Former President Trump and his team were caught off guard by the indictment of the former president that was announced last week, leaving him “extremely angry” and his family “rattled,” according to New York Times reporter and longtime Trump scribe Maggie Haberman.
“While Trump is not said to be throwing things, he is extremely angry and his family is, not surprisingly, rattled,” Haberman said in an interview with the newspaper’s “The Morning” newsletter.
Trump was indicted last week by a Manhattan grand jury investigating a hush money payment made during Trump’s 2016 campaign to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Haberman, a veteran reporter who has covered Trump for decades, said Trump’s legal team was caught by surprise by the news of the indictment after reports surfaced that the grand jury in that case would break for a month.
“One is the political front, which I’d say they were most prepared on,” Haberman said. “Another is the legal front, which is messy because his team has had a lot of infighting, and there’s finger pointing about why they were so caught off guard.”
Trump is expected to appear in court in New York on Tuesday for an arraignment in the case. It is not the only criminal investigation that he faces — he is being investigated at the federal level for his handling of classified information and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and faces a number of other state-level probes. Haberman said the precedent-setting indictment in New York — the first indictment of a sitting or former president — could open the dam for other charges to follow.
“All the prosecutors were concerned about being first with a historical precedent,” Haberman said. “And now there is a broken seal of sorts. That said, Republicans who dislike Trump are saying privately they wish this case wasn’t first because they view it as more trivial than the others.”