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Defendant Trump finally seems to have run out delays. In the one case that is liable to re-ignite the chattering class’s imagination ...
www.pbs.org — Mar 27, 2024
Manhattan hush-money case
What’s the case about?
Trump was indicted on March 30, 2023, on charges of falsifying business records. These involved hush-money payments made on Trump’s behalf to conceal alleged affairs ahead of the 2016 presidential election. This indictment made Trump the first former president ever to face criminal charges.
Trial start date: April 15
What are the charges?
Trump faces 34 felony counts in the hush-money scheme that sought to silence allegations of extramarital affairs — including a $130,000 to Stephanie Clifford, the adult film actor known as Stormy Daniels— that surfaced during his first presidential campaign.The indictment detailed how the hush-money payments, made by Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen, were recorded as legitimate business expenses.
[...]
Trump has said that “because he is a current presidential candidate, the ordinary rules for criminal law and procedure should be applied differently here.” This argument, prosecutors wrote in a 99-page document, “is essentially an attempt to evade criminal responsibility” because he is “politically powerful.”
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THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP, Defendant
Ind. No. 71543-23
[ pg1 ]
INTRODUCTION
Defendant Donald J. Trump is charged with thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree as part of an expansive and corrupt criminal scheme to conceal damaging information from the voting public in advance of the 2016 presidential election.
From August 2015 to December 2017, defendant orchestrated — and then tried to conceal — a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit his electoral prospects. One component of this scheme was that, at defendant's request, Michael Cohen — a lawyer who then worked for the Trump Organization as Special Counsel to defendant — covertly paid $130,000 to an adult film actress just weeks before the presidential election to prevent her from publicizing a sexual encounter with defendant. This payment was illegal, and Cohen pleaded guilty to making an illegal campaign contribution and served time in prison.
After the election, and before details of the underlying scheme and payment became publicly known, defendant reimbursed Cohen for the illegal payment through a series of monthly checks that were each disguised as a payment for legal services rendered in a given month of 2017 pursuant to a retainer agreement. The payment records, kept and maintained by the Trump Organization, were false entries in the business records of a New York enterprise: there was no retainer agreement, and Cohen was not being paid for legal services rendered in 2017. Defendant caused his entities' business records to be falsified to disguise his and others' criminal conduct — which included violations of state and federal election law; the falsification of additional business records; and the mischaracterization, for tax purposes, of the true nature of the payments to Cohen.
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[ pg 81 ]
CONCLUSION
Defendant is alleged to have lied in New York business records over and over to conceal the truth about his involvement in an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 presidential election. A grand jury decided based on the facts and the law to charge defendant with felony crimes for his conduct. This case should now proceed to trial. Defendant's omnibus motions should be denied.
DATED: November 9, 2023
Respectfully submitted,
ALVIN L. BRAGG, JR.
District Attorney, New York County
[emphasis added]
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DA Bragg sums up the importance of his case against Donald Trump, by describing it as the falsification of business records to conceal “an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 presidential election.”
SO you see, this is about much more than marital adultery and payments to a porn star.
For the sake of showing how this “hush money” label is an unfortunate journalistic shorthand, for the larger, more legally relevant crimes, allegedly committed by Defendant Trump — let’s take a closer look at the chronology of some of the pivot events. These whirlwind events, documented to have occurred in the closing days of the 2016 presidential election, provide color to the panic and “damage control” mode that the Trump Campaign had sunk to.
[Apologies in advance for triggering these forgotten memories, but they are relevant to case, especially since DA Bragg plans on hearing the testimony of Hope Hicks and David Pecker, in the upcoming trail.]
Detailed Timeline of Trump Hush Money-2016 Election Investigation
www.justsecurity.org — May 24, 2023
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October 7, 2016: The 2005 Access Hollywood tape of Trump saying “Grab ’em by the pussy” became public (The Washington Post).
October 8, 2016*: The very next day, Rodriguez, Davidson, and Howard reportedly began discussions about AMI purchasing Clifford’s story. They appear to have believed it was “more marketable [then] than it had been when Rodriguez first pitched Howard in April, before the Access Hollywood tape placed Trump’s treatment of women in the national spotlight” (The Fixers, p. 174).
*The timeline of events on October 8 is supplied primarily from two sources: The Fixers and Cohen’s search warrant.
October 8, 2016, Sourced from The Fixers
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- After 7:20 pm ET: “Cohen had a conference call with [Hope] Hicks and Trump, followed by a call with Hicks alone. Hicks had heard from another campaign aide” that there was another tape, “this one of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow during a trip there for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013. Hicks had been told that TMZ might have access to the tape, and she knew that Cohen was very close to Harvey Levin, the gossip outlet’s founder. Hicks asked Cohen to let her know if he heard anything from Levin. She also impressed on him … that the campaign’s messaging was that Trump’s remarks on the Access Hollywood were merely ‘locker room talk’” (The Fixers, p. 175; see also Cohen Warrant, p. 41).
- After Cohen’s call with Hicks: “Cohen, Pecker, and Howard exchanged a series of calls after Cohen got off the phone with Hicks. Cohen lobbied Pecker to buy Daniels’s [Clifford’s] story.” During these calls, Cohen sought to convince Pecker to purchase and not publish the story, as he had done with McDougal’s account in a practice known as “catch-and-kill” (The Fixers, p. 175).
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[emphasis added]
Many more sordid details about this “cover-up” timeline, which allegedly amounts to a conspiracy to commit election interference, can be found at that well documented link from JustSecurity.org.
The context matters. The timeline matters. Candidate Trump’s prospects were ‘on the rocks’ after the Hollywood Access story broke. Or as Clifford’s attorney, Keith Davidson, put it on October 8, 2016:
Davidson texted Howard that “‘Trump is fucked.’” Howard responded, “‘Wave the white flag. It’s over people!’” [Dylan Howard, was then the chief content officer at AMI.]
The timeline shows that the Trump Campaign was in serious “damage control” mode. They knew everything was already on the line, and THEN the Stormy Daniels story surfaced. They had to get a hold of the new story and disposed of it, at all costs. IF Trump was to have any chance to salvage a win.
IF it would have been published — as almost happened at AMI — then the painful chapter of American history otherwise known as the Trump presidency, never would have occurred.
Thus the payoff to Daniels, which ensured the damaging sordid story of Trump’s dalliance would never see the light of day. At least not, when it really mattered, to the Voters — already shell-shocked by the raging misogynist, masquerading as a viable presidential candidate — despite his celebrity interview that devolved (conveniently, and unbelievably) into some ad-hoc “locker-room talk” …
And so, yet another moray of American values falls by the wayside. Sadly, we only knew the half of it, back then.
Perhaps we should start calling it the “Voter Deception Case” instead — which really captures what it is all about ...
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Postscript: When that now-convicted misogynist continues to rage about “Election Interference” being ‘currently conducted against him’ — he certainly has some experience in that department. Expect his increasing desperate projections to continue, as he trashes America’s elections and Justice process, at every opportunity the News cameras continue to lend him.
It’s the only “cover story” ploy he has left. Since simply telling the truth, has never been a character trait, that he ever had in his toolbox.
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