Trump says he will be arrested on Tuesday as indictment looms

Three people close to Mr Trump said the former president’s team had no specific knowledge of when an impeachment might come or when an arrest might be anticipated. One such person, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said Mr. Trump’s advisers’ best guess was that it could happen around Tuesday, and that they passed it on to him, but that they had also made it clear that they did not know a specific deadline.

Mr Trump, who faced his first criminal investigation in the late 1970s, is deeply anxious about being arrested, which should include being fingerprinted, one said. of his relatives. When former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen H. Weisselberg was arrested in 2021, Mr. Trump watched in horror as television coverage showed Mr. Weisselberg flanked by officers in the courthouse and said that he couldn’t believe what was being done to him.

The call to protest echoed Mr. Trump’s call for his supporters in the final days of his presidency to join him for a rally in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, the day President Biden’s victory was due. be certified by a Congressional endorsement of the electoral college vote. At that rally, at the Ellipse near the White House, Mr. Trump then told his supporters to march to the Capitol, where the certification was taking place.

Mr. Trump’s message urging his supporters to “PROTEST, TAKE BACK OUR NATION!” carried unmistakable echoes of the inflammatory messages he had posted online in the weeks leading up to the attack on the Capitol. In the most notorious of these posts, he announced on Twitter that he would be holding a rally in Washington on January 6, 2021. “Be there,” he told his millions of followers, “will be wild.”

Investigators later determined that far-right extremist groups as well as mainstream Trump supporters read that tweet — posted Dec. 19, 2020 — as a clear call and almost immediately took action, acquiring protective gear. , setting up encrypted communication channels and, in one case, preparing heavily armed “quick reaction forces” to be staged outside Washington for the event.