The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office began presenting evidence to a grand jury on Monday about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying silent money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork possible criminal charges against the former president in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The grand jury was recently formed and the start of testimony represents a clear signal that District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg is about to make a decision on whether to indict Mr. Trump.
On Monday, one of the witnesses was seen with his attorney entering the Lower Manhattan building where the grand jury sits. The witness, David Pecker, is the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker the deal with porn star, Stormy Daniels.
As prosecutors prepare to piece together the events surrounding the grand jurors’ payout, they have sought to interview multiple witnesses, including former tabloid editor Dylan Howard and two employees of Mr. Trump’s company, people said. Mr. Howard and Trump Organization employees Jeffrey McConney and Deborah Tarasoff have yet to testify before the grand jury.
Prosecutors have also begun contacting officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, one of the people said. And in a sign that they want to corroborate those testimonies, prosecutors recently subpoenaed phone records and other documents that could shed light on the episode.
A conviction is not a sure thing, in part because a case could hinge on evidence that Mr. Trump and his company falsified records to hide the payment from voters days before the 2016 election, a charge of low level crime that would be based on a largely untested legal theory. The case is also said to rely on the testimony of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who made the payment and who himself pleaded guilty to federal charges related to Silence Money in 2018.
Still, the developments are compounding Mr Trump’s legal troubles as he mounts a third presidential campaign. A Georgia district attorney may seek to indict him over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state, and he faces a special counsel investigation into his removal of sensitive White House documents as well as his actions during the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Mr. Bragg’s decision to form a grand jury focused on hush money – fueling the longest-running criminal investigation into Mr. Trump – represents a dramatic escalation in an investigation that once seemed to have reached an impasse.
Under Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney’s office had begun presenting evidence to an earlier grand jury about a case that focused on Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he had fraudulently inflated the value of his assets to obtain favorable results. loans and other benefits. Yet during the first weeks of his tenure last year, Mr. Bragg developed concerns about the strength of this case and decided to drop the grand jury presentation, prompting the resignation of the two senior prosecutors leading the case. ‘investigation.
One of them, Mark F. Pomerantz, strongly criticized Mr. Bragg’s decision and wrote a book due for publication next week, “People vs. Donald Trump”, detailing his account of the investigation. . Mr. Bragg’s office recently wrote to Mr. Pomerantz’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, expressing concern that the book could leak information to the grand jury or interfere with the investigation.
Although he was hesitant to accuse Mr. Trump of asset valuations, this is a different case, and Mr. Bragg is now a bolder prosecutor. He stepped up the investigation into secret money in the weeks after his prosecutors convicted Mr. Trump’s company in an unrelated tax case, a far cry from his shaky beginnings in office when Mr. Bragg was under fire from all sides to unveil a host of policies designed to put fewer people behind bars.
For his part, Mr Trump has denied any wrongdoing and attributed the review to a partisan witch hunt against him. He also denied having an affair with Ms Daniels. If Mr. Trump is ultimately found guilty, he would face a maximum sentence of four years, although jail time is not mandatory.
“This is just the Manhattan District Attorney’s latest act in his never-ending, politically motivated witch hunt,” the Trump Organization said in a statement, adding that reigniting the case under what it called a “questionable legal theory” was “simply wrong”. and vindictive.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg’s office declined to comment. Mr. Pecker’s attorney, Elkan Abramowitz, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Mr. McConney and Ms. Tarasoff declined to comment.
The panel that hears the evidence is probably what is called a special grand jury. Like regular grand juries, it is made up of 23 randomly selected Manhattanites. But its members are sworn in to serve for six months to hear complex cases, rather than 30 days, as is the case with panels that review evidence and vote on whether to bring charges in more routine cases. .
The investigation, which has proceeded in fits and starts for more than four years, began with a review of the secret money deal before expanding to include appraisals of Mr Trump’s properties. Last summer, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors returned to hush money, seeking to relaunch the investigation after the departures of Mr. Pomerantz and Carey R. Dunne, the other lead prosecutor in the investigation.
The District Attorney’s Office, working with New York Attorney General Letitia James, is also continuing to review how the former president valued his assets, people familiar with the matter said.
