The NYPD erected steel barricades around Manhattan’s Criminal Court Monday afternoon in anticipation of Donald Trump’s looming indictment by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg.
Footage taken by CBS News on Monday afternoon shows police officers positioning the barricades around the courthouse in lower Manhattan days after the former president said he expected to be arrested and indicted on Tuesday. The expected indictment is the result of Bragg’s investigation into an alleged hush-money payment provided to Stormy Daniels, a former adult actress, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
“THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!” Trump blared to his followers over the weekend on Truth Social, a social-media platform owned by the former president.
“THEY’RE KILLING OUR NATION AS WE SIT BACK & WATCH. WE MUST SAVE AMERICA!PROTEST, PROTEST, PROTEST!!!” he added in a later message.
However, while news of the impending arrest has seemingly triggered the security precautions, the timing of Tuesday’s possible indictment is unclear.
Reporting by the New York Times suggests that procedural matters will likely complicate Trump’s surrender. Moreover, the historically close cooperation between the NYPD and the Secret Service (USSS) suggests that any potential iconic imagery of the former president being perp-walked in handcuffs into the courthouse is highly unlikely.
Local law enforcement have sought to maintain a calm face in light of the much-anticipated indictment.
“We will use all of our available resources,” an NYPD source told the New York Post on Sunday, highlighting that the department’s Strategic Response Group — a body charged with preventing civil unrest — “has a role in this agency and when needed they will be called in.”
“We’ll handle it like we do anything else,” NYPD Chief Kevin Maloney told the Post. “It’s Lower Manhattan, there’s always plenty of police presence down there anyway. So we’ll monitor the situation. We’ll have ample resources. We’ll see what Tuesday brings.”
Some commentators anticipate that Trump will likely face multiple indictments in the coming weeks and months as several investigations across the country into his conduct following the 2020 presidential election come to a head. Federal prosecutors in Fulton County are expected to charge Trump in the near future over his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia.
A grand jury was impaneled in Georgia to investigate a now-infamous January 2021 phone call between then-president Trump, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. On the call, Trump instructed Raffensperger to “find” the roughly 12,000 votes he needed to reverse the election results in the state.
The call was placed just days before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building.
“For the office of the secretary of state to ‘recalculate’ would mean we would somehow have to fudge the numbers. The president was asking me to do something that I knew was wrong, and I was not going to do that,” Raffensperger wrote in a 2021 memoir, Integrity Counts.
Meanwhile, some suspect the Department of Justice’s special counsel, Jack Smith, will bring formal charges against Trump in connection to his possession of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence, as well as obstruction of Congress for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
Reporting from National Review.
