Trump Civil Fraud TrialTrump Begins Fraud Trial by Attacking Attorney General and Judge

Instead of a finding of guilt or innocence, the trial will determine Mr. Trump’s liability, or his legal obligation to pay for damages. And instead of his fate being decided by a jury of his peers, it will be up to Justice Arthur F. Engoron of State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

The crux of Attorney General Letitia James’s case was decided on Tuesday, when Justice Engoron ruled that Mr. Trump and his family business had committed fraud by inflating his assets.

But this ruling addressed only one of seven claims made by the attorney general, with Justice Engoron reserving the remaining six for trial. As a result, the trial will focus on allegations of falsifying business records, issuing false financial statements, insurance fraud and related conspiracy offenses.

The outcome will determine his punishment. The attorney general is seeking $250 million in penalties and wants to bar Mr. Trump from doing business in New York.

Ms. James must prove her claims by a “preponderance of the evidence” — whether it’s more likely than not that Mr. Trump and his family business should be held liable. That bar is lower than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the standard at a criminal trial.

Without a jury, the trial should proceed expeditiously, starting with opening statements from both sides. As in a criminal trial, both sides may also call witnesses and introduce evidence. They can also cross-examine witnesses.

Ms. James can call Mr. Trump and the other defendants to testify — a power she would not have in a criminal trial.

The trial will conclude with closing statements before Justice Engoron delivers his decision and Mr. Trump learns what, if any, punishment he will face.

But Christopher M. Kise, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, responded in his opening that there was no objective value of the assets and that differing valuations were standard in real estate.

“There was no nefarious intent, it simply reflects the change in a complex, sophisticated real estate development corporation,” he said of the way Mr. Trump’s company represented the assets’ value.

Though Mr. Trump’s lawyers began their opening arguments with a dry presentation, the tenor of the trial changed after a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Alina Habba, gave what she said was an extemporaneous presentation in which she attacked Ms. James as politically motivated and again declared that her client’s business partners had made money from the deals. Mr. Trump watched intently, occasionally nodding in agreement.

That kicked off a sequence in which Justice Arthur F. Engoron went back and forth with Ms. Habba and the other defense lawyers, Mr. Kise and Clifford S. Robert, correcting what he thought were legal errors from their presentations.

Mr. Trump and his adult children are just four of the 28 people appearing on the attorney general’s witness list filed with the court last week. While there is no guarantee that all will take the stand, the list provides a road map of how the attorney general plans to prove her case.

The witness list was submitted to the court in order of testimony. If called to the stand, Mr. Trump would testify second to last. The only witness listed after him is an expert on damages.

This is shaping up to be an unusual case for Mr. Trump: He rarely testifies or even appears in court at civil trials.

This year, Mr. Trump left open the possibility that he’d attend federal court and deny the sexual abuse and defamation allegations leveled against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll. The judge eventually called his bluff. Ultimately, Mr. Trump was found liable and ordered to pay $5 million in damages, having never once set foot in the courtroom.

Mr. Trump’s children are no strangers to this litigation. Both sons are co-defendants and were previously deposed by the attorney general’s office. Ivanka Trump was also a co-defendant at one point, but her case was dismissed by the Court of Appeals in June.

This trial could also reunite former and current Trump Organization associates, some of whom have testified against Mr. Trump before. Notable among them are Mr. Trump’s former fixer turned chief antagonist Michael Cohen; the former Trump Organization chief financial officer and criminal defendant Allen H. Weisselberg; the former company controller Jeffrey McConney; and Mr. Trump’s former accountant Donald Bender.

For their part, Mr. Trump and his co-defendants provided the court with a list of 127 witnesses who could be called to prove their case. Their list overlaps slightly with the attorney general’s, also listing Mr. Trump himself, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, as well as Mr. Weisselberg, Mr. McConney and Mr. Bender. They may also call up to 12 expert witnesses to testify about property valuation.

While Mr. Trump is not at risk of going to prison — as is possible in the four criminal cases he faces around the country — the civil trial could still produce a number of serious consequences for the former president and his family business.

