Prosecutors say Donald J. Trump and two confidants hatched a plan in August 2015 to boost his upstart presidential campaign. They did it, and Trump won the election.
Almost nine years later, Trump will be running against the same people: Michael Cohen and David Pecker. But unlike his previous meetings, he will not be sitting at a desk in his 26th-floor Trump Tower office, but in the defendant’s chair in a lower Manhattan courtroom.
Trump’s criminal trial is set to begin in earnest on Monday, with several of Trump’s former allies expected to take the witness stand and testify in a bid to make him the first president to be convicted of a felony. has been done.
Trump is charged in a 34-count indictment with falsifying business records to conceal $130,000 in hush money he paid to a former porn star to influence the 2016 election. Within two weeks of the election, Mr. Cohen paid Stormy Daniels to keep silent about the woman’s claims that she had a sexual relationship with Mr. Trump 10 years ago.
Lawyers defending Mr. Trump, who denies having sex with Mr. Trump, claim that Mr. Trump’s employees were responsible for creating a document that falsely stated hush money repayments were used to pay legal costs to Mr. Cohen. There is a high possibility that it will.
But prosecutors under Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg will seek to prove that the payments were part of a larger effort to suppress negative news about Trump in order to sway the election. Dew. They will argue that the scheme resulted in not only the hush money payment at the center of the case, but also two other payments.
The other episodes are not included in the formal charges in the case, but prosecutors say the real purpose of the payments to Daniels were election-related, a federal campaign finance violation, and that his company’s records are They will use them to claim that they have been tampered with. To hide it. The accusation that Trump covered up another crime raises what would normally be a misdemeanor charge to a felony.
The Trump Tower meeting in August 2015 was the beginning of a story that prosecutors had foreseen in their filings and court arguments. Details in this article are extracted from court documents, interviews with people involved or familiar with the case, personal correspondence, and other records.
Mr. Cohen was a lawyer and Mr. Trump’s dogged fixer. Mr. Pecker is the publisher of the National Enquirer and has been friendly with Mr. Trump since the 1990s.
Trump had announced his presidential campaign activities The plan the men devised two months later was simple. Mr. Pecker would use the Enquirer to publish positive articles about Mr. Trump’s campaign and negative articles about his rivals. If the Enquirer learned of a story that could threaten Trump, he intended to alert him through Cohen. The Enquirer may buy the rights to those stories to suppress a practice known in the tabloid world as “catch-and-kill.”
“The purpose of the Trump Tower meeting was to control the flow of information reaching voters, emphasizing positive information and concealing or exaggerating negative information,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said. told Judge Juan M. Marchan. Hush money case in court.
One of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, asked Judge Marchand to suppress evidence about the meeting and other hush-money deals, arguing that a “collateral trial” would prejudice jurors.
“This is to embarrass President Trump,” he complained, but the judge disagreed.
Trump’s allies paid a price to help him. Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance crimes in 2018. The Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., entered into a deal that year to avoid federal prosecution. admitted to trying to illegally influence the election. He is expected to testify on the stand that the payments to Daniels were aimed at getting Trump elected.
After Mr. Cohen and Mr. Pecker met in Mr. Trump’s office, it took only a few months for the first situation to arise that required their attention.
doorman
That information had the potential to be explosive. Dino Sajudin, a former doorman at a Manhattan building managed by the Trump Organization, filed a complaint with the Enquirer in late 2015. He said he heard from other employees that Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman who worked for the Trump Organization. he.
In November 2015, American Media guaranteed Sajuddin $30,000 to publish a story based on his tip, and reporters began an investigation.
They did not immediately warn Cohen or Trump. First, Enquirer editor Dylan Howard tried to determine whether the information was accurate. According to a memo written by Howard, the tabloid arranged for Sajudin to take a lie detector test.
Tests showed that Mr. Sajuddin was telling the truth about what he had heard, but Enquirer reporters doubted that the child was actually Mr. Trump’s. She looked a lot like the Trump Organization driver she knew as her father.
Mr. Cohen, who was Mr. Trump’s special counsel at the time, learned of the doorman’s allegations after a reporter contacted the company. He was furious and called Mr. Howard, claiming the story was false.
Nevertheless, American Media amended its contract to pay Mr. Sajudin regardless of whether the Enquirer published anything. The amendment also included a confidentiality clause that would require him to pay the company $1 million if he leaked the information elsewhere.
