Associated Incidents
Twitter has been flooded with images depicting the arrest of Donald Trump, mugshots taken by the New York police and the anguish of his wife, Melania — all of which have yet to happen.
Generated by artificial intelligence, the fabricated, or deepfake, pictures show the former president fighting with and fleeing from officers. Another shows his wife, Melania, and his son Donald Trump Jr shouting in protest against his arrest.
On Saturday Trump, 76, said on social media that he expected to be arrested on Tuesday this week over hush money paid to the former porn star Stormy Daniels, 44, before the 2016 presidential election. She claims she was paid to stay silent over a brief affair she had had with him.
An indictment has yet to be issued, with the grand jury hearing evidence in the case going home yesterday. The jury will meet next on Monday. Manhattan's district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who has been investigating the case, has made no public statement on a possible indictment.
Trump is the only person to have said that his arrest is going to take place, and has not mentioned it directly since his social media post at the weekend. Since then he has raised millions of dollars for his 2024 presidential campaign from supporters angered by his apparently imminent detention.
Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative group Bellingcat, tweeted the original deepfakes, which were created using the AI text-to-image generator Midjourney. His original post has been viewed more than five million times.
"The Trump arrest image was really just casually showing both how good and bad Midjourney was at rendering real scenes — like the first image has Trump with three legs and a police belt," Higgins told Associated Press. "I had assumed that people would realise Donald Trump has two legs, not three, but that appears not to have stopped some people passing them off as genuine, which highlights that lack of critical thinking skills in our educational system."
Midjourney's founder, David Holz, said that the latest version of his product had a "much wider stylistic range" and was "more responsive to prompting".
Another Twitter user, O'Keefe Reborn, shared deepfakes he had created showing a mugshot of Trump and a Manhattan building on fire.
"Donald Trump has not been taken into custody by the New York City Police Department," the department wrote in an emailed statement in response to the deepfake images.
Trump has denied the encounter with Daniels and any other wrongdoing. Bragg is investigating whether the payments contravened campaign finance law, and would have to show for a prosecution that Trump knew that they were unlawful.
The former president says the investigation is part of a plot by what he calls the "deep state" to stop him running in next year's presidential election.
His Republican allies in Congress have also condemned the investigation. The party now controls the House of Representatives and some of the former president's allies hold key positions on important committees.
Jim Jordan, a congressman from Ohio, is chairman of the House judiciary committee and is expected to expand an investigation into Bragg by calling two prosecutors to give evidence to his committee.
On Wednesday, Jordan wrote to Mark Pomerantz, a former New York county special assistant district attorney, and Carey Dunne, a former Manhattan special assistant district attorney. Both had resigned from Bragg's Trump investigation in February last year because they disagreed with Bragg over the conduct of the investigation.
Bragg's office hit back today at efforts to intervene on Trump's behalf, accusing House Republicans of "an unprecedented inquiry into a pending local prosecution", and said that the former president had created "false expectation" of his imminent arrest.
In a letter to Republican committee leaders in Congress, the district attorney's general counsel, Leslie Dubeck, said claims that the investigation was politically motivated were unfounded. Dubeck added that the demands for information from Bragg's office "came after Donald Trump created a false expectation that he would be arrested the next day and his lawyers reportedly urged you to intervene""
She dismissed the calls for a congressional inquiry into Bragg's case against Trump, adding that "the proper forum for such a challenge is the courts of New York".
Trump issued a statement after the latest postponement today, claiming that Bragg's office was in "total disarray." "Tremendous dissension and chaos because they have NO CASE, and many of the honest people in the office know it, and want to do the right thing," he said.