Former President Donald Trump had a real normal one last night after news broke of his likely imminent criminal indictment in New York.
Trump staged an overnight tirade on his social media site, Truth Social, hours after the New York Times broke the news that the Manhattan District Attorney’s office has invited him to testify before a grand jury next week.
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The move signals that New York prosecutors are close to charging Trump, because giving him a chance to address the grand jury indicates that the investigation is in its late stages and that prosecutors are serious about seeking an indictment at the end.
Trump unleashed a series of frantic posts denying wrongdoing and blasting his enemies. He attacked Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg with the accusation he frequently throws at Black law enforcement officials: “racist.” He slammed his own estranged former attorney Michael Cohen as a “convicted felon…with zero credibility.” And he insulted the appearance of the woman who claims she had an affair with Trump, adult film star Stormy Daniels, insisting he did not sleep with her and wouldn’t have wanted to. He even posted a short video about the situation, talking straight to camera.
He didn’t deny receiving an invitation to appear before the grand jury, though.
“Our country has become the investigation capital of the world,” Trump thundered. “Actually that’s all we do.”
Getting investigated does seem to be all Trump does these days. Outside Manhattan, he’s also under scrutiny in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is weighing whether to charge Trump over his attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat. Willis said in January that charging decisions in her case are “imminent.” Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith is leading a federal probe into Trump’s role in attempting to overturn the election and the violent aftermath at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and also into whether he broke the law by hoarding documents bearing classified markings at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Suddenly, however, it’s starting to look like Manhattan prosecutors may be first to move against Trump. Bragg is pursuing multiple lines of investigation into Trump’s activities, and recently revived a probe into the circumstances surrounding Trump’s alleged affair with Daniels.
The case revolves around $130,000 in hush money payments to Daniels in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election. The payout eventually led Trump’s former attorney and so-called “fixer,” Michael Cohen, to plead guilty to campaign finance violations in connection with the transfer of funds.
The hush money probe has been brought back to life so many times by the Manhattan DA’s office that it became known internally as the “zombie” case. Now it’s been officially revived again, after Bragg began showing evidence to the grand jury about the case a few weeks ago.
A spokesperson for the Manhattan DA’s office declined to comment. Trump’s legal team didn’t return a request for comment on Thursday evening. Trump has repeatedly denounced Bragg’s office for leading a “witch hunt” against him, and denied wrongdoing. He has denied having a sexual relationship with Daniels.
Allowing a potential defendant the opportunity to testify before a grand jury probing their behavior is a standard practice of the Manhattan DA’s office, and signals that prosecutors there are on track to probably bring charges, said Rebecca Roiphe, an expert on prosecutorial ethics at New York Law School and a former prosecutor for the Manhattan DA’s office.
The case against Trump in New York could be highly complicated, however, because it might rely on a complex arrangement of interrelated legal violations. Bragg’s team is reportedly considering charging Trump in relation to keeping false financial records, which is a crime under New York state law.
Cohen arranged the payment to Daniels, and court documents from his criminal case indicate that Trump’s company reimbursed him with payments that were falsely categorized as legal expenses.
Yet to make the crime of false record-keeping a felony, rather than a misdemeanor, the records must have been falsified for the purpose of committing some other crime. That’s where this case could get dicey: It remains unclear which other infraction Bragg’s team might try to connect to the false records.
