As jurors consider their verdict, it’s worth reviewing the basics of the prosecution’s case against Trump.
Trump is accused of signing onto a scheme to illegally falsify records to conceal a $130,000 “hush payment” that Cohen paid to Daniels in 2016. Prosecutors say the scheme was designed to subvert election laws and keep the payment secret.
The defendants allege that Trump falsely represented the repayment of the $130,000 payments throughout his first year in office as monthly checks for ongoing legal services. Each of the 34 counts deals with vouchers, invoices and checks that arose from payments to Cohen.
Prosecutors began their case by calling a wave of witnesses and laying out a broader “catch-and-kill” plan to quash negative reporting about Trump during the 2016 election.
David Pecker was CEO of American Media, the parent company of the tabloid newspaper National Enquirer, in 2016. A longtime friend of Trump, Pecker testified about how Trump and Cohen schemed to prevent negative stories about Trump from surfacing in the months leading up to the election. The Enquirer also published negative stories about Trump’s opponents and positive stories about Trump. Pecker said the tabloid would run Cohen’s stories before they were published.
Pecker told jurors that he agreed to be the “eyes and ears” of the campaign during a meeting at Trump Tower in August 2015. This “catch and kill” strategy resulted in the suppression of three stories by Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal and Dino Sajudin. The copyrights to the McDougal and Sajudin stories were bought by AMI, and Cohen paid Daniels himself.
In his closing argument, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said AMI’s purchase of articles on behalf of then-candidate Trump, in coordination with the campaign, constituted illegal campaign contributions. “It turned out to be one of the most valuable contributions anyone has made to the campaign, and it may have helped elect Trump,” Steinglass said.
Essentially, this was a case about documents, and through witnesses such as the Trump Organization’s former comptroller Jeff McConney and the company’s payroll manager Deborah Tarasoff, prosecutors walked jurors through allegedly falsified business records and numerous documents they said supported their case.
During the trial, prosecutors presented bank records, emails, text messages, phone records and two documents handwritten by Allen Weisselberg and McConney detailing the amounts to be repaid to Cohen, which they called “smoking gun.”
They have pieced together a timeline of events that they say leads to only one conclusion: that the business records were falsified with Trump’s knowledge and consent as part of a larger effort to aid his candidacy and prevent voters from learning potentially damaging information before the 2016 election.
