Donald Trump, a former US president, asserts that he will be detained on Tuesday.
On social media, he made no mention of how he was made aware of the impending arrest.
According to “illegal leaks” from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, “THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK,” will be detained on that day next week, he claimed in a post on his Truth Social network.
Mr Trump also urged his followers to protest.
The post comes as a New York prosecutor eyes charges in a case examining hush money paid to women who alleged sexual encounters with him.
Law enforcement officials in New York have been making security preparations for the possibility that the former President could be indicted.
There has been no public announcement of any time frame for the grand jury’s secret work in the case, including any potential vote on whether to indict the ex-president.
In his postings, he repeated his lies that the 2020 presidential election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden was stolen and he urged his followers to ‘PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!’
That language evoked the message from the then-president that preceded the riot at the US Capitol on January 6 2021.
The grand jury in Manhattan has been hearing from witnesses, including former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who says he orchestrated payments in 2016 to two women to silence them about sexual encounters they said they had with Mr Trump a decade earlier.
The former president denies the encounters occurred, says he did nothing wrong and has cast the investigation as a ‘witch hunt’ by a Democratic prosecutor bent on sabotaging the Republican’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has apparently been examining whether any state laws were broken in connection with the payments or the way Mr Trump’s company compensated Mr Cohen for his work to keep the women’s allegations quiet.
Yesterday, Trump went live with his first Facebook post since 2021.
‘I’M BACK!’ he wrote in the post on Friday afternoon.
It was accompanied by a 12-second 2024 Trump campaign video.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting, complicated business, complicated business,’ Trump said in the clip when he addressed a New York City watch party after defeating Hillary Clinton and winning the 2016 presidential election.
His post came more than a month after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, restored his accounts.
Trump has 34million followers on his Facebook page. Friday’s post is a clear indication that Trump intends to use Facebook as a mechanism in his 2024 presidential campaign, which he announced in November.
The 45th president had been sticking to posting on his own Truth Social platform, despite having his Meta accounts restored and his Twitter account reinstated in November following Elon Musk’s takeover.