The trial stems from a lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who accused Mr. Trump of fraudulently inflating his assets by billions of dollars to secure favorable loan terms from banks.

Mr. Trump is beginning the trial at a serious disadvantage. The State Supreme Court judge overseeing the case ruled last week that the former president had persistently committed fraud, deciding that no trial was needed to determine the core of Ms. James’s lawsuit.

The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, also imposed a heavy punishment, stripping the Trumps of control over their signature New York properties — a move that could crush much of the business known as the Trump Organization.

Ms. James is now asking for more from Justice Engoron, who will determine the outcome himself in the nonjury trial.

She is seeking to recover $250 million in ill-gotten gains. She wants to prohibit Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization from entering into any New York State commercial real estate deals for the next five years and to bar them from applying for loans from any New York bank during that same period.

As a final blow, Ms. James wants to permanently prevent Mr. Trump and his adult sons from running any New York companies.

Although Mr. Trump has moved to Florida, his family business is based in New York. The trial could end that for good.

That’s because the case was brought under a little known but powerful New York state law requiring that the matter be adjudicated at what is known as a bench trial, meaning that no jury will hear the case. The judge not only applies the law, as judges do in jury trials, but also decides the facts, a task that a jury would otherwise perform.

And that means that Justice Engoron, a Democrat, will play a far more prominent and consequential role than a judge would at a jury trial, not just during the proceedings, but in the ultimate outcome — unless he is overturned on appeal.

Last week, before the trial began, Justice Engoron issued a decision that itself could have a devastating impact on Mr. Trump and his family business. He ruled that the former president had consistently committed fraud by inflating the value of his assets by billions of dollars. The ruling could strip him of control of some of his flagship New York properties, including Trump Tower and 40 Wall Street.

Justice Engoron has been overseeing the matter for three years. When the state attorney general, Letitia James, was conducting her civil investigation into Mr. Trump’s business practices, the judge resolved disputes over evidence. Then, after she filed the resulting lawsuit a year ago, the judge began hearing arguments and ruled on pretrial litigation.

While Justice Engoron’s demeanor verged on the jovial in the earlier stages — and he still teases the lawyers and allows himself the occasional comic digression — the proceedings have become increasingly contentious. Last year, he held Mr. Trump in contempt, fining him $110,000, and later, Mr. Trump unsuccessfully sought to have Justice Engoron taken off the case. Last week, in a social media post, Mr. Trump called the judge “deranged,” and on Monday, he said he was “rogue” and should be disbarred.

Now, as a result of threats, court security officers pick him up at his home in the morning and drive him to the courthouse, officials said. At the end of his workday, the officers drive him home.

Justice Engoron nonetheless seems to maintain his sense of humor. A fan of pop culture references who also revels in puns, he quoted from the Marx Brothers movie “Duck Soup” in a footnote to underscore his position that some of the defense’s arguments were essentially designed to tell him to not believe his own eyes.

“As Chico Marx, playing Chicolini, says to Margaret Dumont, playing Mrs. Gloria Teasdale,” the judge wrote, “well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Justice Engoron was appointed to the New York City Civil Court in 2003 and was elected — he ran unopposed — to the State Supreme Court in 2015. Before his time on the bench, he served as a law clerk to a State Supreme Court judge in Manhattan.

The atmosphere in his courtroom is somewhat unusual. Beyond the levity he fosters, he discourages members of the public from standing, as is typical, when he enters. He also gives broad latitude to his principal law clerk, Allison Greenfield, perhaps because he himself has served in that role. Ms. Greenfield keeps the trains running on time with a firm hand, in contrast to the judge’s generally genial demeanor.

But Justice Engoron seems to be losing his patience with Mr. Trump. He has consistently ruled against the former president, and his decision last week had withering words for the defenses put forward by Mr. Trump’s lawyers. He called the conduct of the defendants, who include the president’s two adult sons and the family business, “obstreperous” and their arguments “bogus,” saying they had ignored reality when it suited their business needs.

