Today, Explained - Florida man indicted

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

Donald Trump is the first US president to be indicted. Now what? Vox’s Andrew Prokop explains. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah and Amanda Lewellyn with help from Avishay Artsy. It was edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and Cristian Ayala, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Help keep this show and all of Vox's journalism free by making a gift to Vox today: bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Donald Trump has been indicted. Correct. This indictment filed under seal by the Manhattan DA could be announced in the coming days. But we don't yet know what the charges are. True. But we have a pretty good sense of what the story is. Also true. Because we've been talking about this case for years.

So many years. Is Donald Trump allowing his lawyers to commit crimes on his behalf to protect him? Or maybe even encouraging it? So we're going to do a show to remind y'all about Stormy and Michael and Donald. But just a reminder to temper your expectations because we don't know if Donald's going to jail. Don't know. We don't even know when the trial's going to happen. Absolutely not.

But he's certainly not going to suspend his campaign. He's running. Vox's Andrew Prokop on Donald Trump's latest unprecedented coming up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today, today explained.

For those people who are confused why this old story is making big news, how big a deal is it that the former president got indicted last night? Well, it's the first president of the United States, sitting or former, ever to be indicted. So, yes, it's a big deal in that sense. The actual implications of what this particular case means is a bit more debatable. And it may not be the last time that a former president of the United States named Donald Trump gets indicted because there are several more investigations of him pending at this very moment. But this is the one that got there first.

And I believe you told us the story before, but remind us what the crux of this case is. So this dates back to the ancient times of the 2016 presidential election. As you will recall, in the final month of that election, Donald Trump was besieged by many accusations from women he had known in the past, saying he had sexually harassed or assaulted them. He was like an octopus. It was like he had six arms. He was all over the place. Allegation after allegation, this was spurred by the Access Hollywood tape, a recording where he made very vulgar comments. I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet.

And it really looks like it might sink his campaign. So around this time, Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress who says that she had a sexual encounter with Trump back in 2006, began getting ready to put her story out. This was a consensual sexual encounter with Trump back in 2006, began getting ready to put her story out. This was a consensual sexual encounter, but she was getting ready to put out this story, and she is an adult film actress,

so this would be an embarrassing scandal for the Republican presidential nominee. She was in talks with ABC about putting out the story, but her attorneys let it be known that she might be willing to accept some payment in return for not going public with the story. This was part of a larger thing that Trump had going on at the time with the National Enquirer known as Catch and Kill. They would pay for people who had damaging stories about Trump. They would buy exclusive rights to that story, and then they would just bury the story and never

publish it. So the inquirer got involved in these talks with Stormy Daniels, but at the end of the day, they decided not to go through with it. So she was still getting ready to go public. So that's where Michael Cohen, Trump's longtime lawyer and fixer, decided to step up. He decided that he would pay Stormy Daniels $130,000 of his own money. He set up a shell company to process those payments named Essential Consultants. This all went through October 27th, 2016, shortly before the election. Stormy got her money. The story didn't come out. And Trump won the election. And at what point does this become a problem for the former president?

So once Trump is president, Cohen wants to be paid back, obviously. So Trump sends back payments to him through the Trump organization. But then eventually news gets out that these payments happen. Now, Cohen is famous for his loyalty to the president, but it is that loyalty that has now possibly exposed him to an FEC violation. Cohen's involvement caught the attention of prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. They had already been investigating Cohen for various things. He was involved in a bunch of tax and taxi license scams. It's a long story. We don't need to get into it now. But this was the potential crime that connected to Trump.

Cohen had made these payments to help Trump win the election, they allege. So eventually they ended up striking a plea deal with Cohen, August 2018. Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance law by making these payments. This was an argument by prosecutors that, you know, this was essentially a campaign donation and it should have been disclosed according to campaign finance requirements and subject to limits on the amount of money someone could give a candidate. That by paying off Stormy Daniels to try and help Trump win the election, like that was essentially a campaign donation. So Cohen broke the law by not disclosing it.

This is where we start to get a hint of crime. Well, yes. The implication is that Trump, who was named at the time in court filings as Individual 1, was also involved in this crime because he paid Cohen back. Cohen claims that Trump knew about the payment at the time. It wasn't just an after-the-fact thing. So there was a lot of speculation that Trump himself could be on the hook for violating campaign finance law too. Mr. Trump is a con man. He asked me to pay off an adult film star with whom he had an affair

and to lie about it to his wife, which I did. Then we moved from 2018 to 2019 and the investigation kind of fizzled out. There was an assessment in the Justice Department that it was not permissible by their policy to charge a sitting president with any federal crime. So they kind of just dropped it. And that is where the Manhattan district attorney comes in. Cyrus Vance Jr., who was the DA of Manhattan at the time, starts meeting with Cohen, starts investigating the hush money case as well. So he would be pursuing a case according to New York state law, not federal law. Vance's case quickly sprawled to encompass a wide-ranging investigation of the Trump organization's business practices.

