Trump’s claim he’ll be arrested is latest twist in saga that sees him facing multiple legal probes
Donald Trump is facing a list of legal woes and has now claimed he will be arrested on Tuesday after his lawyer paid porn star Stormy Daniels hush money to cover up their alleged affair.
It is the latest twist in the saga for Trump, who has also formally announced he will run for president for the third time in 2024.
Since leaving office in January 2021, probes into his family business, his role in the Capitol Riot, and the trove of documents he took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago have piled up.
The former president has claimed the cases are politically-motivated witch hunts to try and take him down – with Republicans suggesting the indictment by the Manhattan DA will only boost his presidential campaign.
However, he is still facing criminal and civil cases with his family business that could create financial obstacles.
In November, the Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the committee would stop paying his legal fees if he announced a 2024 run.
Here DailyMail.com breaks down the legal issues Trump faces as he prepares to potentially be taken away in handcuffs over the Stormy Daniels allegations.
Expected indictment over Stormy Daniels hush money probe
The probe comes more than six years after Trump’s lawyers paid Daniels a total of $130,000 to keep quiet about the affair.
New York prosecutors are considering if he should face charges. Trump denies the affair and knowledge of the payments.
He claimed on his Truth Social account that the Manhattan DA’s office will arrest him within days and branded the probe ‘corrupt and highly political’, calling the alleged hush money payment an ‘old and fully debunked fairy-tale.’
The post came hours after it was claimed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was planning on indicting Trump next week.
Last week the former president and 2024 hopeful was invited to testify before a Manhattan grand jury, with his long-time fixer and former lawyer Michael Cohen testifying on Monday.
Cohen served jail time after pleading guilty in two criminal cases, one of which included using campaign finances in relation to Daniels and another woman who allegedly had an affair with Trump.
He said he had been acting at his command and that the payoffs were supposed to keep the affair stories out of public knowledge before the 2016 election. Trump has admitted reimbursing Cohen
Daniels met with prosecutors on Wednesday to answer further questions in the case and her lawyer, Clark Brewster, said she would also make herself available as a witness in future, if required.
Cohen has also indicated he’s given the grand jury damning testimony that implicates Trump. He testified for three hours on Monday.
Speaking beforehand, he said: ‘This is all about accountability. He needs to be held accountable for his dirty deeds.’
Speculation that charges were imminent increased when Bragg told Trump’s team the former president could testify before the grand jury if he so chose – a notification usually at the end of a process that could mean an indictment is near.
Legal experts have said Trump could face one of two charges over the payments – but also concede that both would be difficult to prove.
Classified documents taken from White House to Mar-a-Lago when Trump left office
The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into Trump for retaining government records after leaving office in January 2021.
The FBI seized 11,000 documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in a court-approved August 8 search, including about 100 marked as classified.
Some were designated top secret, the highest level of classified information.
The department began its investigation after the National Archives, the U.S. agency responsible for preserving government records, requested Trump return missing government property and received 15 boxes with classified documents mixed in.
Trump has accused the Justice Department of engaging in a partisan witch hunt and claims the documents he took were part of his personal records and were declassified when he left office.
A so-called special master, Senior U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, is reviewing the seized documents to determine whether any are protected by attorney-client privilege or by executive privilege, a legal doctrine under which a president can keep certain documents or information secret.
The Justice Department is also asking a federal appeals court to end that review and to let them access unclassified materials taken in the search, arguing that both measures are hindering their criminal investigation.
New York Attorney General’s $250million civil suit over inflated property values
New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a civil lawsuit filed last year that her office uncovered more than 200 examples of misleading asset valuations by Trump and the Trump Organization between 2011 and 2021.
James accused Trump of inflating his net worth by billions of dollars to satisfy loan terms and get better insurance coverage.
Mar-a-Lago was valued as high as $739 million when it should have been closed to $75 million, the 200-page lawsuit against the Trump Organization claims.
James is seeking to permanently bar Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and his daughter Ivanka Trump from running companies in New York state, and to prevent them and his company from buying new properties and taking out new loans in the state for five years.
James is also seeking to have the defendants disgorge around $250 million that she described as obtained through fraud.
After James announced the lawsuit, Trump in a social media post called the action ‘Another Witch Hunt.’
A lawyer for Trump called the lawsuit’s claims ‘meritless.’
James urged a state judge to reject Trumps bid to delay her civil fraud case against him ON Wednesday.
She said that her office had provided Trump and other defendants with an ‘enormous quantity’ of material, including 1.7 million documents and interview transcripts for 56 witnesses.
She said that negates their plea for an extra six months to gather evidence to defend themselves adequately at trial, now scheduled for October 2, and accused them of being slow to conduct their own witness depositions.