“In defendants’ world,” he wrote, “rent-regulated apartments are worth the same as unregulated apartments; restricted land is worth the same as unrestricted land; restrictions can evaporate into thin air.”

At a hearing two weeks ago, the judge, addressing one of the former president’s lawyers, pounded his fist in apparent frustration, saying, “You cannot make false statements and use them in business.”

Along the way, Ms. James, a Democrat, has been called a racist by the former president, who has accused her of being politically motivated.

But judges have found that the attorney general has every right to pursue the case. And last week, the trial judge handed Ms. James a major win, determining that she had demonstrated with undisputed evidence her central claim: that Mr. Trump had committed fraud by overvaluing his assets.

Ms. James, 64, has made a habit of taking on powerful men. A former member of the New York City Council and public advocate, she ran for attorney general in 2018, supported by then-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

His support did not stop Ms. James from opening a civil investigation into Mr. Cuomo after he was accused by several women of sexual harassment and misconduct. At the end of the inquiry, she issued a report that her investigators said corroborated the allegation of 11 women and told a damning story about Mr. Cuomo’s efforts to fight back against his accusers.

In the Trump case, Ms. James has already succeeded in part of her goal: The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, revoked the certificates that allow Mr. Trump’s New York companies to operate in the state. But she is seeking more: Her lawsuit asks the judge to oust the Trumps from leading their family business, to permanently bar them running a business in New York again and to fine them $250 million.

It is not a normal fraud case. Rather, it was brought under a powerful New York statute that gives the attorney general wide scope to investigate and prosecute corporate fraud. Because that law is being used, the questions that remain will be decided by Justice Engoron in a bench trial — one decided by a judge rather than by a jury.

Who is deciding the case?

Justice Engoron is an independent and thoughtful — if somewhat quirky — jurist who has served for 20 years in New York City Civil and State Supreme Court.

The 74-year-old judge, a former cabby with a shock of white hair and a penchant for cracking jokes from the bench, will effectively be judge and jury, deciding the fate of Mr. Trump’s New York businesses, which make up a large portion of his real estate empire.

What is the attorney general’s special authority?

A state law that dates to 1956 gives the attorney general’s office expansive authority to investigate and punish corporations. It demands a lower burden of proof than other fraud cases. Crucially, prosecutors do not have to prove that the defendant intended to act fraudulently — or that they hurt anyone financially in the process. Mr. Trump has said repeatedly that the banks he dealt with made money.

The New York attorney general’s office has relied on the law for years in high-profile cases, including against UBS, Exxon Mobil and Juul — as well as Trump University and the Trump Foundation, both of which paid millions of dollars to resolve the cases before trial.

The statute allows investigators to issue subpoenas and gather information before filing a lawsuit, often resulting in many rounds of legal back-and-forth between competing sets of lawyers.

Who might testify?

Ms. James plans to call Mr. Trump and his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump to the witness stand. She also plans to call Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka to testify about the inner workings of the Trump Organization.

The attorney general submitted a list of 28 potential witnesses to the court in order of testimony. Mr. Trump is scheduled to testify second to last.

This trial will likely reunite former and current Trump Organization associates, some of whom have testified against Mr. Trump before. Notable among them are Mr. Trump’s former fixer turned chief antagonist, Michael Cohen; the former Trump Organization chief financial officer and criminal defendant, Allen H. Weisselberg; the former company controller, Jeffrey McConney; and Mr. Trump’s former accountant, Donald Bender.

For their part, Mr. Trump and his co-defendants provided the court with a list of 127 witnesses who could be called to prove their case. Their list overlaps slightly with the attorney general’s, also listing Mr. Trump himself, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, as well as Mr. Weisselberg, Mr. McConney and Mr. Bender. They may also call up to 12 expert witnesses to testify about property valuation.

What punishment might Trump face?

While Mr. Trump is not at risk of going to prison — as is possible in the four criminal cases he faces in other states — the civil trial could still produce serious consequences for the former president and his family business.