This was the trial of the Trump organization that ended up taking place last year. Former Trump organization CFO Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty today to tax fraud. And as part of the plea deal, he is expected to testify against the company later this year. At some point, a new DA arrives in Manhattan. Yes. So Vance was pursuing the big real estate case. He had kind of dropped the hush money case. And then he decides not to run for another term. He is replaced by Alvin Bragg Jr., who comes into the office at the beginning of 2022. History in the Manhattan district attorney's race as Alvin Bragg becomes the first Black elected official to that office. He is known as a criminal justice

reformer, a critic of tough prosecution tactics in general. One of the first things he does in office is he reviews the big Trump case on real estate valuations that Vance's team is building. Bragg was not impressed. He reportedly did not think the evidence was strong enough that they were likely to win in court. And he made it very clear that he wanted to kind of put a pause on the case, which was pretty far along. The two top prosecutors who were overseeing it resigned in protest. Bragg faced a ton of backlash. Much to the dismay of many who worked on the case, including one of the leading prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz, who writes in his new book that the office was just weeks away

from filing criminal charges against Trump. You know, this is New York City, a lot of Democrats and liberals there who thought that he was letting Trump off the hook. And so, at some point last year, Bragg rethought things. He took another look, and suddenly the hush money case, which had long been dormant, popped up again. He started pursuing it towards the end of last year, convened a grand jury, started bringing in witnesses again, and it moved surprisingly quickly from something that had been kind of a forgotten loose end to the most threatening imminent case for

Trump's indictment. And we don't know what the charges are yet. We might in a few days. But what do we know thus far about the charges? So all of the reporting says that this is a business records case, that the issue here is that when the Trump organization paid back Michael Cohen for the hush money, they logged those payments as legal expenses. When they were not legal expenses, Cohen wasn't even acting as a lawyer in making these payments. It was more of a fixer, but basically that it's fraud and violation of New York business records and bookkeeping laws. There has been a report that there are 34 specific charges against Trump in this case, which sounds like a lot. But one explanation I've heard for this is that there were 11 hush money payments, they could be essentially triple counted. And then there might be one other charge on top of that of conspiracy or something like that. But we won't

know for sure until we see the actual indictment. Of all the things President Trump has done, Andrew, we have, you know, phone calls to the Georgia election officials asking him to find him votes that don't exist. This doesn't feel like the biggest crime, some New York business law about, you know, business finance or something like that. That is very true. And under New York state law, the violation of this New York business records law is only actually a misdemeanor. But there has been a lot of reporting in this case that Bragg's team has been essentially searching for a way to make that misdemeanor into a felony because it becomes a felony if the business records misstatements were made for the purpose of committing another crime.

So according to reports, Bragg's team has gone through several possibilities and theories about like what the other crime could have been. You know, the obvious one is that to follow the New York federal prosecutor's idea that this was a federal campaign finance law violation. But Bragg is a state prosecutor and he does not have authority over federal campaign finance law. Some people said, well, maybe he could just, you know, say it was in commission of a federal crime and see if the courts hold it up, but we don't know. Others have said maybe he could assert a violation of state campaign finance law, but this was about a federal election. So it's unclear that would fly either.

Tax law has been another theory that's been going around. We won't know until we actually see the indictment. But that's been a very important part of this whole story that Bragg has been trying to come up with a way to make a misdemeanor case against Trump into a felony, which would, of course, come with a greater chance of prison time and so on. And what is the former president saying about Bragg's effort there? Well, Trump has been raging against Bragg for weeks, calling him a Soros-backed animal.

When the news of the indictment came out, Trump posted on his social network, Truth Social, these thugs and radical left monsters have just indicated, he meant to say indicted, the 45th president of the United States of America and the leading Republican candidate by far for the 2024 nomination for president. This is an attack on our country, the likes of which has never been seen before. It is likewise a continuing attack on our once free and fair elections. The USA is now a third world nation, a nation in serious decline. So sad. More with Andrew Prokop from Vox in a minute on Today Explained.

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Today Explained Vox. We are back with Andrew Prokop, also of Vox. Andrew, I'm going to give the former president the benefit of the doubt for a second here. You said in the earlier half of the show that the Manhattan D.A., Alvin Bragg, has been looking for ways to make a misdemeanor a felony. Is that because there's some political agenda here or what? Does the president have a point?