During Mr. Trump’s investigation, the silent payment was discussed within the district attorney’s office with such regularity that prosecutors have come to call it the “zombie theory” – an idea that does not just won’t die.
The first visible sign of progress for Mr Bragg came this month when Mr. Cohen appeared at the district attorney’s office to meet prosecutors for the first time in over a year. He is expected to return for at least one more interview in February, one of the people said.
The lawyer who represented Ms Daniels in the secret money deal, Keith Davidson, is also expected to meet with prosecutors.
Mr. Trump’s company was instrumental in the deal, according to court records from Mr. Cohen’s federal case.
Although Mr McConney and Ms Tarasoff did not play a central role, they helped ensure that Mr Cohen was reimbursed for the $130,000 he paid Ms Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford .
Allen H. Weisselberg, the company’s former chief financial officer, was also involved in reimbursing Mr. Cohen. And, according to Mr. Cohen, Mr. Weisselberg was involved in a discussion with Mr. Trump about whether to pay Ms. Daniels.
Mr. Weisselberg is serving time in prison after pleading guilty to a tax evasion scheme unrelated to the silent money deal, a case that also led to conviction from the Trump Organization in December. Although he was the district attorney’s office’s star witness in that case, Mr. Weisselberg never implicated Mr. Trump in any wrongdoing.
Without his cooperation, prosecutors could struggle to directly link Mr. Trump to the misconduct.
In 2018, when Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance charges stemming from his role in the silent payments, he pointed the finger at Mr. Trump, saying the payment was made “in coordination with and under the direction of direction of the President. Federal prosecutors agreed that Mr. Trump was behind the deal, but never charged him or his company with a crime.
There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that Mr. Trump was involved: He and Mr. Cohen spoke by phone twice the day before before Mr. Cohen transferred payment to Ms. Daniels’ lawyer, according to court records. federal affair.
For prosecutors, the crux of any possible case is how Mr. Trump repaid Mr. Cohen the $130,000 he paid Ms. Daniels and how the company recorded that payment. According to court documents in Mr. Cohen’s federal case, Mr. Trump’s company falsely identified the reimbursements as legal fees.
The district attorney’s office now appears to be focused on whether the misclassification of the payments to Mr. Cohen as legal fees violates a New York law that prohibits the falsification of business records.
Violations of this law may be considered a misdemeanor. To make it a felony, prosecutors would have to show that Mr. Trump falsified records to help commit or cover up a second crime — in this case, violating a New York state election law, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. . This second aspect is largely untested and would therefore be a risky legal action against any defendant, let alone the former president.
Defense attorneys could also argue that Mr. Trump, who was running for president for the first time, was unaware that the payments violated election law. And they could target Mr. Cohen, arguing that he is a convicted felon with an ax to grind against Mr. Trump.
In its statement, the Trump Organization noted that “the narrow question of whether payments to Michael Cohen were properly recorded in a personal ledger in 2017 has been thoroughly investigated” by federal prosecutors who charged Mr. Cohen and concluded that he had engaged in a “pattern of deception”.
Mr. Pecker’s testimony, however, could bolster the prosecution’s claim that Mr. Trump was involved in planning the silent payment. A longtime ally of Mr. Trump, the publisher agreed to research potentially damaging stories about Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign. He agreed to this during a meeting in Mr. Trump’s office.
In October 2016, Ms Daniels’ agent and lawyer discussed the possibility of selling the exclusive rights to her story to The National Enquirer, who would then never publish it, a practice known as “catch and kill “.
But Mr. Pecker balked at the deal. He and the tabloid’s editor, Mr Howard, agreed that Mr Cohen should deal directly with Ms Daniels’ team.
When Mr Cohen was late in paying, Mr Howard pressured him to close the deal, lest Ms Daniels reveal their discussions about suppressing her story. “We have to coordinate something,” Mr. Howard texted Mr. Cohen in late October 2016, “or it might look awfully bad for everyone.”
Two days later, Mr. Cohen transferred the $130,000 to an account held by Ms. Daniels’ lawyer.
Michael Rothfeld contributed report.