Justice Engoron already stripped the Trumps of control over their signature New York properties — a move that could crush much of the business known as the Trump Organization. Ms. James is now asking for more.

She is seeking to recover $250 million in ill-gotten gains. She wants to prohibit Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization from entering into any New York State commercial real estate deals for the next five years and to bar them from applying for loans from any New York bank during that same period.

As a final blow, Ms. James wants to permanently prevent Mr. Trump and his adult sons from running any New York companies.

The flurry of activity means that Mr. Trump will be on trial for much of the next year, all in the thick of the presidential campaign.

The trials began in October, not with a criminal case, but with the civil action filed by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. The trial is the culmination of a four-year battle between the Trump family and the attorney general, who sued Mr. Trump, his adult sons and their company, accusing them of fraudulently inflating the former president’s net worth by billions of dollars.

Ms. James, a Democrat, is seeking to recover $250 million from Mr. Trump and has already persuaded the judge overseeing the case to strip Mr. Trump of control over his New York properties, striking a blow at the heart of his family business.

Keeping Track of the Trump Investigations

See a guide to the major criminal cases involving the former president.

The criminal cases carry even more serious repercussions for Mr. Trump, who could face years behind bars.

The Georgia case, filed on Aug. 14, leveled the most extensive accusations yet against the former president, who was charged with orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Georgia’s results in the 2020 election and subvert the will of voters. He was charged alongside 18 of his lawyers, advisers and supporters as part of a sweeping racketeering case.

The case, brought by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, was the fourth and perhaps final indictment of Mr. Trump.

The indictments began in March, when the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, filed 34 felony charges against Mr. Trump related to what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme to cover up a potential sex scandal and clear his path to the presidency in 2016.

The first federal case came in June as part of the special counsel’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and whether he obstructed the government’s efforts to recover them after he left office.

In that case, Mr. Trump faces 40 criminal counts: 32 related to withholding national defense information, five related to concealing the possession of classified documents, one related to making false statements and two related to an effort to delete security camera footage at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where he stored the documents.

On Aug. 1, the special counsel filed another case against him, this time stemming from an investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election.

Here is where the notable cases involving the former president stand:

New York State Civil Inquiry

In a lawsuit last year, Ms. James, the New York attorney general, accused Mr. Trump of lying to lenders and insurers by fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars. The goal of the fraud, she said, was to obtain favorable loan terms and insurance policies.

In some years, Mr. Trump inflated his net worth by as much as $2 billion, according to Ms. James.

When the case went to trial on Oct. 2, Mr. Trump was already at a significant disadvantage. The judge overseeing the case, Arthur F. Engoron, had ruled that the former president had persistently committed fraud, deciding that no trial was needed to determine the claim at the core of Ms. James’s lawsuit.

As an initial punishment, Justice Engoron effectively revoked Mr. Trump’s licenses to operate his New York properties, a move that could crush much of the business known as the Trump Organization.

At trial, Ms. James is seeking more from Justice Engoron, who will decide the case, rather than a jury. She wants Mr. Trump to be fined as much as $250 million and to be permanently barred from running a business in New York. The trial will determine what penalty the former president must pay and whether he will be in essence evicted from the world of New York real estate that made him famous.

Mr. Trump has denied all wrongdoing and called Justice Engoron, a Democrat, “deranged.” Mr. Trump’s lawyers have also argued that the banks were hardly victims — they made a lot of money from dealing with Mr. Trump and did not rely on his financial statements.

Mr. Trump’s older daughter, Ivanka Trump, was also one of the targets of the suit, but she was dropped from it in June after an appeals court found that the attorney general had missed a legal deadline for bringing claims against her.

Mr. Trump had argued that the appeals court ruling also effectively excused him from the case, but Justice Engoron disagreed and cleared the case for trial.

Mr. Trump attended the opening day of trial, and Ms. James was expected to eventually call him to testify. Ms. James’s investigators already questioned Mr. Trump under oath twice, though one of those times he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination.

