NEW YORK -- Former President Donald Trump is facing multiple charges of falsifying business records, including at least one felony offense, in the indictment handed down by a Manhattan grand jury, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Friday.
He will be formally arrested and arraigned Tuesday in his hush money case, setting the scene for the historic moment when a former president is forced to stand before a judge to hear the criminal charges against him.
The indictment remained sealed and the specific charges were not immediately known, but details were confirmed by people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss information that isn't yet public.
The streets outside the courthouse where the arraignment will unfold were calm Friday compared with earlier in the week. There were no large-scale demonstrations for or against Trump, though tourists stopped to take selfies and throngs of reporters and police officers remained assembled.
When Trump turns himself in, he'll be booked mostly like anyone else facing charges, mug shot, fingerprinting and all. But he isn't expected to be put in handcuffs; he'll have Secret Service protection and will almost certainly be released that day.
In the meantime, Trump's legal team prepared his defense while the prosecutor defended the grand jury investigation that propelled the matter toward trial. Congressional Republicans, as well as Trump himself, contend the whole matter is politically motivated.
"We urge you to refrain from these inflammatory accusations, withdraw your demand for information, and let the criminal justice process proceed without unlawful political interference," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg wrote to three Republican House committee chairs Friday in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
The case is plunging the U.S. into uncharted legal waters, with Trump the first former president ever to face an indictment. And the political implications could be titanic ahead of next year's presidential election. Trump is in the midst of running for president a third time and has said the case against him could hurt that effort -- though his campaign is already raising money by citing it.
The Trump campaign said it raised over $4 million in the first 24 hours after news of the indictment broke.
The charges do not prevent Trump from running for president. Even a potential conviction would not disqualify his bid for the White House, according to Anna G. Cominsky, a professor at New York Law School.
"There are actually not that many constitutional requirements to run for president," Cominsky said. "There is not an explicit prohibition in the Constitution in respects to having a pending indictment or even being convicted."
But the indictment and subsequent legal proceedings could affect Trump's candidacy in both positive and negative ways. Some of his advisers, according to a recent Washington Post article, said legal controversy is favorable terrain for Trump and puts him back in the center of attention as the dominant figure in his party.
A number of his rivals for the Republican nomination, including presumed but undeclared candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have already leaped to his defense. But Trump's advisers also acknowledged the pitfalls of an indictment and said the campaign had not worked out the logistics of simultaneously mounting a presidential run and facing a criminal trial.
The campaign operation is separate from Trump's legal team, and the two are not always acting in concert, advisers said. And the candidate is not always taking advice from either team.
The Trump campaign is aiming to position the forthcoming prosecution as the latest politicized "witch hunt" targeting the former president. It has framed the probe as politically motivated by "radical-left Democrats" and said that Bragg's probe has been funded by liberal philanthropist George Soros.
"This is the new normal. The president has been battle-tested," Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said. "This operation has been fine-tuned since 2016. Dealing with these types of news cycles, you learn to get good at it. We have a full-spectrum response operation on the campaign that can deal with anything that comes our way."
Top Republicans also have begun closing ranks around him. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has promised to use congressional oversight to investigate Bragg. Reps. James Comer, Jim Jordan and Bryan Steil, the committee chairs whom Bragg addressed in his letter, have asked the district attorney's office for grand jury testimony, documents and copies of any communications with the Justice Department.
Trump's indictment came after a grand jury probe into hush money paid during the 2016 presidential campaign to squelch allegations of an extramarital sexual encounter. The indictment itself has remained sealed, as is standard in New York before an arraignment.
The investigation dug into six-figure payments made to porn actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Both claim to have had sexual encounters with the married Trump years before he got into politics. He denies having sexual liaisons with either woman.
Trump also has denied any wrongdoing involving payments and has denounced the investigation as a "scam," a "persecution," an injustice. He shouts in all capital letters on his social media platform that the Democrats have "LIED, CHEATED" and more to damage his 2024 presidential run.
Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina said during TV interviews Friday he would "very aggressively" challenge the legal validity of the Manhattan grand jury indictment. Trump himself, on his social media platform, trained his ire on a new target, complaining that the judge expected to handle the case, Juan Manuel Merchan, "HATES ME."
The former president is expected to fly to New York on Monday and stay at Trump Tower overnight ahead of his planned arraignment Tuesday, according to two people familiar with his plans who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss Trump's travel.
Trump will be arraigned in the same Manhattan courtroom where his company was tried and convicted of tax fraud in December and where movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's rape trial took place. On Friday, officials from the Secret Service and the NYPD toured the courthouse and met about security plans.
Court officers ultimately closed and secured access to the 15th floor, where Merchan was continuing to preside over unrelated matters, until Trump's arraignment.
Lawyers involved in the cases and some employees were permitted to stay, but media were chased away by officers, who were standing sentry in front of a bike-rack barricade set up in the hallway. Officers yelled at reporters who ventured up, "This floor is closed," and ordered them to get back in the elevator and leave.
Since Trump's March 18 post claiming his arrest was imminent, authorities have ratcheted up security, deploying additional police officers, lining the streets around the courthouse with barricades and dispatching bomb-sniffing dogs. They've had to respond to bomb and death threats, a suspicious powder scare and a pro-Trump protester who was arrested Tuesday after witnesses say she pulled a knife on passersby.
Since no former president had ever been charged with a crime, there's no rulebook for booking the defendant. He will be fingerprinted and have a mug shot taken, and investigators will complete arrest paperwork and check to see if he has any outstanding criminal charges or warrants, according to a person familiar who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive security operations.
All of that activity takes place away from the public. New York law discourages the release of mug shots in most cases. Less clear is whether Trump would seek to have the picture released himself, for political or other reasons.
Once the booking is complete, the former president would appear before a judge for an afternoon arraignment.
Even for defendants who turn themselves in, answering criminal charges in New York generally entails at least several hours of detention while being fingerprinted, photographed, and going through other procedures.
As for the allegations, prosecutors contend that as Trump ran for president in 2016, his allies paid two women to bury their accusations. The publisher of the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer paid McDougal $150,000 for rights to her story and sat on it, in an arrangement brokered by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
After Cohen himself paid Daniels $130,000, Trump's company reimbursed him, added bonuses and logged the payments as legal expenses.
Federal prosecutors argued -- in a 2018 criminal case against Cohen -- that the payments equated to illegal aid to Trump's campaign. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violation charges, but federal prosecutors didn't go after Trump, who was then in the White House. However, some of their court filings obliquely implicated him as someone who knew about the payment arrangements.
The New York indictment came as Trump contends with other investigations. In Atlanta, prosecutors are considering whether he committed any crimes when trying to get Georgia officials to overturn his narrow 2020 election loss there to Joe Biden.
And, at the federal level, a Justice Department-appointed special counsel also is investigating Trump's efforts to unravel the national election results. Additionally, the special counsel is examining how and why Trump held onto a cache of top secret government documents at his Florida club and residence, Mar-a-Lago, and whether the ex-president or his representatives tried to obstruct the probe into those documents.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael R. Sisak, Colleen Long, Will Weissert, Jennifer Peltz, Jill Colvin, Michael Balsamo and Farnoush Amiri of The Associated Press and Perry Stein of The Washington Post.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump speed past his Mar-a-Lago estate Friday in Palm Beach, Fla. Trump will be formally arrested and arraigned Tuesday in New York and his indictment unsealed. More photos at arkansasonline.com/41trumpscenes/. (AP/Lynne Sladky)Gallery: People rally for, against Trump
