Millions Dollars

Sunday, April 16, 2023

POLITICS Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reportedly has been claiming thousands of dollars annually from a shuttered real estate firm


Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reported on financial disclosure forms that his family has earned thousands of dollars in rental income from a Nebraska real estate firm that has been shuttered since 2006, according to a report by the Washington Post Sunday.

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Thomas has reported income from a firm called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership over the last two decades, but in 2006 it was shut down and replaced by a new firm, the report said. The new firm, Ginger Holdings, LLC, is similarly named, but there is no mention of it in Thomas' records.

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In recent years, Thomas reportedly continued to disclose between $50,000 and $100,000 in income from the old firm annually.

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Even if the misstatement can be reduced to a paperwork error, it marks the latest question around the justice's financial practices after a recent ProPublica report revealed Thomas has accepted secret luxury trips from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow for more than two decades in apparent violation of a financial disclosure law.

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Thomas, the 74-year-old conservative associate justice who has served on the nation's highest court since 1991, has not reported the trips on his financial disclosures as required by law, the nonprofit newsroom reported. ProPublica later reported that Crow bought property from Thomas as well, which the justice also failed to disclose.

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The investigation offers more fuel for Thomas' critics, who say his refusal to recuse himself from cases touching on issues related to his wife's political work in conservative circles — including her involvement in schemes to overturn the 2020 election — poses a conflict of interest.

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The Senate Judiciary Committee's Democratic majority on Monday called for an investigation into Thomas' behavior. Chief Justice John Roberts should "immediately open" a probe into "how such conduct could take place" on his watch, read a letter from Chairman Dick Durbin of Illinois and the Senate Judiciary panel's 10 other Democratic members.

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The committee announced in the letter that it would hold a hearing "in the coming days" on "the need to restore confidence in the Supreme Court's ethical standards."

See Also: MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson claimed that when people think of Florida, they mostly think of "crystal meth and alligators."

Thursday, April 13, 2023

Trump’s GOP rivals try to grab media coverage, but he dominates with Fox interview

Nikki Haley's presidential campaign has raised more than $11M in the first six weeks since announcing her candidacy


Nikki Haley ranks high on the list of Republicans who don't want to directly criticize Donald Trump. 

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In fact, she deflects every question about the front-runner and insists only the media are asking her about this.

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But she came up with a not-so-subtle method of taking a few swipes at her rivals. It's called the confidential memo. And I can't exactly say it has no fingerprints.

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The Haley campaign simply leaked the memo to Axios – which touted it as a scoop. An Axios reporter confirmed it came from the campaign (duh). And a leaked memo is sexier to journalists than, say, a sitdown interview.

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Haley has raised $11 million in six weeks, and the memo from campaign manager Betsy Ankney says: "Donald Trump had a pretty good Q1, if you count being indicted as 'good.'"

Zing!

See Also: MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson claimed that when people think of Florida, they mostly think of "crystal meth and alligators."

"Still, it's increasingly clear that Trump's candidacy is more consumed by the grievances of the past and the promise of more drama in the future, rather than a forward-looking vision for the American people." Perfectly fair shots – but why couldn't Haley say these things herself? Who is she fooling? Perhaps she thinks she's avoiding a Trump counterattack by laundering it through the press. The memo also says of Ron DeSantis that he's "not ready for prime time."

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Still, the memo didn't make much news, not in this environment. Sen. Tim Scott announced a presidential exploratory committee yesterday. Which means he's running. \

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The Senate's only black Republican is an attractive candidate with a compelling life story, which he summarizes as "from cotton to Congress." 


In a video, Scott stressed his optimistic message: "I know America is a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. I know it because I lived it." But given the nature of today's GOP, Scott has to be regarded as a long shot. And as more Republicans jump in, they increase the chances of Trump cruising to the nomination as they divide the opposition vote.

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Both Haley and Scott got a sliver of the coverage that Trump attracted, not surprisingly, by sitting down with Fox's Tucker Carlson.

