trump. thank you so much forjoining us. we keep talking about this being historic and unprecedented but i want you to take a moment to really reflect on this moment and what is happening in the united states. it is good to be here. yes, i am troubled by it because i don t know the full extent of the charges. if it is a charge related to these hush payments, i wonder if that is an aggressive enough of a charge to indict a former president because i think it ends up running a very slippery slope in the country. i will remind everyone that ted kennedy excoriated gerald ford back in the 70s for pardoning richard nixon but in 2009 prior to his death he wrote wrote in his memoir that fort did the right thing so we need to be very careful going down this
Donald Trump’s lawyers may reportedly seek to move the potential criminal case from New York s Manhattan to Staten Island in hopes of ‘ less biased" jury.
this is unprecedented and it is historic. the first time a former president has ever been criminally charged and therefor we don t have any real roadmap for how it will now play out. we do know former president donald trump will be arraigned next week in manhattan courtroo surrounded by extraordinary security fear also surrounded b security tonight the manhattan da alvin bragg leaving his office after grand jury decided he had to demonstrate probable cause in the case he has pursue against trump, alleging campaign-finance laws were broken but was so-called hush payments to stormy daniels she claims she had an affair with trump before he ran for president for the immediate question is how exactly the former president will be processed and charged to move surrendering to authorities.
the new indictment. alison okay , caitlin carroll. we should remind everyone that you broke this story for cnn tonight. really appreciate both of your reporting. thank you very much for of that. all right. i want to bring in now. our panel. we have cnn legal analyst jennifer rogers, a former assistant, u s attorney also with us. nick akerman, former assistant special watergate prosecutor, and john miller, cnn s chief law enforcement and intelligence analysts, guys. thank you very much for being here with us on this special coverage tonight, nick. i ve spoken to you many times on this program, and you always felt confident that this was going to happen. question about it. i mean, exactly, we re not confident on is exactly what those charges are going to be. we know that the stand the daniels hush payments are part of this. the stormy daniels payments, but we don t know if there s more to it if there s more to it about falsification of records in the trump organization, particularly in l
what we do know. there s some talk about perhaps what the republicans are calling a business bookkeeping question could lead to something having to do with the commission of a crime in campaign finance, and that would be a felony but what do we know right now, and what happens from here well, by all accounts, what the manhattan district attorney has charged is related to this same set of facts that led to a part of the guilty plea that michael cohen entered in a federal court. where michael cohen admitted his guilt in part of this scheme, which was hush payments, and then falsifying, covering up those hush payments, which were made to keep information, allegedly, from the american public, voting on whether to elect donald trump or hillary clinton president. so that was the purpose of the scheme this has obviously been charged under state law after bill barr