Hey, it's Allison, and it's probably pretty clear why I'm popping up in your feed right now. I couldn't let the news of former President Trump's indictment pass by without offering you some expert insight and analysis about what this big moment means for our country and for the office of the presidency. So you're about to hear today's episode of Post Reports. The biggest stories of the moment, including the most important politics news, are covered there every weekday by Washington Post journalists. If you like what you hear, be sure to follow Post Reports wherever you're listening. Thanks.
So Devlin, a Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict Trump. What are they charging him with? Well, the indictment remains sealed, so the specifics we do not know. However, we do know what the thrust of this investigation has been. That's Devlin Barrett. He covers law enforcement for The Post. And like so many of us, he's been glued to this unfolding case in New York against former President Donald Trump.
We can't see exactly what Trump has been charged with yet, but Devlin says we do know a few things about what the Manhattan District Attorney's Office has been investigating. And that is, they have been looking at charging the former president with what's called business records fraud, which is a crime in New York State, basically of filing a false business record. And at the center of these business records are hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Who alleged that she had an affair with Donald Trump years before he ran for president. And the central allegation that we believe is in this indictment are charges.
stemming from those hush money payments and that there has long been a question as to whether those payments and the way they were recorded on the books for Trump amount to business records fraud. Just sort of stepping back for a moment, how big of a deal is this news? Like what is actually at stake here? You know, it's funny. So I'm a bit of a court rat. That's how I've been a reporter for most of my career. It is an amazing thing and an amazing moment in American history. It is going to be fascinating to watch this unfold, both in the court system and beyond the court system, because there will be essentially two stages upon which this case plays out.
One will be the formal, you know, physically small, but very imposing stage of the courtroom. But the other stage will be the public debate and the political debate that surrounds it. Those are two very different things. And it will test the legal system, certainly. It will also test the political system. And so I think you will see all of the strengths of the court system put to a pretty significant test by what you might call the noise or the chaos of the political system. From the newsroom of The Washington Post, this is Post Reports. I'm Elahe Izadi. It's Friday, March 31st.
Today, our legal system and our political one face the ultimate test, charging a former president with a crime. This has never happened before. So we're going to talk with Devlin about all the political trauma this moment will unleash. And then we also get into what we actually know of the Trump indictment. Devlin breaks down how we got here, what happens next, and why this could be a really tricky case for prosecutors.
So Devlin, I want to get into the specifics of the case in a little bit. But first, I think my immediate questions and perhaps the immediate questions for a lot of people are, does this mean we could see Donald Trump actually getting arrested soon? That's not what's going to happen, is our understanding. What's going to happen is like a lot of white collar, nonviolent criminal cases that are that are indicted as opposed to, you know, handled by the police. Donald Trump will come to New York City on Tuesday, go to the courthouse on Tuesday and be processed. Processed involves essentially getting your mugshot taken, getting your fingerprints made. But it's not the law and order, you know, scene where where the guy gets is working at a bakery or whatever. Right. Someone just goes behind the counter and arrests a guy. That's not what's expected to happen here. Yeah. And law and order often is what our touchstone of what happens in a criminal process. Yes, it's quite frustrating for me.
But does that mean Trump could go to jail? It is not really a knowable thing yet. I think it's possible. It's certainly possible. One of the big questions, because we haven't seen the indictment yet, is are these primarily misdemeanor charges? Because one version of business records fraud in New York State is a misdemeanor, but they can also elevate that misdemeanor to a felony if they find that the business records fraud was done to essentially cover up or facilitate another crime. And so one of the big questions that all the reporters have and the public, I think, rightly has is, is he charged with misdemeanors or felonies? I see.
And have we heard from Trump yet? And what has he said? He did issue a very long statement attacking this as a political prosecution by the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, and also vowing to defeat Alvin Bragg and to defeat Democrats and Joe Biden. And so I think his statement was remarkable in the way that it twinned up the politics and the legal issues here. And obviously his argument is the only motive for these charges, the only point of this case, the only reason this case exists, is political will by his opponents to take him down. And that's clearly going to be a big part of his defense.
Now, the indictment is under seal, so we can't see quite yet the exact charges. How do we know that the case at the center of this involves Stormy Daniels, a former adult film star, and hush money payments? We know who the vast majority of witnesses have been before the grand jury. And in some cases, we know what they've been asked about. We know what they've been talked about. So we know this is the focus. I see. And we know this is the area of the New York state law that could be applied to these facts. So let's dig into the specifics of this case, given that...
it's very likely that it's this case. First, where does it date back to? What is the origin of this? So if you go back to 2016, there was obviously a lot of reporting and public speculation about Trump's personal life long before he became a presidential candidate. He was a tabloid figure. And essentially, this woman, Stormy Daniels, at some point in 2016, you know, tried to sell her story of what she says was an affair years earlier with Donald Trump. And so in the course of her trying to do that, representatives for her and representatives for Trump essentially meet up and they basically agree to strike a deal to pay her money so that she will not tell her story.