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The former president was full of provocative responses, such as saying he'll stay in the race even if he's convicted in the Stormy Daniels case. When he was brought in for the arraignment, "They were actually crying. They said 'I'm sorry.' They'd say '2024, sir, 2024.' And tears are pouring down their eyes." 

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Will Joe Biden stay in the race?

"Look, I watch him just like you do, and I think it's almost inappropriate for me to say it. But I deal with other people. I don't see – I don't see how it's possible.

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And it's not an age thing."

Then what is it? 

Trump delivered his standard riff about the president being surrounded by "smart" but "vicious" left-wingers, as if Biden isn't really in charge.

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In a particularly strange series of exchanges, Trump said Biden "is not top of the line" and then proceeded to praise dictators around the globe.

Vladimir Putin? "Very smart," said Trump, despite the fact that he has decimated his military and committed countless war crimes by invading Ukraine.

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"People ask me, how smart is Xi? I say, top of the line. You've never met anybody smarter. How smart is Kim Jong-un? Top of the line."

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But was Kim, who inherited his job, smart enough to make a nuclear deal with Trump? No.

See Also: MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson claimed that when people think of Florida, they mostly think of "crystal meth and alligators."

Whether you agree or disagree with Trump's comments, they're all designed to generate buzz and be replayed (and even denounced) on television. That leaves those with leaked memos and exploratory groups in the shadows, and it leaves the indicted former president even more of a front-runner than he was a week ago.

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Tuesday, April 11, 2023

Christina Hammock Koch Will Become The First Woman On The Moon


/NASA has named four astronauts as the first people who will fly around the moon in over 50 years, leading a pivotal spaceflight before humans return to the lunar surface.

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U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Victor Glover, and G. Reid Wiseman will ride in the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II mission, expected to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, as early as November 2024. Joining them will be astronaut Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.

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The 32-story mega moon rocket — the most powerful in the world — will shoot them into the sky with 8.8 million pounds of thrust, a force equal to that of 160,000 Corvette engines. Not since the final Apollo flight in 1972 have astronauts made this journey.

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Though women have trained and tested alongside men since the early 1960s, this mission marks the first time in history any woman will have traveled into deep space, hundreds of thousands of miles beyond the low-Earth orbiting International Space Station. For years, NASA simply said female applicants did not meet the stringent requirements for crew assignments. Now in 2023, the agency freely admits this day has been a long time coming.

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"You have already been in the history books as a record-setting astronaut. You're a trailblazer and a role model for every generation to come," said Joe Acaba, NASA's chief of astronauts, of Koch, who will be the first woman to travel into deep space. "And as the only professional engineer in the crew, I know who mission control will be calling on when it's time to fix something on board."

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced the Artemis 2 crew: mission specialist Christina Hammock Koch, pilot Victor Glover, mission commander G. Reid Wiseman, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.

Artemis II will break another barrier by including the first person of color on a space mission beyond low-Earth orbit, pilot Victor Glover. NASA officials say the diverse crew assignments signify the immense cultural shifts that have taken place within the agency since the dawn of the program decades ago, when white men dominated human space exploration and aeronautics.

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"All four astronauts will represent the best of humanity as they explore for the benefit of all," said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA Johnson Space Center, in a statement.

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Artemis II purpose

The mission is expected to serve as a crucial stress test of Orion's life-support systems, the new passenger spacecraft NASA hopes will shuttle astronauts to the moon to carry out its long-term ambitions: establishing a permanent lunar base for research. The agency intends to use the moon as a testbed for a future mission to Mars, over 130 million miles in the distance. The crew selections were announced Monday morning from NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA announced crew selections for Artemis II on Monday morning from NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"The commitment to go to the moon should be seen in the context of going to Mars," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's former associate administrator for science, told Mashable last year. "That is perhaps one of the hardest things we'll have ever done as humans, in terms of technology, in terms of objectives. It's harder than going to the moon, it's harder than the Apollo program. And the way we're doing it is very different. We're doing it as a world, not as a country."