Is this some sort of witch hunt, to use his words? I think it's pretty clear from the reporting about how decision making in this investigation has proceeded that it's been politicized from the start, essentially. I mean, these are elected Democrats. They have to run in Democratic primaries and win elections. And the political incentive for being the one to charge Trump has been pretty high. The way that Bragg initially tried to drop the case or wash his hands of it when he took office, faced political backlash, and then changed his mind about it. It's pretty hard to say with a straight face that a case like this would have been given such high priority by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office unless it involved Donald Trump. So all of these Republicans who are right now saying that this is a Soros-backed

farce and it's, you know, a stain on our democracy and all this, are you saying that they kind of have a point? There has been a lot of hand-wringing among legal experts about the strength of this case. And we haven't seen it yet, so we don't really know. Maybe Bragg will put everyone's doubts at ease when we actually see he has a really strong, rock-solid case against Trump, and he's made the argument that this is a really important thing to be charging and so on. Got to give him a chance to make his case. But when you mentioned earlier on about how penny ante this seemed in comparison with the other things that Trump has been accused of, trying to overturn democracy in the United States, trying to steal the election, or even just like stealing classified documents and then trying to obstruct the investigation

and lying about it. Like, these are the other investigations that are going forward into Trump, and they seem a lot stronger and better grounded in the facts and in the law and in just flat out importance than this, which has involved a lot of creative legal reasoning. It hasn't inspired a ton of confidence. Which isn't to say that the Republicans who are calling out the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg right now would be more convinced by a better case like, say, the one who are calling out the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg right now would be more convinced by a better case like, say, the one in Georgia? Could you remind us of everything else that Trump is being investigated for right now? That's a bit of the tragedy of this, because the

weakest case has been going first. But there are other cases against Trump that seem a lot stronger and a lot more serious. Like, it is ridiculous to claim that all the investigations against Trump are like a witch hunt just designed to get him. The guy tried to steal the election and that, at the very least, deserves to be rigorously investigated about whether laws were broken in that attempt. All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they're doing, and stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up.

We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved. And then there's this whole matter of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, too. The newly released information shows the FBI found 27 boxes of government materials, including 11 sets of classified documents, three of which were marked secret, four marked top secret, and one labeled top secret SCI. So both of those are the federal investigations going forward. The investigation into Trump's attempt to overturn Biden's win

and the investigation into classified documents that Trump had at Mar-a-Lago after he left office, those are both now being overseen by a special counsel, Jack Smith. They seem pretty advanced at this point. Smith just last week got testimony from one of Trump's lawyers in the classified documents case. He won a court battle about whether this lawyer should be forced to testify and to reveal his conversations with his client, Trump, because Smith argued this was the crime fraud exemption to attorney-client privilege, that essentially, reportedly, the theory is that Trump lied to his own attorney, and then the attorney told the government there were no more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. And so, you know, this is pretty advanced. This is viewed as kind of one of the

last things that Smith would likely be doing if he was preparing charges against Trump for the classified documents case. And then in the election case, there was just a ruling that Mike Pence has to testify. He may appeal that. Various other Trump aides who have so far avoided testifying might be forced to soon as well. There's also a case from the Fulton County district attorney in Georgia about Trump trying to overturn the result in Georgia. The stunning recording of President Trump in his own words, pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to overturn the election results in a phone call. So look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.

So I think Trump obviously disregards norms, seems to flatly disregard laws in many cases. He is a very serious threat to democracy. He's running again. And yet the case that has been brought forward, it doesn't seem to be, again, we haven't seen the details yet, but it doesn't seem to be equal to the enormity of the task of actually kind of charging Trump the worst and most dangerous of his conduct. Of course, many have speculated that the former president is running again just to stave off prosecution for this buffet of cases you just presented. How exactly does this indictment and maybe the future ones factor into his current campaign? It is certainly true that if you get elected president of the United States, you're not going to be charged with federal crimes, according to the Justice Department.

So that is one way to get out of a charge, at least for the time being. You could also go much further in pardoning yourself and so on. But the near-term impact seems to be that Republicans are lining up behind Trump, defending him, in part because, yes, they do have a bit of a point with the Manhattan DA. I think they're going to defend him in lockstep about the other indictments, too, if they go forward. But those indictments seem stronger to me and those defenses would probably be weaker. Now, that's not necessarily the last word on the subject. If some more of these indictments do come down, I think there will be some discussion among Republicans about whether is this guy too much of a liability to take to the general election? At least the elite

Republicans will talk about it. It's just not clear whether they would have the ability to do anything about it if their voters believe otherwise. In the meantime, what happens next with Bragg's case? So there are in discussions about Trump turning himself over, coming to New York to be officially arraigned. The likely public moment here is 2.15 p.m. on Tuesday, the Trump arraignment before they believe it will be Judge Juan Marchand, who apparently handled the Weisselberg case. a ton of pre-trial wrangling over many months, likely. Various challenges to the strength of the case that judges in New York, potentially even in federal court, will have to rule on. And then at some point, unless Trump pleads guilty, which seems unlikely,

or the case just vanishes, there will be a trial of Donald Trump. The show today was produced by Haliba Shah and Amanda Llewellyn with help from Avishai Artsy. It was edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey and Christian Ayala, and fact-checked by a team led by Laura Bullard. It's Today Explained. you