Former U.S. President Donald Trump appears in court with his lawyer Joe Tacopina for an arraignment on charges stemming from his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury following a probe into hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels, in New York City, U.S., April 4, 2023.
Andrew Kelly | Reuters
The indictment against former President Donald Trump charges him with 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records and conspiracy in connection with hush money payments to two women before the 2016 presidential election.
The indictment says those payments were done to suppress claims by those women of having sex with Trump, in order to avoid those accounts harming his chances of winning the election over Hillary Clinton.
The charging document was unsealed at his arraignment in Manhattan Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges.
There are two women previously known to have received hush money payments in 2016 to buy their silence about Trump.
One was the porn star Stormy Daniels, who received $130,000 from Trump’s then-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen at Trump’s direction. The other was Playboy model Karen McDougal, who received $150,000 from the publisher of The National Enquirer, the supermarket tabloid that was allied with Trump.
The grand jury indicted Trump on Thursday. The charging document had remained sealed since then.
The grand jury began hearing testimony in the case in late January.
Follow CNBC.com‘s live coverage of former President Donald Trump’s surrender and arraignment at the Manhattan criminal courthouse.
News of those proceedings came as a surprise, since a former prosecutor in the district attorney’s office last year had suggested the investigation into Trump was all but dead after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg declined to seek an indictment against Trump in connection with allegedly false financial statements involving real estate assets.
Trump separately is under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice and a…
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