Even if it wasn’t true, the story still jeopardized Trump’s chances in the 2016 election. The threat is now neutralized. Staff at the research firm were told not to pursue the story further.
Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors said in a court filing last year that even though Mr. Pecker had concluded that Mr. Sajuddin’s story was not true, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors had removed Mr. Sajuddin from a non-disclosure agreement until Mr. Trump won the election. He said he was not released. They say that shows the real purpose of the deal.
By mid-2016, Trump had pushed all of his other Republican rivals out of the race. As the general election campaign against Hillary Clinton began, women with Trump pasts began looking to sell their stories.
The woman, Karen McDougall, was Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1998. Ms. McDougall said she met Mr. Trump at the Playboy Mansion in June 2006 and they began a 10-month relationship at his bungalow in Beverly. The Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, his golf course in New Jersey, and his Trump Tower apartment.
McDougal, who lives in Arizona, saw an opportunity to revive her flagging modeling career. In June 2016, she hired Beverly Hills attorney Keith Davidson to represent her in the sale of her own story. Mr. Davidson contacted Mr. Howard, the Enquirer editor.
At a meeting in Los Angeles, Mr. Howard informed Mr. McDougall, but Mr. McDougall was reluctant to come forward.
Mr. Howard then jumped on a three-way call with Mr. Pecker and Mr. Cohen. Mr Howard conveyed Ms McDougall’s hesitation and said she had not shown any clear evidence of her extramarital affair. The Enquirer has decided not to buy her story for the time being.
That has changed. A tabloid executive told prosecutors that Mr. Trump personally called Mr. Pecker in late June and asked him to refrain from speaking to Mr. McDougal.
After conversations she started with ABC News about telling her story on air became serious, American Media approached her with an offer.
company In early August, they agreed to pay McDougall $150,000. for the rights to her article, which the Enquirer never published. To camouflage the purpose of her contract, her contract guaranteed that American Media would have the right to put her on the cover of two magazines and publish a fitness column by her.
Mr. Davidson also represented Mr. Daniels in the hush-money deal and is likely to testify about both agreements. Prosecutors also cited other evidence they may use in court documents. It was a recording Cohen secretly made of Trump on his cellphone while the men were discussing a deal to buy the rights to McDougall’s store. A story from Mr. Pecker.
“So what do we have to pay for this? Fifty-tenths?” Trump asked in the recording.
porn star
Daniels also tried to capitalize on Trump’s momentum in early 2016.
Her representatives contacted Howard and other editors at other publications to say she had a sexual relationship with Trump in 2006 while he was attending a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. She asked for about $200,000 to tell her story.
Daniels had no takers. Howard considered her story to be of little value because it had already been written on gossip sites in 2011. At the time, she publicly denied the encounter.
But a month before the general election, her story suddenly became more valuable. Washington Post, October 7, 2016 The recording has been released Video of Trump talking about groping women on the set of “Access Hollywood.” The ensuing uproar led to renewed negotiations between Mr. Daniels and the Enquirer. Her agent negotiated a price of $120,000 with Mr. Howard, but Mr. Pecker did not want to spend any more after paying Mr. McDougall and broke the deal.
“I can’t pay 120,000,” Pecker texted. They agreed that Mr. Cohen must address the issue.
“I spoke to MC. Everything is cleared up,” Howard later texted Pecker. “It won’t leave fingerprints.”
When recording for “Access Hollywood” began, Mr. Cohen was in London visiting his daughter, who was studying abroad. He responded to a three-way call with Trump and campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks, and then spoke alone with Hicks about damage control. Mr. Hicks is also expected to testify.
Prosecutor Steinglass said in court that after the recordings came to light, Trump was desperate to “contain the Stormy Daniels incident” and prevent further harm.
On October 10, Mr. Cohen began negotiating a price with Mr. Davidson, the attorney representing Mr. Daniels, and the case was settled for $130,000. In the non-disclosure agreement, Mr. Daniels was identified under the pseudonym Peggy Peterson (“PP”) and Mr. Trump was identified under the pseudonym David Dennison (“DD”).
But Mr. Cohen delayed payments for several weeks, and Mr. Daniels began contacting the press again.
With the election rapidly approaching, Mr. Cohen withdrew funds from his home equity line of credit on October 27 and transferred them to Mr. Daniels’ lawyer through a shell company.
Her silence was assured.