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"The way we're doing it is very different. We're doing it as a world, not as a country."

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That vision, a future in which people can travel to and survive on Mars, means NASA needs practice and can't do it single-handedly. By the time the agency is ready to send the first astronauts to walk on the moon as early as 2025, for example, it will have spent about US$93 billion on the project, according to a federal watchdog. To become multiplanetary requires a host of other spacefaring nations and commercial partners to bear the costs.

Artemis II will be the first mission to send a woman or person of color into deep space.

NASA has been getting buy-in on its plans from other nations through the Artemis Accords, an international agreement establishing standards for safe and collaborative space exploration. Agency officials say this mission, which includes a Canadian astronaut, demonstrates their commitment to international partnerships through the Artemis program.

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"It is not lost on any of us that the United States can choose to go back to the moon by themselves," Hansen said. "But America has made a very deliberate choice over decades to curate a global team, and that, in my definition, is true leadership."

Artemis 2 mission

Artemis II will send four astronauts on a journey around the moon as a crucial flight test before returning to the lunar surface for Artemis III.

Over 10 days, the Artemis II astronauts will make two oval-shaped loops around Earth before flying around the moon. A Houston team will control most of the flight, but for the second Earth orbit, the astronauts will take charge of piloting a maneuver. That step will test Orion's capabilities for docking and undocking — necessary during the next Artemis III mission.

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For the duration of the flight, NASA will observe how the spacecraft handles the air supply, removing carbon dioxide and water vapor as the astronauts breathe, especially during periods when they exercise.

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Orion will make a single lunar flyby during the mission, putting the astronauts on a path that will use Earth's gravity to reel them back home.

Test dummy Cmmdr. Moonikin Campos sits in the pilot seat during the Artemis I mission.

This second mission follows the completion of the inaugural Artemis spaceflight last December. NASA launched the empty Orion spacecraft with its mega moon rocket on Nov. 16, 2022. It flew a 1.4 million-mile journey, testing various orbits that had never been previously attempted.

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After 25.5 days, the spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and was recovered. Three months later, after reviewing flight data, the U.S. space agency called the mission a success.

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But since its return, NASA's post-flight analysis has found the rocket's platform and spacecraft suffered excess damage during the launch and reentry into Earth's atmosphere, respectively. Teams are particularly concerned about the overly charred heat shield that protects Orion as it zooms 24,500 mph in 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit on its way back. The team has not determined yet whether the material needs to be redesigned.

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"With Artemis I, we set out to prove that the hardware was ready," Acaba said. "Artemis II will leverage that by putting humans in the loop, executing operations in the critical path, leading to new footprints on the lunar surface."

Woman at the Heart of Infamous Malaysian ‘Basikal Lajak’ Court Case Acquitted



Malaysia's Court of Appeal has reached a unanimous decision to acquit Sam Ke Ting in the infamous and drawn-out "Basikal Lajak" court case that began in 2017.

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On April 13, 2022, local clerk Sam was found guilty of causing the death of eight young cyclists along a stretch of a dimly-lit road in Johor Bahru at 3.20 a.m. on February 18, 2017, and was handed a six-year prison term alongside an RM6,000 (US$1,358) fine.

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After an investigation by the police, it was found that Sam had not been speeding and was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Also, the eight deaths had arisen after a large group of youths had been riding modified bicycles along the poorly-lit and winding road that Sam had been using when she collided into them.

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While many observers had deemed Sam's sentence unfair due to the nature of the calamity — something many consider to be a freak accident, she was nevertheless deemed guilty despite initially being freed from a reckless driving charge by the magistrate's court in 2019.

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However, the latest ruling by the court of appeal has seen Sam receive an acquittal, with her conviction under Section 41(1) of the Road Transport Act 1987 being set aside by a three-judge panel led by Justice Hadhariah Syed Ismail. All three judges agreed that the charge held against Sam was defective.

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Thursday, April 6, 2023

Whitmer strikes 1931 abortion ban from Michigan law


A near-century old abortion ban that fueled one of the largest ballot drives in Michigan history was repealed Wednesday by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, just months after voters enshrined abortion rights in the state's constitution.

