Trump Expects Arrest on Stormy Daniels Payout Charges, City Prepares for Protests

Over the weekend, former President Donald Trump took to social media and announced he expected to be arrested today, Tuesday, March 21, on charges related to a Manhattan investigation into an alleged payout paid to Stormy Daniels. Since then, numerous New York City sources have beefed up city security to address calls for protest made by the former president and his supporters.

There has been no official news on the determination of the grand jury in the Manhattan DA’s investigation yet. The grand jury heard from another witness on Monday, and is scheduled to meet in court again on Wednesday.

Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen has testified that Trump had him arrange the payout. Trump could be charged with misdemeanor falsification of records charges or felony charges related to campaign finance violations for the role the payout, falsely classified as an expense of the Trump Organization, may have played in the 2016 election.

Police sources have told the New York Daily News that, unlike other major arrests in New York, if Trump surrenders to an arrest he will be allowed to meet voluntarily at the Manhattan DA’s office to have his mugshot taken and be processed, skipping a “perp walk.”

Mayor Eric Adams and NYPD leadership, including Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell, apparently met with local elected officials on Monday to lay out security preparations for the city if Trump is indicted this week.

NYPD Intelligence and Counterterrorism Chief Thomas Galati Chief Thomas Galati said in a recording obtained by the Daily News that police are expecting protests throughout the week including a potential car caravan planning to come to Manhattan from Long Island.

Yesterday, The Crime Report visited a small group of demonstrators at a protest organized by the New York Young Republican Club and ‘Loud Majority’ at Collect Pond Park.

The turnout was low, which seemed partly intentional; the Club had tried to keep the location under wraps for all but members who RSVP’d in advance, though it was posted publicly by the Loud Majority social profiles earlier the day before.

The park sits across the street from New York County Criminal Court, where former President Donald Trump is expected to be indicted and where the New York Police Department has erected a number of security barriers. The department also erected barricades around the surrounding family and civil courthouses.

Police and reporters far outnumbered demonstrators at the event.

Jim Jordan, Bryan Steil and James Comer, chairmen of the House Committees on the Judiciary, House Administration and Oversight and Accountability sent a letter to Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg early Monday requesting documents related to the office’s investigation into Donald Trump between 2017 and 2023.

In the letter, Jordan claimed that the Committee on the Judiciary has “jurisdiction over criminal justice matters in the United States,” as justification in part for the request.

The congressmen cited articles from the Daily Mail condemning Bragg as a “Woke DA” to support the statement that Bragg has allowed “criminals [to] run the streets” of Manhattan, but that claim has been widely debated.

“Congress has no jurisdiction to investigate the Manhattan DA,” Democratic Representative Daniel Goldman wrote on twitter Monday.

The three insinuated that communication between the Manhattan DA and the DOJ would be a kind of collusion and demanded all communications between the two agencies.

Joyce Alene White Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, tweeted Monday that even if the DOJ and the DA’s office had communicated, that would be normal:

“In my 25 years as a federal prosecutor, we always coordinated with state & local partners when our investigations overlapping (sic),” Alene wrote. “That’s just common sense & good law enforcement.”

Politico reported Monday that three people involved in the deliberations surrounding Trump’s potential indictment are expecting it to happen soon.

The grand jury considering charges against the former president is scheduled back in court on Wednesday.

Former President Donald Trump posted multiple times about his expectation he will be arrested this week after an indictment from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, and turned on Sunday evening toward the New York Police Department in an all-CAPS post on Truth Social.

“Can you imagine the great New York City Police Department, correctly referred to as ‘New York City’s finest,’ who, for the first and only time in history, endorsed a president, me, & honored me as ‘man of the year,’ having to defend & protect the ‘defunders’ & ‘cop haters’ of the radical left that want to put their greatest champion & friend in prison for a crime that doesn’t exist,” Trump wrote.

In multiple posts and a video ad responding to the investigation, Trump wrote or spoke to his belief that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is responsible, through his policy changes and implementation of city and state level justice reform laws, for the release of violent criminals and for turning New York City into a “hellscape.”

The Manhattan case is not the only criminal investigation at play this week. In the federal classified documents handling case against Trump, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported early Monday that attorneys Jim Trusty and Evan Corcoran, and Michael Levy, Corcoran’s attorney, appeared at the D.C. Courthouse for the first time that morning since a D.C. judge said prosecutors met the crime-fraud threshold in the case against Donald Trump last month.

Rolling Stone’s Charisma Madarang reported in February that Federal prosecutors are hoping to use the exception to compel testimony from Corcoran.

The crime-fraud exception voids legal client-lawyer secretary in cases where a client has asked a lawyer for help in commission of fraud or a crime.