Donald Trump Likely to Be Criminally Charged in New York Soon: Report

Prosecutors in Manhattan just sent a strong signal that former President Donald Trump could be charged with a crime soon. 

Trump has been offered a chance to testify before a grand jury investigating his activities by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office next week, the New York Times  and Washington Post reported Tuesday evening, citing people familiar with the matter. 

Giving a target of the investigation a chance to speak to the grand jury is a powerful sign that a criminal indictment is close. 

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin 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 adult film star Stormy 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. 

Bragg’s case is just one of several areas of criminal legal jeopardy now swirling around the former president as he runs for another term. 

In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating 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.