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"Today, we're going to take action to make sure that our statutes and our laws reflect our values and our constitution," Whitmer said at a bill signing outside of Detroit.

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The 1931 abortion ban made it a four-year felony to assist in an abortion. Roe v. Wade had made the law null and void until the landmark decision was overturned in June by the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Courts blocked the ban from taking effect while a citizen-led initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state's constitution received more signatures than any other ballot proposal in state history to put the question before voters. Voters overwhelmingly approved the proposal in last November's midterms, making the 1931 law unconstitutional and unenforceable.

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The 1931 ban could have been enforced in the future had voters collected enough signatures to once again amend the state constitution and repeal abortion rights. Whitmer's signature Wednesday eliminated that possibility, erasing the law completely.

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"We cannot allow archaic laws to remain on our books under the assumption that they'll never be used again," said Democratic state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky. "We don't know what the future will hold and we don't know what plans abortion opponents have."

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Last month, the Michigan House and Senate — each with a two-seat Democratic majority — voted to send a repeal of the abortion ban to the governor. A majority of Republicans opposed the bill, speaking out ahead of the vote on the legality of abortion as a whole.

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Pohutsky, who sponsored the legislation repealing the law, said at the event Wednesday that "this is far from the end of the story," and that the Democratic-controlled Statehouse will continue expanding access to reproductive health care.

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Wednesday's signing marked another victory for abortion rights supporters in Michigan, who joined California and Vermont last November in enshrining abortion rights in their state's constitution. Kentucky, a reliably red state, rejected a ballot measure aimed at denying any state constitutional protections for abortion.

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Voters in Wisconsin elected a Democratic-backed Milwaukee judge Tuesday to the state's Supreme Court, ensuring liberals will take over majority control of the court with the fate of the state's abortion ban on the line.

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"Who would have thought two years ago, three years ago, five years ago, that we would be as Democrats looking to Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, Montana and Kentucky to be on the frontline of protecting reproductive freedom for women across this country," said Laphonza Butler, the president of EMILYs List.

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Whitmer joined other speakers at the event in Birmingham in calling out Republican-led states for restricting abortion rights, saying laws in Texas and South Carolina were "un-American, anti-free and, frankly, sickening."

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has pushed for a six-week ban in his state, is scheduled to appear in Michigan on Thursday to speak at a Midland County GOP event before heading to southern Michigan to speak at Hillsdale College.

Judge orders Stormy Daniels to pay Donald Trump another $120,000 in legal fees



As Donald Trump was in New York for a date with legal jeopardy, a judge in Los Angeles quietly granted him a substantial legal victory.

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The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the former president on Tuesday, ordering adult film star Stormy Daniels to pay $121,972 in legal fees for a failed defamation suit.

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The ruling is not legally connected with the Manhattan district attorney's investigation that led Trump to be charged with 34 felony counts on Tuesday. But it does stem from the same event: Daniels claims she had an affair with Trump in 2006, then was paid by Trump's legal team to avoid going public with the story ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

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Trump denies the affair but has since admitted he reimbursed his then-attorney Michael Cohen for the hush money payments.

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Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Cliffords, tried to sue Trump for defamation in 2018, specifically taking aim at a tweet attacking her account of being threatened by a stranger in 2011 to stay quiet on her Trump story. Trump attacked the account as a "con job, playing the Fake News Media."

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Federal Judge S. James Otero dismissed the lawsuit, saying Trump's tweet constitutes " 'rhetorical hyperbole' normally associated with politics and public discourse" and is protected by the First Amendment.

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Daniels tried to appeal the decision in 2022, saying her then-attorney Michael Avenatti filed the defamation suit "without my permission and against my wishes." But a judge ruled against her, leaving her on the hook for nearly $300,000 in Trump's legal fees.

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Daniels subsequently filed a motion to knock down the fee payment. On Tuesday, the court dismissed in part her latest request, which only increased the bill she has to pay.

