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New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman on Friday said several Trump Organization employees texted her expressing their happiness over former President Donald Trump's indictment by the Manhattan District Attorney's office in connection with a hush money payment made to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
After a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Trump, Haberman, who wrote the book "Confidence Man" and is widely seen as the most prominent chronicler of the former president's tenure in the White House, said during a panel interview on CNN's "This Morning" that she began receiving messages from employees soon after news broke of his indictment.
"There is a long trail of people who feel burned in one way or another by Donald Trump. We certainly saw that in the White House," she said. "This was a pattern that existed for decades before the Trump Organization."
"The number of people I heard from yesterday who worked for his company who were really happy — one person texted with the words 'Wonderful news.' That really sort of tells you something about where these folks' heads are," she continued.
Haberman remarked that Trump's advisors were "caught by surprise" by news of the indictment, and she stated that some members of his team actually found out from her and her colleagues' reporting.
"He's very angry, that should not really surprise anybody," she said of the former president. "I don't think that means that he's throwing staplers, but I think he's really angry. Everything that you were seeing in his statement about how this is a political persecution and a political prosecution, I think, is something that he genuinely believes. And I expect that it is going to be said with greater degrees of intensity."
Haberman then spoke of the unique standing that Trump possesses ahead of his expected arraignment on Tuesday in Manhattan.
"This is not an ordinary defendant," the senior political correspondent said. "He comes with a phalanx of Secret Service. This is going to require multi-agency protection. He's not just any other defendant in reality."
Haberman while speaking with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper on Thursday said that the arraignment process would be "much more jarring" for Trump than many might believe.
"He is now going to go through the process of getting arrested. And I think that that is going to be much more jarring for him than I think people realize. I've been told that he's been briefed on what that will look like," she said.
Haberman said that Trump has generally felt as though he could control things in his life, but the looming arraignment and the next steps have changed things for him.
"He was able to control impeachment in some way because Mitch McConnell was on his side in the Senate trial and because House Republicans were on his side," she said of the Kentucky Senate Republican leader and allies in the lower chamber. "He was even able to control the second impeachment to some extent, with the Mueller report and the investigation. He was never going to get indicted as a sitting president."
"This is now in the hands of whatever judge he draws and what the voters think," she added.