Literally signed it. I didn't even question. They're like, here's the amount. Sign it this way. It'll never come out. And it was $130,000. Yes. That money is paid. The main facilitator of that is Trump's then lawyer, Michael Cohen. A few years after that, while Trump is president, Michael Cohen gets in a lot of legal trouble for mostly his own financial crimes, but also lying to Congress and also this financial arrangement he made with Stormy Daniels. And as part of his guilty plea, he pleads guilty to a number of crimes, including essentially arranging for an undisclosed campaign donation, which was the Stormy Daniels payments.
Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and fraud charges today. Cohen says in an attempt to influence the election, he, Cohen claims, at the direction of the candidate, arranged to pay off two women who claimed they had affairs with Trump a little more than 10 years ago. The premise of Cohen's guilty plea and this investigation is essentially that because Stormy Daniels was paid money in the very last days of the 2016 election campaign, to be quiet about what she said was her past interaction with Donald Trump, that... That money essentially acted as a campaign donation because it helped his campaign. It was money paid to help his campaign. And so because it wasn't reported as money paid to help his campaign, therefore it was illegal. One of the things that's really quirky about this case and this issue is that the federal government, the federal prosecutors, the Justice Department looked at this issue and basically decided there is not a federal case to make here.
Years ago. When did they make this decision? Was he still president at the time? He was still president. And if the Justice Department had wanted to after Trump stopped being president, because here's the other wrinkle that makes all this fairly complicated. The Justice Department has a longstanding policy that it will not file or accuse a sitting president of a crime. So in theory, if the Justice Department had felt Trump had committed a crime in the course of the Stormy Daniels payment, when they first looked at this, when Trump was still president, they would not be in a position to charge it or accuse him of that. However, once Trump stopped being the president, the Justice Department had every
authority to re-ask the question, re-examine the issue and decide whether to charge Trump for this or not. And it chose not to. And I'll be honest, from my sources, it's pretty clear to me why that is. Most of the people I've talked to who dealt with this case on the federal side have said some version to me of you would not make a case that needed Michael Cohen's testimony. He's just not quite, he's not reliable enough. He's got too much baggage in the parlance of lawyers. I mean, he's served time. He's been, he was convicted of crimes. He went to prison and he, you know, part of his guilty plea was for lying to Congress. Part of his guilty plea was for fraud.
So there are a lot of on the surface problems with Cohen as a witness. But to be clear, a lot of people who end up witnesses for the government have crimes, including crimes of lying. What is Michael Cohen saying right now about all this? Michael Cohen's argument has been for a long time. Why am I the only one punished for this when I did it for him?
That has been his basic point for a very long time. And I think it's a fair question to ask. I think it sort of glosses over the fact that he actually pled guilty to a number of crimes that had nothing to do with Donald Trump. But I do think that is his basic point. And that is in some ways the strongest argument for this indictment, because Michael Cohen did plead guilty to this on the federal level. I think to some federal investigators, Cohen's track record of honesty and reliability was especially problematic. And that's really why they stepped away.
But realistically speaking, the law on this issue of undisclosed campaign donations has not gone well for the Justice Department when it's tried to do such things. One big comparison point for a lot of lawyers who have looked at the Trump case is an older case involving John Edwards, who is a Democratic senator from North Carolina who also ran for president. And in that case, John Edwards was indicted by the federal government for hush money payments made to the mother of a child of his. Edwards was charged with violating campaign finance laws by using $925,000 in contributions to hide his pregnant mistress during his 2008 run for president. The charges come after a two-year FBI investigation. And when that case went to the jury, the jury basically rejected one of the charges outright, couldn't reach a decision on the others, and the Justice Department had to walk away from the case. And the takeaway for the Justice Department prosecutors from that is that...
If you try to prove a crime out of hush money payments on facts like these, you know, an alleged affair from years ago, it is very hard to convince a jury that that was done as a campaign expense as opposed to to protect the person's marriage, to protect the person's reputation for essentially private reasons. And so that's the comparison. And that that lesson, the lesson of the John Edwards case for the federal government has been for a long time. You really shouldn't try to make cases out of facts like these criminal charges out of facts like these. Obviously, the Manhattan district attorney has decided that he thinks he can.
So tell me more about this Manhattan DA and what we know about why he is pursuing this. So the Manhattan DA, Alvin Bragg, inherited these investigations. It's important to understand that one of the quirky parts of this history is that these were not really investigations that he started. These are investigations he inherited. Is he an elected prosecutor? Did he run on this? The Manhattan DA is an elected prosecutor and similar to the attorney general for the state of New York during the campaign.