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Daniels argued that the fee request was "unreasonable and excessive," saying the law group had overstaffed the appeal and performed duplicative tasks, and asked for fees to be reduced, court documents show.

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She specifically asked the judge to cap the law firm's rates at $500/hourly for partners and $350/hourly for associates — a request the appeals commissioner denied on account of "inflation and increase in the attorneys' experience."

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The court denied a secondary request for Daniels to reimburse Trump $5,150 for time responding to the most recent appeal, saying the request lacked itemized detail about the law firm's billing.

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"Collectively, our firm obtained over $600,000 in attorney fee awards in his favor in the meritless litigation initiated by Stormy Daniels," said Trump attorney Harmeet Dhillion in a tweet celebrating the legal victory.

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After the appeals court ruled against her last year, Daniels tweeted: "I will go to jail before I pay a penny."

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

How Alvin Bragg Resurrected the Case Against Donald Trump

A year ago, the investigation into the former president appeared from the outside to be over. But a series of crucial turning points led to this week's indictment.


One year ago this week, the Manhattan district attorney's investigation into Donald J. Trump appeared to be dead in the water.

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The two leaders of the investigation had recently resigned after the new district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, decided not to charge Mr. Trump at that point. Amid a fierce backlash to his decision — and a brutal start to his tenure — Mr. Bragg insisted that the investigation was not over. But a disbelieving media questioned why, if the effort was still moving forward, there were so few signs of it.

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"Unless y'all are great poker players," Mr. Bragg told The New York Times in an early April 2022 interview, "you don't know what we're doing."

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What they were doing, new interviews show, was going back to square one, poring over the reams of evidence that had already been collected by his predecessor.

For a time, their efforts were haphazard as they examined a wide range of Mr. Trump's business practices, including whether he had lied about his net worth, which was the focus of the investigation when Mr. Bragg had declined to seek an indictment. But by July, Mr. Bragg had decided to assign several additional prosecutors to pursue one particular strand that struck him as promising: a hush-money payment made on Mr. Trump's behalf to a porn star during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

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On Thursday, Mr. Trump was indicted on that strand. He is expected to surrender to the authorities in Manhattan on Tuesday and face arraignment on more than two dozen charges, which will be unveiled at that time.

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This account of Mr. Bragg's decision to revive the investigation and point it toward the hush-money arrangement, based on interviews with about a dozen people familiar with the matter, reveals the circuitous and sometimes uncertain road that led to the first criminal charges against a former American president.

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Along the way, a key internal skeptic of the investigation became one of its champions; Mr. Bragg shook up the Trump team and hired an experienced lawyer away from the Justice Department to help lead it; and he ultimately found new promise in a key witness he had once disregarded as unreliable. The district attorney was also emboldened late last year when his prosecutors won a conviction of Mr. Trump's company in an unrelated tax case.

Last April, Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, had a chance to move on from the ex-president and turn his tenure toward his initial motivation in running for office: reshaping the criminal justice system in Manhattan. Now, his willingness to wager his political future on the case against Mr. Trump will be tested like never before — his success, or failure, is inextricably tied to the former president.

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Winning an indictment is one thing. Winning a conviction of Mr. Trump will be far more difficult.

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The decision to revisit the case despite his earlier reservations has opened Mr. Bragg to criticism from the former president's supporters that he is blindly pursuing Mr. Trump.

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The case has also exposed the district attorney to a wave of hostile and racist rhetoric from the former president and his supporters. Mr. Bragg, a career prosecutor, has received vivid death threats, including one that was mailed to the office last week.

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In a statement on Thursday, after the indictment was reported, Mr. Trump called the case a "political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history," adding that Mr. Bragg was "a disgrace" and calling himself "a completely innocent person."

Shortly after Mr. Bragg took office in January 2022, he received a warning.

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At the time, he was grappling with the potential case centered on Mr. Trump's net worth, which two senior prosecutors, Mark F. Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, were presenting to a grand jury.

