Editor’s note (March 30th): This story was updated after a grand jury in Manhattan indicted Mr Trump.
DONALD TRUMP is facing, by some counts, around 20 criminal investigations and civil lawsuits. On March 30th one, led by the district attorney in Manhattan, resulted in an indictment, a first in American history. What are the most prominent inquiries involving Mr Trump—and how much trouble might he be in?
The hush-money probe
A grand jury in Manhattan has heard evidence that Mr Trump falsified business records to hide the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels (née Stephanie Clifford), a porn actress who says she slept with him in 2006. To buy her silence, Michael Cohen, then Mr Trump’s lawyer, paid her $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election. The money came from Mr Cohen’s pocket, allegedly at his boss’s direction. Later Mr Trump personally signed cheques to reimburse Mr Cohen. Those payments were falsely marked as legal expenses by the Trump Organisation, his property firm. Mr Cohen says that Mr Trump knew about the misleading records; Mr Trump denies that as well as the affair with Ms Daniels, and says that any suggestion of criminal conduct on his part is a “fairy tale”.
The case is far from straightforward. Falsifying business records is a misdemeanour. To treat the allegedly fraudulent record-keeping as a felony, prosecutors must prove that it facilitated another crime: failing to report what was, in effect, a campaign expense. That is an untested legal strategy.
In 2018 Mr Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations related to the hush money, as well as tax evasion, and served just over a year in prison. Mr Trump was not charged at the time; the Department of Justice (DoJ) has guidelines that recommend against the indictment of a sitting president.
Mr Trump’s lawyers will probably argue that Mr Cohen told his boss that the scheme was legal. Even if convicted the former president is unlikely to go to jail. If charged as a felony, falsifying business records carries a maximum prison sentence of four years, but first-time defendants rarely serve time.
The “raid” at Mar-a-Lago
On August 8th FBI agents arrived unannounced to search Mr Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago, in Florida—an unprecedented action against a former president. The DoJ sought national-security documents that Mr Trump had taken from the White House. Mr Trump’s lawyers had claimed that the relevant documents had been returned. But the agency rightly suspected that some remained in the former president’s residence. Its agents found more than 100 classified or secret documents. Reports suggest that some related to the nuclear capabilities of a foreign government. Mr Trump has said that he declassified the documents while he was president and that he had the power to do so “even by thinking about it”. His lawyers have not made the same claims in court, under penalty of perjury.
Merrick Garland, the attorney-general, has tried to be scrupulously non-partisan. Yet the investigation into the recovered documents and whether they might lead to criminal charges against the former president have become politically fraught. On November 18th Mr Garland appointed a special counsel—a semi-independent federal prosecutor—to oversee the investigation. This, he said, demonstrated his department’s commitment to “independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters”. Jack Smith, the special counsel in question, previously worked at the DoJ investigating corruption by government officials. He will advise on whether or not to indict Mr Trump; the ultimate decision will remain Mr Garland’s.
The attempts to overturn the 2020 election
The most public investigation into Mr Trump was an 18-month effort by the House of Representatives’ January 6th committee. The bipartisan committee lacked the power to charge the former president but it recommended that the DoJ charge him with four federal crimes, including obstruction of an official government proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States and aiding an insurrection. Those can carry stiff prison sentences.
The committee’s trove of evidence concerning Mr Trump’s post-election machinations could inform the DoJ’s separate investigations, which Mr Smith is also overseeing. Several people subpoenaed by the committee—including John Eastman, a lawyer who concocted the legal scheme of objecting to state election results in Congress, and Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania congressman who lobbied to have a Trump loyalist installed as attorney-general—subsequently had their phones seized by federal investigators.
Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, is conducting a separate investigation into whether the president and his associates tried to overturn the election results in that state. Georgia law criminalises solicitation of election fraud. Some experts believe that Mr Trump’s notorious leaked phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president asked him to “find 11,780 votes”, might constitute evidence of that offence.
Lawyers advising Mr Trump also drew up a hare-brained scheme to manufacture a false slate of electors in order to award Georgia’s 16 electoral-college votes to Mr Trump. They claimed that this ruse would allow Mike Pence, Mr Trump’s vice-president, either to overrule Joe Biden’s narrow win in Georgia or let it be adjudicated by a special vote in the House of Representatives (which would have gone in Mr Trump’s favour). A grand jury has recommended that Ms Willis charge more than a dozen people in the scheme, though precisely whom was not made public.
Fraud and civil liabilities
Mr Trump also faces probes over his business dealings. Letitia James, New York’s attorney-general, has sued Mr Trump, three of his children and his business, the Trump Organisation, for committing “staggering” fraud over a decade. Although Ms James is not able to bring criminal charges, she is seeking the return of $250m in allegedly ill-gotten gains and to have Mr Trump permanently barred from running a business in the state. The case goes to trial in October 2023.Ms James alleges that Mr Trump and his subsidiary businesses grossly inflated his net worth and the value of his properties to mislead prospective lenders. In 11 annual statements between 2011 and 2021, government attorneys found 200 instances in which they claim that the value of assets was fraudulently inflated. In 2015 Mr Trump’s flat was valued as though it were 30,000 square feet (2,787 square metres) when it was in fact around 11,000 square feet. Its purported value was $327m—at a time when only one New York apartment had ever been sold for more than $100m. Mar-a-Lago was valued at $739m on the premise that the land could be developed for flats, though Mr Trump had previously signed away those rights (and sought an income-tax deduction for doing so). An honest evaluation would have valued the property at a little more than one-tenth of the amount claimed, the attorney-general writes.Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer for the Trump Organisation, pleaded guilty in August to unrelated charges of tax fraud. He testified in a separate criminal trial against the company, which was found guilty of dodging taxes on December 6th. The potential penalties stemming from that conviction, at $1.6m, are pocket change for the firm, but the verdict is nonetheless an embarrassment. Prosecutors said Mr Trump—who was not indicted—had been “explicitly sanctioning tax fraud”.
Slow justice
The former president faces numerous other civil lawsuits—including one brought by E. Jean Carroll, an author, who accused him of sexually assaulting her 26 years ago. So far, none of the investigations or lawsuits he faces has significantly damaged his standing on the right. He claims to be the victim of a Democratic witch-hunt.
Some Democrats hope that Mr Trump will be in jail by the time of the presidential election in 2024. That is exceptionally unlikely. The pace of criminal investigations can be plodding. Finding an unbiased jury to try a former president would be fiendishly hard. It is almost impossible to imagine a charge against Mr Trump speeding through indictment, trial, conviction and all possible appeals in merely two years. And even if one did, that need not be the end of Mr Trump. In 1920 Eugene Debs, a socialist convicted of sedition, ran for president from his prison cell—in Georgia.
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