Trump indicted over hush money, prosecutor coordinating 'surrender': Top updates

A New York grand jury voted to indict Trump over hush money payments made to a porn star, making him the first ever former president to face criminal charges.

Published on: Mar 31, 2023, 05:49:07 IST

By HT News Desk

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Former US President Donald Trump was indicted in New York on charges involving payments to a porn start made during his 2016 presidential campaign to silence claims of an extramarital sexual encounter. It's the first criminal case ever brought against a former US president.

Trump is expected to turn himself in next week, according to multiple reports, as the details of a surrender are being worked out. The office of New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg, who got a grand jury to indict Trump, confirmed to news agency AFP that the Republican's lawyers have been contacted to "coordinate his surrender... for arraignment."

"Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected," AFP quoted the spokesperson for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as saying.

Here are the top updates on Trump's indictment:

Stormy Daniels was paid $130,000 to keep quiet about the sexual encounter with Trump at a celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe in 2006. Trump denies having sex with Daniels.
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was paid the hush money in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign after she expressed willingness to make on-the-record statements confirming a sexual encounter with Trump.
Daniels's lawyer said the indictment of former president Trump shows that "no one is above the law." "The indictment of Donald Trump is no cause for joy," Clark Brewster tweeted. "Now let truth and justice prevail."
Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s first Black district attorney and a Democrat, became the first prosecutor to bring a criminal case against a former US president.
Trump released a lengthy statement calling the indictment the next step in a leftists' campaign "to destroy the Make America Great Again movement.”
He alleged that the Democrats have "lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable - indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference."
The Republic leader accused Bragg of “doing Joe Biden’s dirty work, ignoring the murders and burglaries and assaults he should be focused on.”
Many Republicans rallied behind the indicted former president with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy vowing to “hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account.”
Trump's expected challenger for the party nomination for 2024 campaign, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis slammed the indictment as "un-American" and signalled that Florida wouldn’t help extradite the former President.
Democrats have maintained that Trump should face charges, like any American, if he broke the law. US House representative Adam Schiff said in a tweet: “The indictment of a former president is unprecedented. But so too is the unlawful conduct in which Trump has been engaged.”

(Compiled with inputs from AP, AFP, Bloomberg)

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HT News Desk
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