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The warning came in the form of memos about that investigation, one of which was delivered to Mr. Bragg's aides by a career prosecutor, Chris Conroy. The memos highlighted potential gaps in the evidence, and darkened the new district attorney's view of the case he had just inherited.

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Mr. Bragg also developed concerns about relying on Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump's former fixer, questioning whether he had enough knowledge about the intricacies of Mr. Trump's financial records to be a pivotal witness.

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In a series of meetings early last year, Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne tried to persuade Mr. Bragg that the case, which had been developed under Mr. Bragg's predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., was solid. Mr. Bragg and his aides remained unconvinced, and soon after the district attorney decided to halt the grand jury presentation, Mr. Pomerantz and Mr. Dunne resigned.

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Mr. Cohen, who had met extensively with Mr. Pomerantz, was furious, and demanded that prosecutors return documents that he had provided. (They did.)

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It seemed as if Mr. Bragg's decision could carry historic consequences: a brand-new district attorney had just given up a chance to charge Mr. Trump criminally. The political backlash was heated — Mr. Trump is widely loathed in Manhattan — and it was only compounded when a copy of Mr. Pomerantz's resignation letter was published in The Times: He declared that Mr. Trump had committed multiple felonies.

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Mr. Bragg said the investigation was continuing, but the team was running low on prosecutors. Shortly before he took over the office, three prosecutors who were concerned about the inquiry's pace had taken on other assignments, leaving the team threadbare. And four months into Mr. Bragg's tenure, Solomon Shinerock, who had been the lead assistant district attorney on the case for years, stepped back from the investigation into Mr. Trump.

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Mr. Bragg and two of his office's leaders — the head of investigations, Susan Hoffinger, and another top aide, Peter Pope — began to steep themselves in the details of the inquiry. But the team was not yet clear on a game plan. They issued a smattering of subpoenas and questioned some witnesses but did not appear to gain much traction.

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They were also digging into binders that contained the numerous files gathered over the years, files that Mr. Bragg had not yet had time to review in depth.

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The research laid the groundwork for a more robust investigation. The remaining members of the team split up into small groups to focus on different topics, including the financial statements and the eye-catching payoff that was the original impetus for Mr. Vance to open an investigation into Mr. Trump in 2018: the hush-money deal.

Building a case around the sordid episode involving the porn star, Stormy Daniels, was hardly a new idea. Mr. Vance's prosecutors had considered the hush-money payment for so long that some of them began to call it the "zombie case," because it kept coming back to life. Although Mr. Vance had pivoted to focusing on the former president's net worth, he never closed the hush-money inquiry.

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There was a key difference between Mr. Bragg's briefings on the net worth case and digging into the hush-money: time. The new district attorney had only weeks to consider the net worth case before it would have been time to seek a vote from the grand jury, whose term was scheduled to expire in late April 2022.

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Kim Foxx, the state's attorney in Cook County, Ill., who is friendly with Mr. Bragg, said that prosecutors running for office are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to the cases they inherit.

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"You don't have the facts, you don't have the months or years worth of investigation that are there," she said.

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But going through evidence, Mr. Bragg warmed to the idea of charging Mr. Trump for his role in the hush-money payment. Unlike the net worth case, Mr. Cohen was directly involved: He had made the $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels, for which Mr. Trump reimbursed him. If the sequence of events that led to the payment were to be illustrated, the former fixer would be the line connecting all the dots.

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Ms. Hoffinger contacted Mr. Cohen's lawyer, Lanny J. Davis, to reassure him that the investigation into Mr. Trump was very much alive. Mr. Cohen, she suggested, might still become a valuable witness.

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In July, Mr. Bragg built up the Trump team, a sign of his growing confidence. Catherine McCaw, who had garnered attention for her role in the prosecution of Anna Sorokin, the con woman better known as Anna Delvey, joined. So did Rebecca Mangold and Katherine Ellis, prosecutors in the office's Major Economic Crimes Bureau.

