Explained: The Stormy Daniels hush payment case in which Donald Trump expects to be arrested

Donald Trump says he expects to be arrested tomorrow.

This comes as a New York grand jury investigates hush money payments to two women including former porn star Stormy Daniels who alleged sexual encounters with the former president

Trump, who will run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has called on his supporters to rally behind him.

Let’s take a closer look at the Daniels case:

How did Trump and Daniels meet?

As per The New York Times, Trump first met Daniels (real name Stephanie Clifford) in 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada.

Trump, who had become a reality star on the strength of the hit TV show The Apprentice, was not accompanied by his wife Melania and their newborn son Barron.

Trump first met Daniels on the golf course and then later in the gift room where they snapped a picture together. After dinner, they went to Trump’s penthouse at Lake Tahoe where he offered to put her on his TV show.

They then slept together, Daniels has claimed.

Trump and Daniels met twice more – though without getting intimate – and she eventually stopped taking his calls.

According to CBS, by 2011, Daniels was attempting to sell her story to In Touch magazine.

The story never ran after Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and fixer, threatened a lawsuit when asked to comment.

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Daniels claimed a man then approached her in Las Vegas a few weeks later and threatened her.

The Daniels case

In October 2016, when Trump was running for president, the Washington Post published the Access Hollywood tape.

The next day, Cohen agreed to pay Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence about the alleged affair with Trump, as per CBS.

Cohen also offered Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for a similar deal.

It is the evidence of hush payments to Daniels and McDougal that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has presented evidence to a New York grand jury.

Bragg’s office has apparently been examining whether any state laws were broken in connection with the payments or the way Trump’s company compensated Cohen for his work to keep the women’s allegations quiet.

Daniels and at least two former Trump aides — onetime political adviser Kellyanne Conway and former spokesperson Hope Hicks — are among witnesses who have met with prosecutors in recent weeks.

Cohen and federal prosecutors have claimed Trump’s company paid Cohen $420,000 as reimbursement for the $130,000 payment to Daniels and to cover bonuses and other supposed expenses.

The company classified those payments internally as legal expenses.

According to the BBC, prosecutors claim this may be tantamount to falsifying business records – which is a misdemeanour.

To elevate that charge to a felony, prosecutors must prove that Trump falsified records to cover up a second crime.

One possibility, according to the Times, is that prosecutors could assert the payment itself violated state campaign finance law, since it was effectively an illegal secret donation to boost his campaign.

Using state election law to elevate a false business record charge is an untested legal theory, experts said, and Trump’s lawyers would be sure to challenge it.

Trump could also challenge whether the statute of limitations - five years in this instance - should have run out.

Under New York law, the statute of limitations can be extended if the defendant has been out of state, but Trump may argue that serving as US president should not apply.

The $150,000 payment to McDougal was made by the then-publisher of the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer, which kept her story from coming to light.

Federal prosecutors agreed not to prosecute the Enquirer’s corporate parent in exchange for its cooperation in a campaign finance investigation that led to charges against Cohen in 2018. Prosecutors said the payments to Daniels and McDougal amounted to impermissible, unrecorded gifts to Trump’s election effort.

Cohen pleaded guilty, served prison time and was disbarred. Federal prosecutors never charged Trump with any crime.

News that law enforcement agencies were preparing for a possible indictment was first reported by NBC News.

Trump has denied the affair, and his lawyer has accused Daniels of extortion.

Uncharted waters

Were he charged, Trump would become the first former US president to face criminal prosecution.

Polls show him leading other potential rivals for the Republican nomination, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is widely expected to mount a White House bid.

That raises the possibility of Trump having to stand trial in the middle of the 2024 presidential campaign, or even after Election Day, though putting a president-elect or president on trial for state charges would enter uncharted legal waters. If elected, he would not hold the power to pardon himself of state charges.

The New York case is one of several focused on Trump, including a Georgia election interference probe and a pair of federal investigations into his role in the 6 January, 2021, assault on the US Capitol by his supporters trying to overturn his defeat and into his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House.

