Letitia James – New York attorney general and long-time critic of Donald Trump – has been indicted for fraud.

Ms James, a Democrat, was charged on Thursday with one count of bank fraud and one count of making false statements to a financial institution, in connection with a home she purchased in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2020.

The 66-year-old could face up to 30 years in prison and up to a $1m (£752m) fine on each count if convicted, according to Sky’s US partner network NBC News.

Mr Trump has been advocating charging Ms James for months, posting on social media without citing any evidence that she’s “guilty as hell” and telling reporters at the White House: “It looks to me like she’s really guilty of something, but I really don’t know.”

In a lengthy statement, Ms James vehemently denied any wrongdoing and described the indictment as “nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponisation of our justice system”.

She said: “These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost.”

The indictment was presented to a grand jury by Lindsey Halligan, the newly appointed attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Ms Halligan, who has previously worked as a lawyer for Mr Trump, replaced veteran prosecutor Erik Siebert, who had resisted filing charges against Ms James and former FBI director James Comey, who was charged with lying to Congress two weeks ago.

The indictment pertains to Ms James’s purchase of a house in Norfolk, where she has family.

During the sale, she allegedly signed a document called a “second home rider” in which she agreed to keep the property primarily for her “personal use and enjoyment for at least one year”. However, the indictment claims she instead rented it out to a family of three.

According to the indictment, the misrepresentation allowed Ms James to obtain favourable loan terms that are not available for investment properties.

History of Trump and James

Ms James’s indictment is the latest indication that the Trump administration is determined to use the powers of the justice department to target the president’s political and public figure foes.

In a statement on Truth Social last month, Mr Trump called on US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who leads the department, to prosecute his political opponents.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Trump wrote.

Ms James is a particularly personal target of Mr Trump. During the president’s first term in office, she sued him and his administration dozens of times.

Last year, she won a staggering judgment against the Trump Organization after she brought a civil lawsuit alleging he and his companies defrauded banks by overstating the value of his real estate holdings on financial statements.

An appeals court later overturned a hefty fine Mr Trump was ordered to pay, but upheld a lower court’s finding that he had committed fraud.

What happens now?

Ms James is scheduled to make an initial appearance in the federal court in Norfolk on 24 October.

The case has been assigned to US District Judge Jamar K Walker, who was appointed by Joe Biden.

The standard for securing an indictment before a federal grand jury is much lower than securing a unanimous conviction by a jury at trial, NBC reported.

The Justice Manual, which guides federal prosecutors, says attorneys for the government should move forward on a case only if they believe the admissible evidence – evidence that is allowed to be presented in a court of law – would be enough to obtain and sustain a conviction.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner is set to be named on Friday, with Donald Trump and his administration having made clear more than once that they think the US president deserves the award.

The two-time president has been on a not-so-subtle Nobel Prize campaign for years, starting in his first term in office, when he said “many people” thought he deserved it.

In February this year, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, he said: “They will never give me a Nobel Peace Prize. I deserve it, but they will never give it to me.”

After Israel and Hamas signed off on the first phase of Mr Trump’s peace plan on Thursday, people celebrating on the streets of Tel Aviv began calling for the US president to receive the prestigious honour.

But why does he think he should win, who has nominated him and how likely is it?

Why does Trump think he should get a Nobel Prize?

Mr Trump has suggested on several occasions that he has been instrumental in stopping multiple wars.

“I’ve done six wars, I’ve ended six wars,” he said on 18 August, during his summit with Ukrainian and European leaders. “If you look at the six deals I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn’t do any ceasefires.”

The following day, in an interview with Fox News, he revised the number to seven wars. It’s a claim he went on to repeat last month, saying that no one had “ever done anything close to that”.

Dr Samir Puri, director of the Centre for Global Governance and Security at Chatham House, previously told Sky News: “There’s an absurdity to Trump’s claims, but like many of his claims, within the absurdity there are sometimes grains of truth.”

He suggested there was a “huge difference between getting fighting to stop in the short-term and resolving the root causes of the conflict,” and that Mr Trump’s interventions often amount to “conflict management” rather than conflict resolution.

Read more: The seven wars Trump claims to have ended

Has Trump been nominated?

The deadline for nominations for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was on 31 January, not long after Mr Trump returned to the White House.

Over the course of his two terms in the Oval Office he has been nominated for the award more than 10 times – by Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Manet, a Ukrainian politician, as well as legislators from the US, Sweden, and Norway.

However, a nomination does not guarantee someone will be a candidate and the prize committee does not publish a list of candidates before the winner is announced. They have said there are 338 candidates nominated this year, of which 244 are individuals and 94 are organisations.

It is not clear if any of Mr Trump’s nominations came before the January deadline.

Mr Netanyahu publicly nominated him in July, saying Mr Trump was “forging peace as we speak” in “one country and one region after the other”.

It came after Mr Trump took credit for stopping Iran and Israel‘s “12-day war” the month prior.

After Gaza agreement, could Trump actually win?

Experts have suggested that successfully pressuring Russia to end the war in Ukraine or Israel to stop its war in Gaza would make Mr Trump a viable candidate.

In a major development overnight on Wednesday, Israel and Hamas signed off on the first phase of Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan, and it was ratified by the Israeli government on Friday.

Mr Netanyahu said the breakthrough meant the remaining 48 hostages held by Hamas, 20 of whom are thought to still be alive, would be returned.

