Donald Trump said in a post on social media site Truth Social on Saturday morning that he expects to be arrested on Tuesday, calling on his supporters to protest and “take our nation back.”
Trump cites “illegal leaks from a corrupt and highly political Manhattan court district” as the source of his information, and the comments come as a Manhattan grand jury is expected to indict the twice-impeached former president for hush money paid to women who alleged sexual encounters with him.
Trump’s claim that he’ll be arrested on Tuesday is unsupported by any official announcement from law enforcement officials, and the New York Times reports that Trump’s team has no specific knowledge about when an indictment may come. One person close to Trump told the Times that Trump’s advisors’ “best guess” was an indictment could come Tuesday, and that information may have been relayed to Trump, spurring the social media rant.
There have been widespread reports that Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg would indict Trump next week over payments to Stormy Daniels since he was offered the chance to testify before a grand jury, a move that usually precedes an indictment.
In his Saturday morning Truth Social post, Trump’s rhetoric had chilling echoes of his calls for protests ahead of his rally on Jan. 6, 2021, which led to a harrowing and violent assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen told CNN’s Don Lemon in February he was directed by Trump to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels to keep her alleged sexual relationship with Trump out of the press.
“Right before the election, I was then asked by Donald to handle it with Allen Weisselberg,” Cohen said, nodding to the former CFO of the Trump Organization. “And what that really meant for me was to resolve it. And so I did, but I did it at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump.”
“I’ve said all along that I thought the DA’s case is by far the simplest to prove, and it is the most destructive to Donald Trump individually and to his business,” Cohen said, adding, “I think we’re going to see a lot of repercussions for Donald Trump.”
Trump also faces potential indictment in two other separate cases, in Georgia over allegedly trying to illegally sway the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, and in Florida and Washington D.C. over allegedly taking classified documents from the White House when his term ended.
The former president’s imminent New York indictment comes as he has already announced he’s running for president in 2024.