There were a number of statements about no one being above the law and that he would not flinch when it came to handling Trump investigations. And so how did it come to this moment, this decision, to take this before a grand jury? We know that over the course of last year, the Manhattan DA was investigating and prosecuting a different set of facts, basically related to cheating on taxes in New York State with a senior official within the Trump organization. And I think one of the stories that still needs to be told and understood better is what was it about those cases from last year? that made the Manhattan DA's office decide, you know, we can dust off this old Stormy Daniels case and actually pursue it. This Stormy Daniels case had been referred to among prosecutors for many years as the zombie case because it didn't seem really to be going anywhere, but it also wasn't dead. And, you know, that zombie case seems to have roared back to life in the last two months. And it's not entirely clear why that happened. What will be Bragg's biggest obstacle in securing a conviction, which is what he wants? Is it Michael Cohen?
I think a lot of lawyers believe Michael Cohen's credibility questions over the years is a thing that needs to be overcome if you're going to win a conviction. I've also spoke to a number of lawyers who think, look, there's a universe here where a judge decides, boy, I don't know if I like the theory of this indictment. The theory being this sort of federal state trying what seems to be a federal crime, but with state law. Right. Assuming that's what's in the indictment. That's the underlying assumption to all of this. Right. We'll know a lot more when we see the indictment. After the break, we find out what Trump was up to when this indictment came down and how this isn't the only legal fight he faces right now. We'll be right back.
Did you know you can play the Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in the Washington Post app or at washingtonpost.com slash games. No subscription required. So Devlin, where is Donald Trump right now? And how is he responding to this incredible moment? So he's in his residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago. And one of the things that our reporters were told is that as much as he and his people have been preparing for the possibility of this indictment, they really weren't expecting it Thursday night. That caught them by surprise. And so they are now rapidly shifting gears to fight this thing. And it's kind of a fascinating dynamic because just the day before.
he had been posting on social media how much he loved grand juries, that the grand jury in this case really gets it and they're not going to be beholden to a mean political prosecutor. Wait, why was he saying that about grand juries? Did he think that they were going to let this go? I think one of the ways in which covering Donald Trump is unique and different than covering almost anyone else is that he often just makes bold declarative statements that you find out soon after aren't based on anything. So two weeks ago, he posted that he was going to be arrested.
like in a matter of days. That didn't happen. And technically speaking, the whole notion of being arrested is not going to happen, is our understanding. So for a while, he had this belief he was about to be arrested. And then when that didn't happen, he, just based on a social media post, seemed to believe that the grand jury had refused to indict him. And so he posted a thing praising how wonderful grand juries are and how fair they are. And then a day later, the grand jury he's praising indicts him. What's he saying about that now? Well, it's terrible in that it's all, you know, political prosecution. I mean, on that point.
saying it's a political prosecution. I'm imagining there are also a lot of Republicans who agree with that, including other people who are considering running against him for president. Is there any evidence to suggest that there is a partisan bent to this, given that the district attorney in Manhattan is an elected official? It's a big Democratic voting stronghold. I mean, is there anything to suggest that?
I think the tricky question for the Manhattan DA and for this indictment, once we see it, is, is this the kind of case that would be charged if it was conduct committed by anyone else? And that is, I think, the real crux of the issue. So, for example, one of Trump's potential challengers in the Republican field is his former vice president, Mike Pence. Mike Pence, interestingly enough, has been ordered to testify in a different federal investigation about Donald Trump. But in the meantime, Mike Pence was on CNN Thursday night and essentially criticized the prosecution of Donald Trump in the Manhattan DA case and called it outrageous. Well, I think the unprecedented indictment of a former president of the United States on a campaign finance issue.
is an outrage. And it appears to millions of Americans to be nothing more than a political prosecution that's driven by a prosecutor who literally ran for office on a pledge to indict the former president. And so I think what you're seeing in the early stages is a kind of Republican rallying around Trump. Even among people who are very critical of Trump's behavior, even among those people, there is a concern that this isn't... This conduct isn't really criminal. This is a politicization of the criminal justice system and is wrong for that reason. And this isn't the only active investigation into Donald Trump. Can you just quickly remind us, maybe tick off the ones that you're monitoring and what else is out there? There's a bunch of other important and potentially consequential investigations involving Trump.