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At the time, prosecutors in the district attorney's office were preparing for another Trump-related trial: Before Mr. Vance left office, he had charged the former president's company and a senior executive, Allen H. Weisselberg, with orchestrating a yearslong tax fraud scheme. In August 2022, Mr. Weisselberg pleaded guilty, but the Trump Organization refused a plea, setting the stage for the highest-profile trial of the district attorney's tenure.

Mr. Bragg later said he began to think of the two matters as chapters in a book: First would come the Trump Organization's trial. Then the investigation into Mr. Trump could progress.

For the trial, which began on Halloween, Ms. Hoffinger teamed up with Joshua Steinglass, an experienced trial lawyer who specializes in homicide cases. It was part of the district attorney's philosophy: pairing lawyers with different skills on a single team.

While Ms. Hoffinger and Mr. Steinglass were focused on the trial, Mr. Conroy and Mr. Pope continued to examine the legal theories underpinning the hush-money case. A chief skeptic of the previous Trump investigation, Mr. Conroy was pushing the hush-money one forward.

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During that period, Mr. Bragg and his deputies indicated to associates and outside supporters that he was newly optimistic about building a case against Mr. Trump, The Times reported in November. Shortly before the jurors in the Trump Organization trial began to deliberate, the office announced that it had hired Matthew Colangelo, a former senior Justice Department official who had experience building a civil case against Mr. Trump and who came to be one of the leaders of the Manhattan investigation.

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The day after Mr. Colangelo's hiring was announced, the jury returned its verdict: Mr. Trump's company was guilty, and Mr. Bragg had won a significant victory.

In interviews after the win, Mr. Bragg took his "chapter" analogy public. And when asked about the case against Mr. Trump himself, he told reporters that he had "been cautioning people not to read ahead in the book."

For Mr. Bragg, the new year began by impaneling a grand jury to hear evidence in the hush-money case. For some of his prosecutors, it began with a peace summit with Mr. Cohen.

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At a meeting in their office in Lower Manhattan — the same building where the new grand jury would soon start to meet — the prosecutors told him they wanted to start fresh, and Mr. Cohen was amenable.

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"I went in to 80 Centre St. skeptical and guarded," Mr. Cohen said in an interview with The Times, referring to the building where the Major Economic Crimes Bureau is. "After a three-hour initial meeting, I left reassured and confident in the team. They were knowledgeable, articulate and professional in a way that made me as comfortable as I was with the previous Pomerantz and Dunne team."

It was the first of at least seven visits Mr. Cohen made to the office this year. In the ensuing meetings, prosecutors grilled him about granular aspects of the hush-money episode. He provided them with documents and his phone.

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While evaluating Mr. Cohen's evidence, the prosecutors began presenting evidence to the grand jury. The first witness was David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker Mr. Cohen's payout to Ms. Daniels. Mr. Pecker was followed by Ms. Daniels's lawyer and some of Mr. Trump's employees and campaign aides, most prominently Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks. The process culminated in Mr. Cohen testifying before the panel for more than two days in March.

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By then, the parade of witnesses had begun to draw a media crowd outside 80 Centre. The fervor grew when The Times reported that Mr. Bragg had signaled to Mr. Trump's legal team that he was poised to seek an indictment. And when Mr. Trump prematurely predicted his own arrest two weeks ago, the blocks near the courthouse took on a circuslike atmosphere.

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At one point, as court officials were preparing to escort a witness into the grand jury, there was a traffic accident outside the courthouse involving a truck that was packing up from filming a scene of the sequel to the film "Joker" nearby.

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All week, no indictment had emerged. But on Thursday afternoon, Chris Conroy, the formerly skeptical prosecutor, walked into 80 Centre Street. In his arms was a copy of the New York State penal law, marked up with sticky notes, to instruct the grand jurors on the law before they took the vote that indicted the former president.

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Three hours later, Mr. Conroy, Ms. McCaw and the warden of the grand jury left 80 Centre and crossed the street to the building where indictments are filed. Reaching the clerk's office through a back entrance, they submitted the paperwork two minutes before the office closed for the day.