How a hush money scandal turned into a criminal case: The whirlwind history of People v. Trump

On Monday, nearly eight years after Donald Trump allegedly orchestrated a scheme to pay a porn star to keep quiet about affair allegations on the eve of the 2016 election, he will become the first former president ever to stand criminal trial.

The path from hush money payment to prosecution has been anything but direct.

The saga of Trump facing trial for the $130,000 paid to porn star Stormy Daniels has run a circuitous route, winding through two different prosecutors’ offices, multiple grand juries and numerous levels of the court system stretching twice up to the Supreme Court.

The investigation lurched through so many different phases — and was so durable — that one former prosecutor dubbed it the “zombie” case. Now, however, it will finally culminate in a roughly six-week trial that will determine whether Trump, the former president and current presumptive Republican nominee, is a convicted felon.

Here is how we got here.

The origin: A federal campaign finance probe

In January 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s then-lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, had arranged a payment to Daniels a month before the 2016 election to silence her claims about a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump.

Despite a series of denials by Trump and Cohen about various aspects of the episode, federal authorities quickly opened an investigation, and by April, the FBI executed searches of Cohen’s home, office and hotel room.

In August 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to several crimes including campaign finance violations, saying he had arranged hush money payments to two women “for the benefit of, at the direction of, and in coordination with” Trump.

That admission came as the result of an investigation by federal prosecutors into conduct by both Cohen and Trump in connection with the hush money. But there was a catch: Trump was still president.

Though the prosecutors had gathered evidence of possible crimes by Trump, they couldn’t charge him due in part to longstanding Justice Department policy that bars federal authorities from bringing criminal charges against a sitting president.

After Cohen pleaded guilty, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, then under the leadership of Cy Vance, opened an investigation into whether the hush money payments violated New York state law. But because federal prosecutors were continuing to pursue investigative threads stemming from the Cohen probe, they asked Vance’s office to pause its inquiry.

A battle over accounting records

Several months later, after federal prosecutors said in a court filing that they had “effectively concluded” their investigation without bringing additional charges, Vance’s office geared back up, issuing a subpoena for eight years of Trump’s business and personal tax records from his longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA.

That marked the start of a prolonged court fight by Trump to prevent prosecutors from obtaining his financial records.

Trump sued Vance in federal court, arguing that a sitting president is immune from investigation, prosecution or indictment by local prosecutors. After losing the case in district court, Trump appealed the decision to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court. In July 2020, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing in the majority opinion that “no citizen, not even the President, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.”

But though the outcome was a victory for the district attorney’s office, clearing that hurdle didn’t guarantee a direct path to prosecution.

For one thing, the district attorney’s office was exploring multiple inquiries involving Trump, including whether he may have committed tax, insurance and banking fraud over matters unrelated to the hush money payments.

And for another, Trump wasn’t done fighting the subpoena. He challenged it again, arguing that it was overly broad. Again, he lost his argument in the lower courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court also rejected his final bid to stop his accounting firm from handing over the financial records.

Finally, in February 2021, Vance’s prosecutors obtained the documents they’d long been seeking.

Doubts about a legal theory

By this point, Trump was no longer president, having left office one month earlier. And Vance’s office accelerated its investigation, hiring veteran prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to ramp up the Trump probe right around the same time.

In his first few weeks on the case, Pomerantz decided to focus his efforts on the hush money portion of the district attorney’s sprawling investigation.

“The return to life of the hush money facts as a potential basis for prosecution sparked a nickname for this part of the investigation: the hush money inquiry came to be known as the ‘zombie’ case, because it was alive, and then it was dead, and now it had sprung back to life,” Pomerantz later wrote in his book, “People v. Donald Trump: An Inside Account.”

But by March 2021, prosecutors had struggled to settle on a legal theory for charging Trump in the hush money matter. They were concerned that charging him with felonies for falsifying business records might not hold up in court, according to Pomerantz. So it went “back into the grave,” he wrote.

A sprawling investigation continues

On March 12, Vance said he wouldn’t run for reelection and would leave office at the end of the year. He also said internally that before stepping down he would make a decision about whether to charge Trump.

Over the next few months, the district attorney’s office moved on to other areas of inquiry related to Trump, including looking at whether he had inflated the valuations of his properties — a matter that was eventually brought as a civil case by the New York attorney general’s office — and whether the Trump Organization had doled out untaxed perks to its executives.

By May, prosecutors began presenting information about the untaxed perks to a grand jury, and by the beginning of July, it had indicted the Trump Organization and its then-CFO Allen Weisselberg.

New top prosecutor, new approach

In November, Vance’s successor, Alvin Bragg, was elected as district attorney.

Bragg was sworn in in January 2022, and in his initial weeks in office, he hesitated on moving forward with the case related to valuations. And as a result, prosecutors paused their presentation of evidence about Trump to a grand jury. Shortly thereafter, Pomerantz and another top lawyer who had been leading the Trump investigation, Carey Dunne, resigned from the office.

By the fall, though, Bragg’s office had renewed its interest in the piece of its inquiry that focused on the hush money payment to Daniels. And by January 2023, prosecutors had begun presenting evidence on that case to a new grand jury.

Over the next two months, the grand jury heard from witnesses including Cohen and Daniels, and prosecutors signaled that they had reached the final stages of their investigation by offering Trump the opportunity to speak to the grand jury himself. He declined.

By mid-March 2023, Trump predicted his own arrest on charges stemming from the Daniels payment. And on March 30, a grand jury voted to indict the former president, charging him with alleged falsification of business records related to his reimbursement of Cohen for the payment to Daniels. Five days later, Trump appeared at the criminal courthouse in Lower Manhattan to plead not guilty.

On Monday, he will return to that same courthouse, where he will take a seat at the defense table to observe the selection of a jury that will decide whether he is guilty of 34 felony counts.