Updated September 18, 2024 at 15:59 PM ET
Former President Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, after a New York jury found him guilty on all 34 felony counts in a hush money case.
Trump also faces 12 charges across two more cases. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and the GOP front-runner claims the investigations are partisan efforts to interfere with his effort to regain the White House. He had been charged with 40 counts in a fourth case involving classified documents but the judge, Aileen Cannon, dismissed it in July. Special counsel Jack Smith appealed the decision, adding months to the case.
The timing of some cases has been intertwined with others, and it's still unclear how things will shake out on the election-year calendar. The landscape shifted when the Supreme Court in July concluded Trump and future presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution for their official acts in the White House, and his lawyers are seeking to dismiss all federal charges, arguing they overlap with official duties as president.
Loading...
Here's where things stand:
New York hush money case
Status: Conviction
Number of charges: 34
Case background: On May 30, Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to be convicted on felony charges.
New York jurors agreed with prosecutors' contention that Trump falsified business records in order to influence the 2016 election.
A grand jury voted to indict Trump in March 2023. Allegations in this case are tied to hush money payments made before the 2016 election to the adult film star Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged affair.
Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, has said that she and Trump had an affair in 2006. Following the launch of Trump's campaign in 2016, Daniels offered to sell her story to gossip magazines. In October, National Enquirer executives friendly to Trump flagged this to Trump's then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen.
Cohen agreed to pay $130,000 to Daniels to keep her silent. Her attorney received this money less than two weeks before the election. Cohen was later reimbursed $420,000 after Trump was elected president — which Trump has admitted to doing to pay off Daniels. Trump has long maintained he never had an affair with Daniels.
According to court records, executives with the Trump Organization categorized the reimbursements as a "retainer" for "legal services."
The trial began in late April, making it the first of Trump's criminal cases to reach that stage.
After his conviction, Trump called the trial "rigged" and "disgraceful."
Originally set to be sentenced in July, Judge Juan Merchan pushed it back to Nov. 26, a few weeks after the election, in order to ensure the court is seen as politically impartial. He also postponed consideration on whether to overturn the criminal conviction in light of the Supreme Court's decision on presidential immunity and other evidence. That hearing is now set to happen on Nov. 12.
Federal election interference case
Status: In process
Number of charges: 4
Case background: A 45-page indictment lays out the case that Trump and those around him committed crimes as the former president scrambled to try to hold onto power after losing the 2020 election. It comes after the Justice Department's investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, one of the most sprawling and complex investigations in U.S. history.
Trump has continued to baselessly state that the 2020 election was stolen from him through fraud, even after courts repeatedly rejected his claims.
Leading up to Jan. 6, Trump and his allies pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the 2020 election results, and urged his supporters to "fight like hell" to stop Congress from certifying the result.
Meanwhile, Trump advisers were also pursuing a fake elector scheme, pushing Republican officials in states like Arizona, Wisconsin and Georgia to put forward an alternate slate of electors even though Biden had won there.
Trump spoke with his supporters during a rally in the hours leading up to the mob taking over the U.S. Capitol. In his speech, he told the thousands present, "we must stop the steal."
As part of Trump's defense in the case, he argued he's immune from federal prosecution related to acts as president. The trial had a March 4 start date, but that was delayed so that the U.S. Supreme Court could consider Trump's claims of presidential immunity. The court ruled that a former president has absolute immunity for his core constitutional powers and is entitled to a presumption of immunity for his official acts — but lacks immunity for unofficial acts. Trial Judge Tanya Chutkan will consider which, if any, of Trump's actions were part of his official duties.
In August, Smith filed a superseding indictment that says it “reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions." As NPR's Carrie Johnson writes, anything Judge Chutkan does will be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court again, so there’s no chance for a trial before November — and maybe not even in 2025.
Federal classified documents case
Status: Dismissed but appealed to the 11th Circuit
Number of charges: 40
Case background: Trump has pleaded not guilty to allegedly storing dozens of top-secret government documents at his Florida resort and then refusing to hand them over to the FBI and the National Archives.
Federal prosecutors allege Trump had a direct hand in packing classified documents when he left the White House in 2021, that he then bragged about having these secret materials and pushed his own attorney to mislead federal law enforcement about what kind of documents he had in his resort.
The trial was set to begin on May 20 but was postponed indefinitely by the judge, Aileen Cannon, on May 7. Attorneys with special counsel Jack Smith's office have urged Cannon to not delay the trial beyond July. Trump's legal team wants the trial to start after the presidential election.