Georgia Criminal Inquiry

Ms. Willis, a Democrat, brought the sweeping case against Mr. Trump over his efforts to interfere with the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state.

The 41-count indictment also brought charges against some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who served as his personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election.

All 19 defendants — a cross-section of conservative operatives that also includes a former senior Justice Department official, the former chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and lawyers who were part of the “elite strike force team” who amplified Mr. Trump’s claims — were charged under the state’s racketeering statute. That law was originally designed to dismantle organized crime groups, and in essence, prosecutors asserted that Mr. Trump sat atop a criminal enterprise designed to keep him in power. (Mr. Trump is facing 13 counts, including racketeering and conspiracy to commit forgery).

The indictment outlined eight ways the defendants were accused of obstructing the election, including by lying to the Georgia state legislature about claims of voter fraud and creating fake pro-Trump electors.

Mr. Trump and the other defendants, prosecutors wrote, “knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”

Mr. Trump and his associates had numerous interactions with Georgia officials after the election, including a now-infamous call in which he urged the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” the number he would have needed to overcome Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lead there.

A special grand jury was impaneled in May 2022 in Fulton County, and it heard testimony from 75 witnesses behind closed doors over a series of months. The jurors produced a final report that was unsealed in September. In it, they recommended indicting more than twice as many Trump allies as were eventually charged, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina; the former senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia; and Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser.

Prosecutors seemingly concluded that some of the people named in the report had committed acts that would be too difficult to prove were criminal.

Since the Georgia indictment, five defendants, including Mr. Meadows, have asked for their cases to be moved from state to federal court, though none has succeeded yet. Two other defendants, the lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, requested speedy trials, as Georgia law allows, and are scheduled to go to trial together in Fulton County Superior Court in late October.

Mr. Trump has asked a state judge to throw out most of the 13 charges against him; he is not seeking to have his case moved to federal court.

In the hours after the indictment was unsealed, Mr. Trump denounced the case in a post on his social media platform, saying that he would release an “Irrefutable” report that would somehow prove his false claims of election fraud in Georgia.

2020 Election and Jan. 6 Inquiries

Two weeks before the Georgia indictment was unveiled, Jack Smith, the special counsel who took over the Justice Department’s inquiries into Mr. Trump last year, brought four charges related to the former president’s efforts to remain in office after his election loss in 2020 and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The two cases cover some of the same ground.

But Mr. Smith’s indictment, handed up in Federal District Court on Aug. 1, charged a narrower case, indicting only Mr. Trump with three conspiracy charges in connection with his effort to stay in power: one to defraud the United States, a second to obstruct an official government proceeding and a third to deprive people of civil rights provided by federal law or the Constitution. Mr. Trump was also charged with attempting to obstruct an official proceeding — the certification of the election results by Congress.

The scheme charged by Mr. Smith played out largely in the two months between Election Day in 2020 and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. During that period, Mr. Trump took part in a range of efforts to retain power despite having lost the presidential race to Mr. Biden.

“The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the federal government function by which those results are collected, counted and certified,” the indictment said

The indictment said Mr. Trump and six unnamed co-conspirators had pushed state legislators and election officials to change electoral votes won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. to votes for Mr. Trump. Among other things, the scheme involved convening fake slates of electors who supported Mr. Trump and sending those illegitimate tallies to Congress to muddy the waters.

“That is, on the pretext of baseless fraud claims, the defendant pushed officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; and ultimately, cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors in favor of the defendant,” the indictment said.

Prosecutors also accused the former president of recruiting fake electors in swing states won by Mr. Biden, trying to use the power of the Justice Department to fuel election conspiracy theories, and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the election or reject legitimate electors.

Finally the indictment accused Mr. Trump and others of exploiting the Jan. 6 riot to redouble his “efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.”

The federal judge overseeing the case, Tanya S. Chutkan, set a trial date for March 4, 2024, laying out a schedule that was close to the government’s initial request of January and rebuffing Mr. Trump’s proposal of April 2026.