Even as a Trump lawyer and spokesperson said there had been no communication from prosecutors, Trump declared in a post on his social media platform that he expects to be taken into custody on Tuesday.

Trump denies the encounters occurred, says he did nothing wrong and has cast the investigation as a “witch hunt” by a Democratic prosecutor bent on sabotaging the Republican’s 2024 campaign. Trump also has labeled Bragg, who is Black, a “racist” and has accused the prosecutor of letting crime in the city run amok while he has focused on Trump. New York remains one of the safest cities in the country.

His message seemed designed to preempt a formal announcement from prosecutors and to galvanize outrage from his base of supporters in advance of widely anticipated charges. Within hours, he sent a fundraising email to supporters while influential Republicans in Congress issued statements in his defense.

In a later post that went beyond simply exhorting loyalists to protest about his legal peril, the 2024 presidential candidate directed his overarching ire in all capital letters at the Biden administration and raised the prospect of civil unrest: “IT’S TIME!!!” he wrote. “WE JUST CAN’T ALLOW THIS ANYMORE. THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA!PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!”

It all evoked, in foreboding ways, the rhetoric he used shortly before the insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. After hearing from the then-president at a Washington rally that morning, his supporters marched to the Capitol and tried to stop the congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s White House victory, breaking through doors and windows of the building and leaving officers beaten and bloodied.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg is thought to be eyeing charges in the hush money investigation, and recently offered Trump a chance to testify before the grand jury. Local law enforcement officials are bracing for the public safety ramifications of an unprecedented prosecution of a former American president.

But there has been no public announcement of any time frame for the grand jury’s secret work in the case. At least one additional witness is expected to testify, further indicating that no vote to indict has yet been taken, according to a person familiar with the investigation who was not authorized to publicly discuss the case and spoke on condition of anonymity.

That did not stop Trump from taking to his social media platform to say “illegal leaks” from Bragg’s office indicate that “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK.”

A Trump lawyer, Susan Necheles, said Trump’s post was “based on the media reports,” though the origin of Trump’s Tuesday reference was unclear. The district attorney’s office declined comment.

Trump’s aides and legal team have been preparing the possibility of an indictment. Should that happen, he would be arrested only if he refused to surrender. Trump’s lawyers have previously said he would follow normal procedure, meaning he would likely agree to surrender at a New York Police Department precinct or directly to Bragg’s office.

It is unclear whether Trump’s supporters would heed his protest call or if he retains the same persuasive power he held as president. Trump’s posts on Truth Social generally receive far less attention than he used to get on Twitter, but he maintains a deeply loyal base. The aftermath of the 6 January riot, in which hundreds of Trump loyalists were arrested and prosecuted in federal court, may also have dampened the passion among supporters for confrontation.

The indictment of Trump, 76, would be an extraordinary development after years of investigations into his business, political and personal dealings.

Even as Trump pursues his latest White House campaign — his first rally is set for Waco, Texas, later this month and he was scheduled to make a public appearance Saturday evening at the NCAA Division I wrestling championships in Tulsa, Oklahoma — there is no question an indictment would be a distraction and give fodder to opponents and critics tired of the legal scandals that have long enveloped him.

A Justice Department special counsel has also been presenting evidence before a grand jury investigating Trump’s possession of hundreds of classified documents at his Florida estate. It is not clear when those investigations will end or whether they might result in criminal charges, but they will continue regardless of what happens in New York, underscoring the ongoing gravity – and broad geographic scope – of the legal challenges facing the former president.

Trump’s post Saturday echoes one made last summer when he broke the news on Truth Social that the FBI was searching his Florida home as part of an investigation into the possible mishandling of classified documents.

News of that search sparked a flood of contributions to Trump’s political operation, and on Saturday, Trump sent out a fundraising email to his supporters that said the “MANHATTAN D.A. COULD BE CLOSE TO CHARGING TRUMP.”

After his post, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy decried any plans to prosecute Trump as an “outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA” whom he claimed was pursuing “political vengeance.” Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking House Republican, issued a statement with a similar sentiment.

With inputs from agencies

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