How a hush money scandal led to Trump's first criminal trial

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NEW YORK — It was a fairy tale that Donald Trump loved before politics: A porn actor says he had sex.

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But in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Trump feared a story he believed to be false would cost him votes. So, prosecutors say, he arranged to pay Stormy Daniels to keep quiet.

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Now, after years of back-and-forth until his indictment last year, Trump will stand trial in New York on Monday on state charges related to a sex scandal he and his aides tried to cover up.

Barring a last-minute delay, this would be the first of Trump's four criminal cases to go to trial. It will be the first criminal trial of a former president, an unprecedented event in US history.

It is not always clear that allegations of hush money would even lead to charges, even if they would have been the first to go to court. This is the most dangerous of Trump's accusations, with others threatening government secrets and democracy.

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Still, it's clearly the thinnest of the expected, with evidence of marital infidelity, a supermarket tabloid's involvement in an undercover operation, and payments orchestrated by a former Trump loyalist who now counts himself among the ex-president's enemies.

Many details of the case have been public since 2018, when federal prosecutors charged former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen with campaign finance crimes in connection with a scheme to bury not only Daniels' claims but other potentially damaging incidents from Trump's playboy past.

They later identified Trump as “Individual-1” in court filings, directing Cohen's efforts. Justice Department policy prohibits criminal charges against a sitting president, but nothing has come of it.

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In the years since, sagas of sex, politics and cover-ups have mostly faded from the undercover headlines with the investigation into Russian election meddling, Trump's two impeachments and allegations that he planned to sabotage the 2020 election and collected classified documents after leaving office.

Former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is investigating the circumstances of Cohen's $130,000 payment to Daniels and has declined to take the politically explosive step of seeking Trump's indictment.

The district attorney's office was so suspicious of the hush money case that it became known among prosecutors as a “zombie case.” They'll revise it and then abandon it because they've prosecuted Trump on multiple fronts over the past five years, twice going to the Supreme Court to get his tax returns and prosecuting his company and a top official for tax fraud.

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Vance's successor, Alvin Bragg, a Democrat who takes office in January 2022, has a different view of monetary peace.

The grand jury convened in January 2023. He heard from Cohen, an outspoken critic of his former boss, and other witnesses, including the former publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid. a practice known as “catch-and-kill”.

On March 30, 2023, a grand jury voted to indict Trump on charges of falsifying his company's internal records to pay him for his work covering up embarrassing incidents. The charges are felonies that carry up to four years in prison, although there is no guarantee that a conviction will result in prison time.

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Trump has denied the allegations, saying prosecutors are engaged in “election meddling” and a “witch hunt.” He pleaded not guilty.

In a court filing, Bragg's office described the allegations as another case of Trump meddling in the election, accusing the Republican of “orchestrating an extensive and corrupt scheme to conceal damaging information from the voting public” and “undermining the integrity of the 2016 presidential election.” »

In the charging documents, prosecutors described a multi-part scheme to suppress stories about Trump's extramarital sex dating back to the early days of the 2016 campaign.

Prosecutors say that before the Daniels payment, Cohen arranged for a $150,000 payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who told the National Enquirer she had a one-month affair with Trump. The tabloid also paid $30,000 to a Trump Tower doorman who it claimed had a story about a child Trump had out of wedlock.

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In 2005, Cohen was ordered to pay off Daniels, reeling from a never-before-seen October surprise taping of Access Hollywood, which boasted about grabbing women's genitalia. In 2006, the celebrity had sex while playing golf in Lake Tahoe, California, according to the indictment.

Five days after the impeachment, Trump's sentencing was a spectacle that drew crowds of media, supporters and protesters. His trial will be held in the same courtroom and in the same October.

After Trump's New York impeachment, others followed suit.

Within 70 days, special counsel Jack Smith in Florida accused Trump of storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home. Fifty-four days later, Smith accused Trump in Washington of trying to sabotage the 2020 election ahead of a January 6, 2021 coup. Two weeks later, Fulton County District Attorney Fannie Willis in Atlanta indicted Trump on racketeering and other charges in a similar anti-election case.

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While the New York case is moving forward quickly, Trump's other criminal cases are unlikely to go to trial before the November election.

The Atlanta case has been slowed by allegations of impropriety against the top prosecutor, an appeal of the Washington case over the issue of statutory immunity from the Supreme Court, and the Florida prosecution with multiple pending motions.

“Partly it's because there are fewer practical obstacles to moving this case forward, and it's probably an easier case to some extent,” said Alex Reinert, a professor at Benjamin Cardozo Law School in New York. City.

Trump has repeatedly tried to delay the trial in New York. His lawyers were rejected three times this week when they tried to get the state appeals court to delay the case.

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The case has some cautious parallels with the Justice Department's failed prosecution of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards in its allegations of large payments to suppress an election-year sex story. He has been charged with campaign finance crimes in connection with nearly $1 million secretly given to him by two wealthy donors who helped cover up his pregnancy during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

Defense attorneys argued that the money was not given to boost his chances of running for office, but to hide the affair from his wife. Edwards was ultimately acquitted on one count, while jurors deadlocked on five other counts.

Jeremy Saland, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney who now works as a criminal defense attorney, says that because of the scale of the case, Bragg must believe he has a winning case against Trump.

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“He has to walk into the courtroom believing he has the goods,” Saland said. “Otherwise, it could be catastrophic for the American psyche — a former president could fall flat on his feet and be prosecuted in a case that appears to be bogus, if not true.”

But he said the allegations, if proven, would still be “serious misconduct by someone who was vying to be the leader of the free world at the time.” For those who say, “Come on, it's just hush money,'' he said he believes that “we hold elected officials to a higher standard and we scrutinize them more closely, and rightly so.

— Tucker reported from Washington.

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