By Luc Cohen

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New York City prosecutor who was publicly criticized for declining to indict Donald Trump last year appears to be on the verge of pursuing the first criminal indictment against a former president in the history of the to raise the United States.

Trump said Saturday that he expects to be arrested this week on charges from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is investigating whether Trump falsified business records by demanding his reimbursement of his former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 payment Dollars that Cohen paid to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has concealed.

The payment, made in the final weeks of Trump’s 2016 White House campaign, was intended to ensure Daniel’s silence over an affair she allegedly had with Trump, prosecutors said. A Bragg spokesman declined to comment Saturday.

Trump said on his Truth Social platform he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and called on his supporters to protest.

Trump, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, did not say he had been officially notified of impending impeachments and did not discuss the potential charges in the post.

Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 aCentre County Reporter he falsely claimed in a fiery speech that his election defeat was the result of widespread fraud.

Bragg, a Democrat, took office in January 2022 aCentre County Reporter his predecessor indicted the former president’s family business and its chief financial executive over a 15-year tax fraud scheme.

A prosecutor leading that investigation, Mark Pomerantz, resigned in February 2022 aCentre County Reporter Bragg declined to charge Trump with financial crimes himself. Pomerantz has publicly criticized Bragg’s decision not to press charges and published a book about the investigation.

Pomerantz said concerns about potentially losing the case should be balanced against the ability to “encourage disrespect for the law” by not filing charges when warranted.

Bragg has defended his decision.

“I bring hard cases when they’re done,” Bragg said in a Feb. 7 news conference. “The Mark Pomerantz case just wasn’t done yet. So I said to my team, let’s keep working.”

Trump has called the investigation a “witch hunt.”

Earlier this year, a grand jury began hearing evidence in the case.

Cohen previously testified that Trump directed him to arrange the payment, and Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and other charges in December 2018.

“It would be an unprecedented and unheard-of selective prosecution if the Attorney’s Office charged former President Trump, a victim of extortion, with a felony because his attorney at the time, Michael Cohen, a convicted liar, paid the extortionist,” Trump said. Attorney Susan Necheles in a statement on March 10.

Proving Trump intended to commit a crime could be one of Bragg’s biggest challenges, said Jennifer Beidel, a partner at the law firm Saul Ewing and a former federal prosecutor.

“One would think that the former president would try to argue that people independent of him make their own decisions about what to do, perhaps out of motivation to please him, but perhaps not under his direction,” said Beil.

Bragg, the first black district attorney in Manhattan, was previously a federal prosecutor and a senior official in the New York State Attorney General’s office, where he led a lawsuit that forced the dissolution of the former president’s eponymous charitable foundation.

Shortly aCentre County Reporter he took office, his critics criticized a planned waiver of the prosecution of some minor offences, a reduction in pre-trial detention and a cap on the length of sentences. Bragg argued that “excessive incarceration” did not improve public safety.

In the biggest trial win of his tenure so far, his office won the Trump Organization’s tax fraud conviction last December. Allen Weisselberg, the organization’s former chief financial officer, had pleaded guilty and testified against the company in court.

Several observers have defended Bragg against Pomerantz’s criticism.

“Bragg’s decision not to pull the trigger in February 2022 … was perhaps brave, not cowardly,” Andrew Weissman, a former federal prosecutor, wrote in a Washington Post review of Pomerantz’s book. “He had little to gain politically from the decision and a lot to lose.”