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- Trump on Saturday lashed out at the Manhattan DA’s office about a looming ‘hush-money’ indictment.
- He said on Truth Social he “will be arrested on Tuesday” and urged “protest.”
- A Trump attorney says no date has been set, and that the DA has kept the defense in the dark.
In a vitriol-laced Truth Social post early Saturday, Donald Trump said he expects to turn himself in on Tuesday in the Manhattan district attorney’s hush-money case — a date his own lead defense attorney could not confirm.
Lead defense attorney Susan Necheles said the Trump defense team had received no information from the DA’s office that Trump would be “arrested” — his word — on Tuesday or on any other specific day, though she was careful not to directly contradict her clients’ Truth Social post.
“President Trump is basing this on press reports,” Necheles told Insider of the Tuesday date.
“This is a political prosecution and the DA leaks things to the press instead of communicating to the lawyers as they should,” Necheles said.
Necheles did not specify which “press report” Trump might be looking at. There has been no reporting of a specific date for Trump to surrender to Manhattan authorities.
She could not confirm if Trump was referring to a Fox News report from Friday. The report said that the district attorney’s office ‘asked for a meeting’ Monday with law enforcement, in order to plan for his possible first appearance on the charges.
Necheles said that the DA’s office has recently been out of touch with the defense, and that this has allowed rumors and “tea leaves” to steer the perception of what is happening in the case.
“We’re all reading tea leaves because they refuse to communicate,” she told Insider. “It’s been over a week and I haven’t gotten any information from them, which is not normal,” she said.
“In normal, run-of-the-mill cases, they’ll be talking to us about what date they expect to turn in an indictment. They’ll be saying ‘we’ll let you know,'” she added. “That’s the normal conversation you would have with prosecutors.”
In his Truth Social post, Trump derided the prosecution as based upon a “fairy tale” and urged “protests.”
Trump cited “illegal leaks from a corrupt & highly political Manhattan District Attorney’s office” as the source for his belief that “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!” concluded the former president’s post, which was written in all capital letters.
A spokesperson for the DA’s office declined to comment.
Speculation has been growing for weeks about the prospect of a Trump indictment. The Manhattan district attorney’s office has been investigating Trump in connection to an illegal $130,000 hush-money payment made to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
The Manhattan grand jury has been hearing witness testimony since mid-January, including on Monday and Wednesday from Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen, a star witness in the prosecution’s case.
But there are no credible accounts to emerge publicly that the grand jury has voted to indict Trump or anyone else, a necessary first step that would then lead the DA to contact Trump’s attorneys and negotiate his surrender and arraignment.
This breaking story has been updated to include additional comment from Trump’s attorney, and to add detail from Saturday morning’s Truth Social post.
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