Two months after postponing the case, Cannon dismissed it over the manner in which Smith was appointed.
“The Superseding Indictment is DISMISSED because Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution,” wrote Judge Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by the former president.
Smith had contested this argument, and other federal courts had upheld the constitutionality of special counsels.
“None of the statutes cited as legal authority for the appointment…gives the Attorney General broad inferior-officer appointing power or bestows upon him the right to appoint a federal officer with the kind of prosecutorial power wielded by Special Counsel Smith," Cannon wrote. "Nor do the Special Counsel’s strained statutory arguments, appeals to inconsistent history, or reliance on out-of-circuit authority persuade otherwise.”
Smith has appealed the case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
Trump applauded the dismissal and called for all other cases against him to also be dropped, including the criminal charges related to efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Georgia 2020 election interference case
Status: In process
Number of charges: 8
Case background: In August 2023, Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted for attempting to overturn the 2020 election results in the state.
The criminal investigation in Fulton County, Ga., which is home to Atlanta, was started by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis after the publication of a phone call in January 2021. In it, Trump is heard pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough ballots in support of Trump to flip the state to him. Raffensperger refused.
Trump has denied wrongdoing and still baselessly maintains there was large-scale voter fraud in Georgia during the 2020 presidential election.
Four of the 19 defendants have since pleaded guilty and agreed to testify.
Willis used the state's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act — a statute normally used for mob bosses and gangs — arguing the collective effort to meddle in the election was part of a criminal enterprise.
Court documents list a series of acts allegedly made by Trump and his co-defendants in their efforts to change election results — including harassing an election worker and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to appoint new electors favorable to Trump.
Trump and other codefendants are attempting to have the case dismissed after Willis admitted to a personal relationship with a lead prosecutor on the investigation. Willis accepted that prosecutor's resignation in mid-March after the judge made his stepping aside a condition of allowing her to remain on the case. The Georgia Court of Appeals will review that decision.
The judge in the case, Fulton Superior Judge Scott McAfee, has twice dismissed charges in the original indictment, bringing the count from 13 to 8 felony charges against Trump. Most recently, he quashed charges related to filing false documents to a federal court. As Sam Gringlas reports, in a separate ruling, McAfee upheld the bedrock charge in the indictment — racketeering.
14th Amendment cases
These cases focus on a Civil War-era constitutional clause that activists and legal scholars have said should disqualify Trump from holding office again.
They argue Trump violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from office anyone who "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against the United States, on Jan. 6, 2021. Colorado and then other states removed Trump from primary ballots for this reason, decisions the former president challenged.
The Supreme Court on March 4 unanimously agreed to restore Trump on the Colorado primary ballot, ruling that states lack authority to remove candidates for federal office. The justices wrote that the "Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates."
Trump's recent civil lawsuits
Since the start of 2024, civil lawsuits involving Trump have resulted in rulings ordering him to pay more than $430 million:
New York AG Letitia James' suit against Trump for alleged fraud
Ruling: A New York judge on Feb. 16 ordered Trump and his flagship organization to $355 million in a civil fraud case.
The ruling hands a win to New York Attorney General Letitia James, who sued Trump and his associates after a three-year investigation. The case accused them of knowingly committing fraud by submitting statements of financial condition that inflated the value of their properties and other assets.
Not long after the trial started, the judge in the case ordered that Trump, his eldest sons and his business associates had committed fraud. Trump's legal team argued that Trump and his associates had nothing to do with the creation of the fraudulent statement condition and, regardless, there is no victim. Trump has called the case, without evidence, politically motivated.
E. Jean Carroll case
A New York jury ordered Trump to pay a total of $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for ruining her credibility as an advice columnist.
In 2019, Carroll first publicly came forward saying Trump had raped her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s when Trump was known as just a businessman. The accusation, which was detailed in her book, was first previewed in a New York magazine article. After the article's publication, Trump issued two statements in response to reporters, including one in which he outright denied her claim and said she was "not my type."
Carroll then sued Trump for defamation, arguing that his comments ruined her reputation as a trusted source in the media, and resulted in a slew of insults and threatening messages, emails and comments to her social media accounts.
This is the second time Trump has been ordered pay Carroll; last year he was mandated by a jury to pay $5 million for a separate instance of defamation. Trump wants that verdict overturned, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals held a hearing on Trump's appeal on Sept. 6.
Copyright 2023 NPR
