If convicted of making a hush payment to a porn star, former President Donald Trump will probably spend the entire day and night with his security detail.
Trump is the first sitting or former president of the US to be charged with a crime, thus it is unclear exactly what would happen if he were to get a prison sentence.
Trump would likely have Secret Service agents stationed outside his cell next to him around-the-clock, though, since previous presidents have lifetime security from the agency.
‘He would have one or two Secret Service details sitting outside his cell with the correctional officers,’ University of New Haven associate professor Mike Lawlor told the Daily Mail on Friday.
‘It is what the Secret Service does anyway, just in a different setting.’
An unnamed former Secret Service official had a similar assessment.
‘Is an agent going to be with him inside a cell? No,’ the former Secret Service official told Insider in November, but added that there would be at least one agent on the premises to protect Trump even if the individual was not ‘walking on his shoulder out in the yard’.
It is particularly likely that Secret Service agents would follow Trump given he would ‘have a target on his back’, Michele Deitch, a prison oversight expert at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, told Insider at the time.
The Former Presidents Act signed in 1958 grants all living ex-presidents entitlement to lifetime Secret Service protection unless they decline it. Richard Nixon is the only ex-president in US history to relinquish his protection, in 1985.
Congress in 1994 had acted to limit protection for future ex-presidents to just ten years after leaving office, as a cost-saving measure. But President Barack Obama in 2013 signed a law restoring lifetime protection for former presidents.
By contrast in the UK, former prime ministers are also afforded lifetime police protection, but it is not anywhere near the level of Secret Service agents.
On Monday afternoon, an 11-SUV motorcade brought Trump from his Mar-a-Lago home to Palm Beach International Airport, where he got on his private jet and flew to LaGuardia Airport. His motorcade was then escorted to Trump Tower, where he is spending the night.
Trump is expected in a lower Manhattan court for his arraignment around 2.15pm on Tuesday.
Late Monday, Trump complained that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had ‘just illegally LEAKED the various points, and complete information, on the pathetic indictment against me’.
Trump appeared to be referring to Yahoo! News report that he was charged with 34 felony counts business records falsification around a $130,000 payment to silence porn star Stormy Daniels on an alleged affair.
It is expected that Trump will be fingerprinted, but unclear if a mugshot will be taken or if he will have a perp walk. He is unlikely to be handcuffed.