Judge Chutkan later denied a request from Mr. Trump’s lawyers that she recuse herself from the case, and she is considering a request from prosecutors to issue a gag order on Mr. Trump, who on social media and in public statements has assailed the judge and the Justice Department.

A House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol spent a year and a half examining the role that Mr. Trump and his allies played in his efforts to hold on to power after his electoral defeat in November 2020.

In December, the committee issued an 845-page report concluding that Mr. Trump and some of his associates had devised “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election” and disclosing in exhaustive detail the events that led to the attack on the Capitol.

The panel also accused Mr. Trump of inciting insurrection and conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other federal crimes, and referred him and some of his allies to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

Mr. Smith’s office conducted its own investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, building on months of work by other federal prosecutors in Washington who have also filed charges against nearly 1,000 people who took part in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Classified Documents Inquiry

Mr. Smith also led the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive government documents he took with him when he left office and whether he obstructed efforts to recover them.

For more than a year, Mr. Trump repeatedly resisted the federal government’s efforts, including a subpoena, to retrieve classified and sensitive material still in his possession, according to government documents.

In August 2022, acting on a court-approved search warrant, the F.B.I. descended on his Mar-a-Lago residence and club in Palm Beach, Fla., and discovered about 100 documents bearing classification markings.

The 49-page indictment unsealed in June said the documents held onto by Mr. Trump included some involving sensitive nuclear programs and others that detailed the country’s potential vulnerabilities to military attack.

In some cases, prosecutors said, he displayed them to people without security clearances and stored them in a haphazard manner at Mar-a-Lago, even keeping a pile of boxes in a bathroom.

The indictment included evidence vividly illustrating what prosecutors said was Mr. Trump’s effort to hide the material from prosecutors and obstruct their investigation.

In one of the most problematic pieces of evidence for the former president, the indictment recounted how at one point during the effort by the government to retrieve the documents, Mr. Trump, according to an account by one of his lawyers, made a “plucking motion” that implied, “Why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room, and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”

Mr. Trump was initially charged with 37 criminal counts covering seven different violations of federal law, alone or in conjunction with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, who was also named in the indictment. In late July, Mr. Smith’s office filed an updated indictment adding three new charges against Mr. Trump and for the first time naming the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, Carlos De Oliveira, as a defendant in the case.

The July indictment accused Mr. Trump, Mr. De Oliveira and Mr. Nauta of trying to delete Mar-a-Lago security footage. It describes how in June 2022, just days after prosecutors issued a subpoena for footage from the cameras, Mr. De Oliveira approached an employee in Mar-a-Lago’s I.T. department to say that the “‘boss’ wanted the server deleted” — a reference to the computer server housing the footage.

When the employee refused, Mr. De Oliveira repeated the orders from “the boss,” according to the indictment. “What are we going to do?” Mr. De Oliveira asked.

That employee, who was not named in the indictment, was later identified as Yuscil Taveras, who ran Mar-a-Lago’s technology department. He is now cooperating with prosecutors in the case.

Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty during his arraignment on June 13. The judge overseeing the case has indicated that a trial will begin in May 2024. The government had requested a trial date in December, while Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked for an indefinite postponement.

Manhattan Criminal Case

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, brought the case over Mr. Trump’s role in a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who was poised during the campaign to go public with her story of a sexual encounter with him.

Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer at the time, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. Once he was sworn in as president, Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen.

While paying hush money is not inherently criminal, Mr. Bragg accused Mr. Trump of falsifying records related to the payments and the reimbursement of Mr. Cohen, who is expected to serve as the prosecution’s star witness.

In court papers, prosecutors also cited the account of another woman, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model. Ms. McDougal had tried to sell her story of an affair with Mr. Trump during the campaign and reached a $150,000 agreement with The National Enquirer.

Rather than publish her account, the tabloid suppressed it in cooperation with Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, prosecutors say. (Mr. Trump has denied having affairs with either Ms. Daniels or Ms. McDougal.)

The court papers also referred to a payment to a former Trump Tower doorman who claimed that Mr. Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock. The National Enquirer paid $30,000 for the rights to his story, although it eventually concluded that his claim was false.

