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Topics: Donald Trump, Politics, US News
Tom Wood
Topics: Donald Trump, Politics, US News
Donald Trump has said that he is to be arrested ‘on Tuesday of next week’ because of allegations that he paid off adult star Stormy Daniels to stop her revealing the details of an alleged sexual relationship between the pair.
Sharing a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said that he ‘will be arrested on Tuesday of next week’ and urged his followers to ‘take our nation back’.
That went famously well the last time, didn’t it?
New York law enforcement are thought to be preparing for the potential arrest of the former President, and he could be indicted over the coming weeks to appear at a court in Manhattan.
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In Trump’s typically rambling post, he wrote: “Page 2: Now illegal leaks from a corrupt & highly political Manhattan district attorneys office, which has allowed new records to be set in violent crime & whose leader is funded by George Soros, indicate that, with no crime being able to be proven, & based on an old & fully debunked (by numerous other prosecutors!) fairytale, the far & away leading republican candidate & former president of the united states of America, will be arrested on Tuesday of next week.
“Protest, take our nation back!"
So far there has been no announcement whatsoever to confirm that Trump is likely to be arrested, though some anonymous employees of law enforcement have suggested that preparations are being made for the possibility that he might be brought in.
They told The Associated Press that the preparations are just preliminary and just offer them the chance to think about what security and planning might be necessary if they were to have the former POTUS in the courtroom.
Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina said that if Trump is eventually indicted he ‘will follow the normal procedures’.
The grand jury has heard from several witnesses, including his ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, who claimed he helped with payments to two women in 2016 in order to keep them quiet about alleged sexual relationships they had with Trump in the past.
He said that Trump asked him to pay a total of $280,000 to both Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Those payments - he claims - were to silence the women during Trump's run for the Oval Office.
Cohen and the prosecutors have claimed that his company was reimbursed $420,000 for the payment to Daniels as well as other expenses.
Those payments were then classified as legal expenses, they claim.
McDougal’s payment was allegedly made by the then-publisher of the National Enquirer, though prosecutors agreed not to bring charges against them in exchange for co-operation in an investigation into campaign finance that eventually led to Cohen being charged and convicted, for which he served prison time and was disbarred.
Trump denies all the allegations, claiming that he’s the victim of a ‘witch hunt’ by a Democratic prosecutor who wants to scupper his presidential bid in 2024.
In a statement on Thursday (16 March), the spokesperson for that campaign, Steven Cheung, said: “Democrats have investigated and attacked President Trump since before he was elected - and they’ve failed every time.”