One is a Georgia district attorney who has been conducting their own months-long grand jury investigation into Trump's efforts and other people's around Trump's efforts to change the vote totals in the state of Georgia and maybe swing Georgia back from being a state that Biden won in 2020 to a state that Trump could win. So that is under investigation. On the federal side, there are two big investigations going on that have a lot of steam at this point. One is an investigation into his handling of classified documents at his home in Mar-a-Lago in Florida. And another separate prong is...
all of his efforts after the 2020 election leading up to January 6th and the riot that happened at the Capitol, and whether he has any criminal culpability for all of his different efforts to change the outcome of that election. You know, Donald Trump has this reputation of defeating charges. I mean, he's been investigated in many iterations. He's been sued. He's sued people. He's not a stranger to our legal system. And he was acquitted in both of his impeachment trials. I'm wondering if you think this case will be different, the case in Manhattan, and if it is something that Trump should be seriously worried about.
Most people would be very worried about any charges on any subject. It does not appear to me that Trump evaluates risk the same way a lot of other people do, especially politicians. I think he has such a long track record, as you say, with investigations, with accusations. and he is often able to beat them back. I mean, you know, lost in all the talk of criminal investigations is we are weeks away from a trial that's about to start with, that might feature, and very likely will feature, Trump as a witness on the witness stand in New York City brought by E. Jean Carroll over an accusation that she made that Trump raped her decades ago.
And that is a civil trial. It's not a criminal case. But there's every reason to expect, because it's a civil trial, that Trump will be called to the witness stand. He has, for many years, operated with just an incredible number of potential legal problems swirling around him and has always managed to come out without too much damage to himself. And what has Trump said about all these cases he's involved in? When it comes to the classified documents case, the January 6th investigation, the election investigation.
In all those instances, Trump has argued, and pretty emphatically, that he did nothing wrong, and these are politically motivated investigations trying to knock him out and make him essentially ineligible or unable to win back the White House. When it comes to the Eugene Carroll case, he has denied the allegation and he's basically said repeatedly that she wasn't his type, which in a bizarre legal twist is now part of the case that he is fighting because she, you know, that claim. Like the fact whether she is his type or not. Correct. Is now a pretty major bone of contention within the case itself. His denial has become part of the legal headache of that case for him. So Devlin, what are the next steps? He's been indicted. He's expected to appear in person on Tuesday. Fingerprints, mugshot.
What are the next following steps? So after he appears in court for his arraignment, in theory, the case could sort of enter a quiet period. Frankly, given that it's Donald Trump, I don't expect much of a quiet period. But in a legal sense, what we're likely to see after that is defense motions, trying to throw out the indictment, attacking sort of the legal theory of the indictment, attacking probably some of the evidence and the witnesses used to craft the indictment. And so I think one of the first things you will see is a series of motions trying to sort of pick apart and get the judge to toss out the indictment.
If that does not succeed, then I think you go into the discovery phase where the... The prosecution has to turn over all of the evidence, good and bad, that is gathered, that is relevant to the case and the prosecution, what they expect for trial. And at that point, you'll probably get some more motions from the defense trying to attack the indictment. When could this go to trial? If it goes to trial, and is it up to a jury of people in Manhattan to make this decision? It is. And Trump has sent every signal humanly possible to indicate that he's going to fight the charges. He's not going to plead. So I think you have to expect a trial at this point. That could take months, if not longer. All of these legal fights.
can go quickly or they can go slowly. And so it remains to be seen exactly how long that will take. I mean, I think the simplest answer is months at least, but we really don't know yet. Devlin, stepping back. Do you find it remarkable that, you know, given all of the caveat of we have not seen the charges quite yet, but everything that you're reporting and our colleagues reporting indicates that at the center of this, at the center of the first time a former president has ever been indicted, is this $130,000 hush payment to an adult film star. That is amazing. There were many times that this case was declared, this question in this case was declared dead, but it never really died. I think it will be an amazing test of the system.
Well, Devlin, thank you for joining us, and I hope you have a hearty supply of coffee as you continue to report this out. I'm going to keep going. Devlin Barrett reports on national security and law enforcement for The Post. That's it for Post Reports. Thanks for listening. Today's show was produced by Ariel Plotnick, with help from Jordan Marie Smith. It was edited by Reena Flores and mixed by Sean Carter.
If you want to show your support for Post Reports, consider subscribing to The Washington Post. It's a great way to support the work we do, which, by the way, was just honored with the Gracie Award. Those are given by the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation. So go to WashingtonPost.com slash subscribe. Our team includes Maggie Penman, Rina Flores, Ted Muldoon, Martine Powers, Lucy Perkins, Eliza Dennis, Alana Gordon, Ariel Plotnick, Arjun Singh, Jordan Marie Smith, Renny Svernofsky, Sabi Robinson, Emma Talkoff, Sean Carter, and Renita Jablonski. I'm Elahe Izadi. We'll be back tomorrow with more stories from The Washington Post.
Did you know you can play the Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in the Washington Post app or at washingtonpost.com slash games. No subscription required.