New York probe into Trump Organization’s ‘tax-free perks’ to top executives
In December a New York jury found the Trump Organization guilty of all charges in a sweeping, 15-year tax fraud scheme that prosecutors said was orchestrated by top executives at the company.
They were fined the maximum possible penalty – $1.6million – by a New York judge in January, for running the tax fraud scheme.
Two Trump entities, The Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp were convicted of 17 felonies, including tax fraud and falsifying business records.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office last year accused the Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corp. of giving executives tax-free perks such as rent-free apartments, school tuition feeds and leased luxury cars.
Its former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, also named as a defendant in the James lawsuit, has pleaded guilty and testified against the company as part of his agreement with prosecutors.
Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has also been investigating whether Trump misled lenders and others about asset valuations.
He said that a fine is not enough of a penalty, adding: ‘The law should reflect what I think many of us see, particularly those who sat through the trial and saw the 13 year you know.’
Settlement with protestors who claim Trump security guards assaulted them
In November last year Donald trump settled with a group of protestors who lodged a lawsuit claiming his security guards assaulted them outside Trump Tower in 2015.
The attorneys did not disclose details of the terms of the settlement, which came as the case was in the middle of jury selection.
Protestors demonstrated outside of the building on Fifth Avenue after his comments about Mexican immigrants when he was a candidate for president.
The suit claimed Trump’s head of security Keith Schiller punched one of the protesters in the head as he tried to wrest away his ‘Make America racist again’ sign.
Trump said in a February 2016 affidavit that said he shouldn’t have to be deposed because he didn’t know anything about the skirmish and hadn’t been involved in hiring security.
Lawyers for the protestors claim Trump was responsible for his employees’ actions, and the judge ordered him to sit for a deposition, saying his testimony was ‘indispensable.’
Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen disputed Trump’s contention that he was in the dark about what his security officers were doing in his own videotaped deposition in May.
Cohen testified that he witnessed Trump directing Schiller to ‘get rid of’ the protesters and that Schiller later returned to Trump’s office with a sign he had taken from them, according to court filings show.
E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case over rape allegations from the 1990s
E. Jean Carroll, a former Elle magazine writer, sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he denied her allegation that he raped her in the 1990s in a New York City department store.
Trump accused her of lying to drum up sales for a book.
Trump appeared for a deposition in the case, according to his and Carroll’s lawyers.
In a letter made public on Sept. 20, a lawyer for Carroll said she also plans to sue Trump for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress under a new state law in New York giving adult accusers a one-year window to bring civil claims over alleged civil misconduct regardless of when it occurred.
A lawyer for Trump has argued that he is protected by a federal law that makes government employees immune from defamation claims. Trump was president at the time the lawsuit was filed.
The Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said last month that Trump was a federal employee when he called Carroll a liar, but left open the question of whether he was acting as president when he made the statement to a Washington, D.C., appeals court.
January 6 committee’s investigation into the Capitol Riot
A House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6, 2021, assault by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol is investigating whether he broke the law in actions taken to try to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
The rioters sought to block Congress from certifying the election results.
The committee unanimously voted in October to subpoena Trump as part of its probe.
Trump sued the committee on November 11 to challenge the subpoena by questioning the legitimacy of the committee and suggesting he has immunity from testifying about his conduct while he was president.
The committee said Trump had ‘failed to comply’ with the subpoena for documents and testimony from that day.
‘The committee will evaluate next steps in the litigation and regarding the former President’s noncompliance,’ Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson and GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, who serve as chair and vice chair of the committee respectively, said in a statement.
Trump could face a misdemeanor charge if he does not comply. The former president could also challenge it in court, as he has done with other subpoenas, which would likely tie the matter up in litigation until the committee concludes its work.
Committee vice chair Liz Cheney has said the committee could make multiple referrals to the Justice Department seeking criminal charges against Trump, who has accused the panel of conducting a politically motivated sham investigation.
The committee cannot charge Trump with federal crimes. That decision must be made by the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland. The panel is expected to issue a written report on its findings in the coming weeks.
Georgia’s criminal probe into efforts to overturn the 2020 election
A special grand jury was selected in May to consider evidence in a Georgia prosecutor’s inquiry into Trump’s alleged efforts to influence that state’s 2020 election results.
The investigation focuses in part on a phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, on Jan. 2, 2021. Trump asked Raffensperger to ‘find’ the votes needed to overturn Trump’s election loss.
Legal experts said Trump may have violated at least three Georgia criminal election laws: conspiracy to commit election fraud, criminal solicitation to commit election fraud and intentional interference with performance of election duties.
Trump could argue he was engaging in constitutionally protected free speech.
A California federal judge said in October in a separate lawsuit that Trump had knowingly made false voter fraud claims in a Georgia election lawsuit, according to emails the judge reviewed. It is not immediately clear what ramifications Trump could face from the ruling.