Mr. Trump is running for president again, and the case is scheduled to go to trial in March, when the campaign will be in full swing.

Mr. Trump has referred to Mr. Bragg, who is Black and a Democrat, as a “racist” who is carrying out a politically motivated “witch hunt.” Before the indictment, he made threatening statements reminiscent of his posts in the days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

Hours after his arraignment, Mr. Trump delivered a meandering, rally-style speech at Mar-a-Lago during which he lashed out at Mr. Bragg and Mr. Bragg’s wife as well as the judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, whom he called “Trump-hating.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers failed in an attempt to move the case out of Justice Merchan’s courtroom, with a federal judge saying that its proper home was state court.

Mr. Bragg’s investigation into Mr. Trump once appeared to be at a dead end. Under Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney’s office had begun to present evidence to an earlier grand jury about Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he had fraudulently inflated the value of his real estate to secure favorable loans and other financial benefits. (Mr. Vance’s prosecutors were also investigating the hush money.)

In the early weeks of his tenure last year, Mr. Bragg developed concerns about the strength of that case. He decided to abandon the grand-jury presentation, prompting the resignations of the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.

But last summer, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors returned to the hush-money case, seeking to jump-start the inquiry.

The first visible sign of progress for Mr. Bragg came in January, when Mr. Cohen met with prosecutors at the district attorney’s Lower Manhattan office — the first such meeting in nearly a year. Mr. Cohen returned for several additional interviews with the prosecutors and testified before the grand jury.

After Mr. Bragg impaneled the grand jury in January, it heard testimony from Mr. Cohen as well as two former National Enquirer executives who had helped broker the hush-money deal. Ms. Daniels’s former lawyer also testified, as did two senior officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway. The grand jury also heard testimony from employees of Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization.

Although this case was Mr. Trump’s first indictment, it might be one of the last to go to trial. Mr. Bragg has publicly indicated a willingness to delay the trial while the federal cases against Mr. Trump proceed, though the schedule will ultimately bt set by Justice Merchan.

In late 2022, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors won a conviction of the Trump Organization when a jury found the business guilty of multiple felonies related to a long-running tax fraud scheme. The company’s veteran chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, pleaded guilty in the scheme and served time at the Rikers Island jail complex.

Other State Inquiries

On July 18, the Michigan attorney general announced felony charges against 16 Republicans for falsely portraying themselves as electors from the state in an effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat there.

Each of the defendants was charged with eight felony counts, including forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery, on accusations that they had signed documents attesting falsely that they were Michigan’s “duly elected and qualified electors” for president and vice president.

“They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it,” Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said in announcing the charges. “They carried out these actions with the hope and belief that the electoral votes of Michigan’s 2020 election would be awarded to the candidate of their choosing instead of the candidate that Michigan voters actually chose.”

Those charged in Michigan included Meshawn Maddock, 55, who went on to serve for a time as the co-leader of the Michigan Republican Party. Ms. Maddock, who has close ties to Mr. Trump and is married to Matt Maddock, a state representative, accused Ms. Nessel of “a personal vendetta.”

“This is part of a national coordinated” effort to stop Mr. Trump, she added.

Wright Blake, a lawyer representing Mayra Rodriguez, 64, another elector who is a lawyer, said in an interview: “I’m very disappointed in the attorney general’s office. This is all political, obviously. If they want to charge my client, how come they didn’t charge Trump and the Trump lawyers that he sent here to discuss with the delegates what to do?”

In Arizona, the attorney general, Kris Mayes, said earlier this year that she would investigate the fake electors situation. “I will take very seriously any effort to undermine our democracy. Those are the cases that I will take most seriously,” she said.

Her communications director, Richie Taylor, confirmed in July that there is an active and ongoing investigation into the situation, but declined to comment further.

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, Jonah E. Bromwich, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Michael Gold, Michael Rothfeld, Ed Shanahan, Richard Fausset and Ashley Wong.