Former US president Donald Trump is set to be arraigned on Tuesday after his indictment in New York City, court officials said on Friday. Mr Trump's planned surrender will usher in the unprecedented scenario of a former US commander-in-chief being arrested and arraigned.
Mr Trump's indictment, announced Thursday, 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.
Mr Trump has denied any wrongdoing and denounced the investigation as a "scam", a "persecution", an injustice and a political low blow aimed at damaging his 2024 presidential run. He is a Republican; the district attorney who oversaw the inquiry, Alvin Bragg, is a Democrat.
No ex-president has ever been charged with a crime before. Mr Trump has Secret Service protection, so agents would need to be by his side at all times.
Indeed, Mr Trump was asked to surrender on Friday, but his lawyers said the Secret Service needed more time to make security preparations, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press. 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.
Mr Bragg's office said on Thursday it had contacted Mr Trump's lawyer to coordinate a surrender. Ahead of the court's announcement of the arraignment date, Mr Trump's lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said that Tuesday was the likely date for Mr Trump to turn himself in.
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 Mr Trump years before he got into politics; he denies having sexual liaisons with either woman.
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As Mr Trump ran for president in 2016, his allies paid the women to bury their allegations. The publisher of the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer paid Ms McDougal 150,000 dollars for rights to her story and sat on it, in an arrangement brokered by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.
After Mr Cohen himself paid Ms Daniels 130,000 dollars, Mr Trump's company reimbursed him, added bonuses and logged the payments to Mr Cohen as legal expenses. Federal prosecutors argued - in a 2018 criminal case against Mr Cohen - that the payments equated to illegal aid to Mr Trump's campaign.
Mr Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violation charges, but federal prosecutors did not go after Mr 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 Mr Trump contends with other investigations that could have grave legal consequences. 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.
At the federal level, a Justice Department-appointed special counsel also is investigating Mr Trump's efforts to unravel the national election results. Additionally, the special counsel is examining how and why Mr 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.
