Thirty-four counts of “falsifying business records in the first degree.”
Those are the charges against former President Donald Trump in the first indictment of a current or former U.S. president.
The indictment, handed down by a New York grand jury last week, was made public Tuesday afternoon after Trump was arraigned in a New York state court, where he pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The charges stem from a hush money payment of $130,000 that Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen made to porn actor Stormy Daniels in the final days of the 2016 presidential election.
The payoff, prosecutors say, was part of an illegal “scheme” conceived by Trump and his associates to “identify and suppress” stories damaging to his candidacy. The practice is known in the industry as “catch and kill.”
Cohen was later reimbursed for the payment, and in 2018 he pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the secret effort.
‘Critical false statement’
At the center of the conspiracy was what Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg called a “critical false statement” repeated over and over: Cohen was being reimbursed for “legal services” performed in 2017.
To reimburse Cohen for the hush money payment to Daniels, Trump or his company made monthly payments of $35,000 to the lawyer under a “retainer agreement” that did not exist, prosecutors say.
The payments took place over the course of 2017, Trump’s first year in the White House.
Each criminal count against Trump represents a “false entry in business records” made in connection with a single reimbursement installment to Cohen.
Count one, for example, is related to the first invoice that Cohen submitted to the Trump Organization on February 14, 2017.
Counts two and three are related to vouchers created by the Trump Organization, while count four is related to a check made out to Cohen by Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust.
In all, Cohen received 11 checks: two from Trump’s trust and nine from Trump’s personal bank account.
“Each check was processed by the Trump Organization, and each check was disguised as a payment for legal services rendered in a given month of 2017 pursuant to a retainer agreement,” prosecutors say. “The payment records, kept and maintained by the Trump Organization, were false New York business records.”
Falsifying business records or making “a false entry in the business records of an enterprise” is a crime in New York.
The offense is typically charged as a misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in prison. But it rises to the level of a felony — punishable by up to four years in prison — when it is carried out with the intent to commit or conceal “another crime.”
The indictment doesn’t specify Trump’s alleged “other crime.” But an accompanying statement of facts points to at least three: a state campaign finance crime, a federal campaign finance crime, and a tax crime, said Joshua Stanton, an attorney at the Perry Guha law firm.
“I think it’s entirely possible that they’ll say with respect to each one of these counts that he had the intent to commit several different crimes,” Stanton said in an interview with VOA.
“And it also gives the Manhattan DA something of a sure footing in the highly likely event that Trump filed the motion to dismiss,” Stanton said.
Trump’s lawyers have said they’ll seek to have the charges dismissed.
A new revelation
John Malcolm, a vice president at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said while the case is not “particularly strong,” it can’t be dismissed out of hand either.
“These are felony offenses. You have to take them seriously,” Malcolm told VOA. “But I do think it’s a very unusual charge.”
Both the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission — the bodies tasked with investigating violations of federal campaign finance laws — examined the payment at the center of the Trump indictment and closed their investigations without charging him, he noted.
But the Trump indictment is not solely focused on the Stormy Daniels payment. In a new revelation, prosecutors allege that in 2015, the publisher of the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer paid a former Trump Tower doorman $30,000 to prevent him from going public about a child that Trump had allegedly fathered out of wedlock.
The story turned out to be false, but Cohen allegedly stopped the publisher from releasing the doorman from a confidentiality agreement.
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