The New York Police Department is bracing for potentially violent unrest in the event that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg follows through with the rumored indictment and arrest of former President Donald Trump. It would be the first time in history that a former president of the United States would be arrested after leaving office.
What Could Happen if Trump Is Arrested
Police began deploying steel barriers around the Manhattan Criminal Court on Monday in anticipation of protests.
The New York Young Republican Club announced over the weekend its intent to hold a peaceful protest on Tuesday, the date the former president claimed on Saturday that he would be arrested, at an undisclosed location in Lower Manhattan.
Conservative pundits spent the weekend urging peaceful protest, but the NYPD is not taking any chances.
“We’ll handle it like we do anything else,” NYPD Chief Kevin Maloney told The New York 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.”
Maloney noted that the NYPD’s intelligence unit would keep in contact with the courthouse.
“We’ll have an advanced heads-up, I’m sure, on the timing of this whole thing,” he added. “We’ll make sure that the entrance and exits to the courthouse are secure and if the protesters are there, we’ll support their rights to peacefully protest. If they’re not there, even better.”
Bragg has not given any confirmation yet as to his plans with regard to Trump. Republican politicians meanwhile are circling around the former president with rhetorical protests.
Trump’s potential rival for the GOP nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, commented Monday about the rumored indictment and arrest of the former president in connection with the $130,000 he allegedly paid porn star Stormy Daniels.
“I don’t know any facts yet, but I do know this. The Manhattan District Attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor, and so he like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety,” DeSantis said, contrasting Bragg’s systematic downgrading of felony cases to misdemeanors and effort to keep people from going to jail with the treatment of the former president.
GOP Response
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy condemned the likely prosecution saying that there should be “equal justice in America” and that the legal system should not be used to target political opponents.
“Stop going after people because you have political differences,” McCarthy said. “It goes against everything this Manhattan DA has professed. He brags about lowering felonies to misdemeanors and not prosecuting.
McCarthy continued: “We’ve watched crime in New York where people are afraid to walk the streets.”
The former president accused Bragg of “Prosecutorial Misconduct and Interference with an Election” Sunday on his TruthSocial platform.
Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., decided against prosecuting Trump because there wasn’t a legal basis for using New York state law to enforce federal campaign finance law, George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley noted in a column published Monday. Turley anticipated that the prosecution might play well politically with the city’s Liberal constituency, but it would flop on its legal merit.
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“The criminal justice system can be a terrible weapon when used for political purposes, an all-too-familiar spectacle in countries where political foes can be targeted by the party in power,” Turley wrote. “None of this means Trump is blameless or should not be charged in other cases. However, we seem to be on the verge of watching a prosecution by plebiscite in this case. The season opener of ‘America’s Got Trump” might be a guaranteed hit with its New York audience — but it should be a flop as a prosecution.
John Rossomando has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award in 2008 for his reporting.
