Trump’s ‘Hush Money’ Stormy Daniels Evidence Goes to Grand Jury

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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has established a grand jury for another Trump investigation. The special grand jury is hearing evidence on whether Trump broke laws in his hush money payments in 2016. Michael Cohen was previously convicted of the scheme in federal court. Loading Something is loading.

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The Manhattan District Attorney’s office will begin presenting evidence to a grand jury on Monday regarding Donald Trump’s possible role in paying a hush settlement to Stormy Daniels in 2016, the New York Times reported.

The move indicates that District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg is close to making a decision on whether Trump should be charged with campaign finance crimes related to the scheme.

David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, entered the lower Manhattan courthouse where the grand jury was sitting on Monday, according to the Times. Pecker helped facilitate a hush payment to Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, to keep quiet before the 2016 election about an affair she says she had with Trump. Prosecutors are also seeking to interview Dylan Howard, the tabloid’s editor at the time.

Trump’s former fixer and personal attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges related to the scheme in 2018. But federal prosecutors in Manhattan who brought the case never filed a charges against Trump, who was the sitting president at the time. Trump is identified as “Individual-1” in the charging documents, and Cohen said he made the payment to Daniels at his direction.

The case is being heard by a special grand jury, according to the Times, which is taking six months rather than the usual single month.

Prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office have mulled for years about filing charges against Trump, who have denied wrongdoing and described the investigations against him as witchcraft.

Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., allowed members of his team to bring evidence to a grand jury on potential tax and bank fraud charges. Bragg scrapped the project when he took office in early 2022, leading the office’s two top prosecutors, Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz, to resign. Pomerantz is preparing a book about what he sees as Bragg’s mistakes, to be released next month.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, however, successfully filed charges against the Trump Organization and its former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, for financial fraud. Weisselberg pleaded guilty and is currently serving his sentence at the Riker’s Island jail complex. Trump’s company was found guilty at trial last year and fined $1.6 million.

While Cohen has implicated Trump in the hush-money scheme, bringing cases against the former president in state court poses some challenges. According to the Times, to file felony charges against Trump, prosecutors would need to prove he falsified records for the payment to cover up a second crime. That second crime, according to the Times, would be a violation of New York state election law. The legal theory that would result in felony charges has little precedent, the Times reported.

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