He added that the “great efforts of our great friend and ally President Trump” had helped them reach “this critical turning point”.

Nina Graeger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, has suggested the overnight developments in Gaza have come too late for Mr Trump.

“It’s highly unlikely that the overnight developments in Gaza will influence the Nobel Committee’s decision tomorrow [Friday],” she told Sky News. “By this stage, the laureate will already have been chosen, and speeches prepared ahead of Friday’s announcement.

“However, if Donald Trump’s 20-point plan will lead to a lasting and sustainable peace in Gaza, the committee would almost certainly have to take that into serious consideration in next year’s deliberations.

“Of course, they would also need to weigh that achievement against the broader record of his efforts to promote peace – both within the US and internationally – in line with Alfred Nobel’s will.”

Why experts think Trump is wrong for the prize

Alfred Nobel’s will, the award’s foundation, says the award should go to the person “who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations”.

That is something Trump is not doing, according to Ms Graeger.

“He has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization and from the Paris Accord on climate, he has initiated a trade war on old friends and allies,” she said.

“That is not exactly what we think about when we think about a peaceful president or someone who really is interested in promoting peace.”

During his second term, Mr Trump has also proposed measures that critics argue will hamper education and scientific research – two areas that are considered pillars of the Nobel Prize.

They include slashing the budget for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, and plans to dismantle the Department of Education to shrink the federal government’s role in education in favour of more control by the states.

Ylva Engstrom, vice president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards three of the six Nobel prizes – for chemistry, physics and economics – says she believes Mr Trump’s changes are reckless and could have “devastating effects”.

“Academic freedom… is one of the pillars of the democratic system,” she says.

The Trump administration denies stifling academic freedom, arguing its measures will cut waste and promote scientific innovation.

Critics of Mr Trump also point to his controversial US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, through which the president has been sending troops to a string of Democratic-led cities to enforce his immigration laws.

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Even as the Gaza ceasefire was set to come into effect on Thursday, the president’s deployment of 300 National Guard troops to Chicago was leading to protests in the city centre.

The US military has also carried out at least four strikes on boats in recent weeks that the White House said belonged to cartels, including three it said originated from Venezuela.

The Trump administration said 21 people were killed in the strikes – but it has has yet to provide underlying evidence to lawmakers proving that the boats were carrying drugs.

Asle Toje, the deputy leader of the present Norwegian Nobel Committee, has suggested Mr Trump’s lobbying campaign for the prize may have had an opposing effect on his chances of winning.

“These types of influence campaigns have a rather more negative effect than a positive one, he says. “Because we talk about it on the committee. Some candidates push for it really hard and we do not like it.

“We are used to working in a locked room without being attempted to be influenced. It is hard enough as it is to reach an agreement among ourselves, without having more people trying to influence us.”

Who could win the prize?

The prize committee said there are 338 candidates nominated this year, of which 244 are individuals and 94 are organisations.

That’s up from last year, when there were 286 candidates.

Bookmakers have Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy as one of the potential frontrunners, along with Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died after allegedly being poisoned in a Russian jail.

Humanitarian organisations like Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms and Doctors Without Borders also have high odds.

The committee could give the award to UN institutions such as the International Court of Justice, or the UN as a whole, which is marking its 80th anniversary this year.

It could also reward the Committee to Protect Journalists or Reporters Without Borders, to mark a year in which more media workers than ever before were killed, predominantly in Gaza.

It could go to local mediators negotiating ceasefires and access to aid in conflicts, such as peace committees in the Central African Republic, the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding or the Elders and Mediation Committee in El Fasher, Darfur.

The sun went down and the volume went up.

In the shadow of Chicago’s high-rise skyline, downtown streets reverberated with protest.

“Ain’t no power like the power of the people, and the power of the people don’t stop,” they chanted.

The president’s plan to deploy troops in the city brought hundreds to the streets in opposition.

They marched the full length of Michigan Avenue, flanked by a line of Chicago police officers.

This is a city on edge, the federal government taking on the state, both braced for a showdown.

Among the people I spoke to, there was no surprise about Donald Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, just outrage.

Asked why he’d joined the protest, a Vietnam veteran pointed to the word ‘Trump’ blazing in bright lights from a nearby hotel.

“That idiot right there, that’s why,” he said.

Read more: What is the Insurrection Act?

His message to the president: “Get the hell out of the White House, or we will put you out of it.”

“I’m on this march because I’m concerned the US is slipping away from democracy to authoritarianism,” another man told me.

One older woman said she was marching for her daughters and granddaughters, “because there isn’t going to be an America for them”.

“I don’t think he [Donald Trump] listens to anybody,” she added, “but doing nothing is not going to do anything so we got to do something.”

A young African American woman told me she felt compelled to march because immigration agents “taking people from their families just isn’t right”.

Shades of orange and pink reflected off the glass skyscrapers, casting long shadows on the streets where the threat of troop deployment looms.

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Hundreds of National Guard troops from Texas have set up camp at Elwood, an army training centre on the outskirts of Chicago.

Their presence drew a diverse crowd of protesters to the city centre – their faces lit by phone screens, voices raised and fists raised in defiance.

“No ICE, no fear,” they chanted, telling Immigration Customs Enforcement agents to leave Chicago.

“Immigrants are welcome here,” they repeated on cue from those wielding megaphones.

It was much more than the noise of protest. This was the pulse of a city fighting back.

A restless city, charged with tension, refusing to be silent.