Trump indicted for hush money, prosecutors coordinate ‘surrender’: Latest developments | World News

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has been indicted in New York on charges of paying for pornographic videos made during his 2016 presidential campaign to quell allegations of extramarital sexual encounters. This is the first ever criminal case against a former US president.

Trump is expected to turn himself in next week as details of the surrender are being worked out, according to multiple reports. The New York prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s office, which obtained the grand jury indictment against Trump, confirmed to AFP that it had contacted the Republican’s lawyer “to coordinate his surrender … for arraignment”.

“Guidance will be provided in selecting an arraignment date,” a spokesman for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was quoted by AFP as saying.

Here’s the latest on Trump’s indictment:

1. Stormy Daniels paid $130,000 to keep quiet about having sex with Trump during a celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe in 2006. Trump denies having sex with Daniels.
2. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was paid hush money after Trump expressed her willingness to make public statements confirming her sexual relationship with Trump in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
3. Daniels’ lawyer said the indictment of former President Trump showed that “no one is above the law.” “The indictment of Donald Trump is not happy,” Clarke Brewster tweeted. “Let truth and justice prevail now.”
4. Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s first black district attorney and Democrat, has become the first prosecutor to bring criminal charges against a former U.S. president.
5. Trump issued a lengthy statement, calling the indictment the next step in the left’s “Destroy Make America Great Again” campaign.
6. Democrats, he claimed, “lied, cheated, and stole in their obsession with ‘Fixing Trump,’ but now they’re doing the unthinkable — blatantly interfering in the election and accusing a completely innocent individual.”
7. The republic leader accused Bragg of “doing Joe Biden’s dirty work of ignoring the murders, thefts and assaults that he should be focusing on.”
8. Many Republicans backed the indicted former president, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy vowed to “hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power accountable.”
9. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a prospective challenger to Trump’s party’s nomination in 2024, slammed the indictment as “un-American” and said Florida would not help extradite the ex. president.
10. Democrats insist that if Trump breaks the law, he should face charges like any American. U.S. House Representative Adam Schiff said in a tweet: “The indictment of a former president is unprecedented. But so is the illegal conduct that Trump participated in.”

(Compiled based on data from Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Bloomberg)