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For weeks, the atmosphere outside of the district attorney’s office had resembled a circus. But the fervor had cooled in recent days, and the outskirts of the office were emptier on Thursday than they have been in weeks.
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Mr. Trump has consistently painted the investigation as a larger conspiracy forwarded by his political opponents. Though he insulted Mr. Bragg, he chose to lay the blame at the feet of his successor in the Oval Office. “I believe this Witch-Hunt will backfire massively on Joe Biden,” he said in a statement.
The prosecution’s star witness is Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, who paid the $130,000 to keep Ms. Daniels quiet. Mr. Cohen has said that Mr. Trump directed him to buy Ms. Daniels’s silence, and that Mr. Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization, helped cover the whole thing up. The company’s internal records falsely identified the reimbursements as legal expenses, which helped conceal the purpose of the payments.
Although the specific charges remain unknown, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors have zeroed in on that hush money payment and the false records created by Mr. Trump’s company. A conviction is not a sure thing: An attempt to combine a charge relating to the false records with an election violation relating to the payment to Ms. Daniels would be based on a legal theory that has yet to be evaluated by judges, raising the possibility that a court could throw out or limit the charges.
The indictment, the product of a nearly five-year investigation, kicks off a new and volatile phase in Mr. Trump’s post-presidential life as he makes a third run for the White House. And it could throw the race for the Republican nomination — which he leads in most polls — into uncharted territory.
Mr. Bragg is the first prosecutor to indict Mr. Trump. He is now likely to become a national figure enduring a harsh political spotlight.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.