Donald Trump’s Day in Court
The case against him is about more than Stormy Daniels.
Yesterday, Donald Trump became the first president, current or former, to be charged with a crime.
Prosecutors accused him of coordinating a scheme during the 2016 presidential campaign to cover up potential sex scandals and of committing fraud to keep them quiet. Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges in a Manhattan court.
Court filings detailed several instances in which Trump allegedly bought the silence of others during the campaign to bury damaging stories. By pointing to those examples, prosecutors described a pattern of behavior that could help convince a judge and jury that Trump is guilty.
You might be wondering why Trump’s sex life, falsehoods and campaign dealings from years ago are worthy of criminal charges. After all, most of us are used to politicians, particularly Trump, misleading the public. And Trump routinely bragged about his sexual endeavors when he was a celebrity real estate developer.
The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, argued that Trump had gone above embellishing or misleading the public and, through the hush money scheme, had violated a number of laws to deceive voters. “That payment was to hide damaging information from the voting public,” Bragg said.
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Trump continued to portray the charges against him as politically motivated and unfair when he spoke last night at his home in Florida, where he flew after he appeared in court in New York. “This fake case was brought only to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election, and it should be dropped immediately,” he said.
Trump’s unhappiness about the indictment came through in his speech. “He’s angry and vengeful, soaked in grievance,” my colleague Jonathan Swan wrote. “Nothing boisterous or celebratory about it, as some predicted.”
Today’s newsletter will explain the charges, the scandals behind the case and other details we learned from Trump’s arraignment.
Three scandals
All of the criminal charges are related to a $130,000 hush payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who says she had an affair with Trump. Bragg suggested that he would try to demonstrate in court that the payout to her was how Trump did business, not a one-off mistake. “It’s not just about one payment,” he said.
Court documents laid out three instances in which prosecutors said Trump had suppressed information during the presidential race. All were already public. “It is still extraordinary to hear the district attorney telling this story in the context of a criminal arraignment,” my colleague Jonah Bromwich wrote.
First, Daniels. During the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, she tried to sell her story of a decade-old affair with Trump, which he denies. Daniels’s representatives approached The National Enquirer. But its publisher, David Pecker, was a longtime ally of Trump’s who had agreed to look out for potentially damaging stories about him. Eventually, he helped arrange a deal in which Trump’s lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about the affair.
Later, when he was president, Trump reimbursed Cohen, and prosecutors say that’s where the fraud began. Trump’s company classified the repayment as legal expenses, citing a retainer agreement. Prosecutors say there were no such expenses, and that the retainer was nonexistent. The felony counts related to invoices Cohen submitted, checks Trump wrote to reimburse Cohen and Trump Organization ledger entries that recorded the reimbursements.
Prosecutors also raised the account of another woman, Karen McDougal, who says she had an affair with Trump, which he denies as well. McDougal, a former Playboy playmate of the year, had similarly tried to sell her story during the campaign and reached a $150,000 agreement with The National Enquirer. Rather than publish her account, the tabloid suppressed it in cooperation with Trump and Cohen, prosecutors say.
Finally, prosecutors invoked a payment to a former Trump Tower doorman. He claimed that Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock. The National Enquirer paid $30,000 for the rights to his story, although it eventually concluded that his claim was false.
The charges
The charges against Trump are all counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors elevated the charges to felonies from misdemeanors by alleging they were linked to violations of election and tax laws. They suggested that the Daniels payment amounted to an illegal campaign contribution, as covering up Trump’s affairs might have benefited his 2016 campaign. And by disguising the payments as legal expenses, Trump also tried to misrepresent the payments to the tax authorities, Bragg said.
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New York prosecutors have never brought an election-law case involving a federal election before. The unique charges and circumstances of charging a former president could make the case harder to win, because courts often rely on past cases to issue rulings, as this newsletter has explained.
But the connection between falsifying business records and potential tax law violations could put the case on firmer ground, as my colleague Charlie Savage wrote. Compared with the election-related allegations, the tax claim is “a much simpler charge that avoids the potential pitfalls,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a New York Law School professor and former prosecutor.
Trump’s supporters, and even some of his critics, have argued that the charges stretch the limits of the law. They point out that other prosecutors didn’t file charges over the hush payments and claim that Bragg himself at one point gave up on the case. “Alvin Bragg is picking up the trash that the U.S. attorney’s office wouldn’t touch, that his predecessor wouldn’t touch, that he wouldn’t even touch the first time,” said Jim Trusty, a lawyer who is representing Trump for federal investigations.
What’s next? The case is expected to last awhile. The next in-person hearing is scheduled for Dec. 4. By then, the 2024 Republican primary campaign will be in full swing.
More Trump news
Inside the courtroom, Trump sat mostly silent as prosecutors described the case against him. He leaned forward to enter his plea of “not guilty.”
Trump was released after his arraignment. That wasn’t special treatment: In 2020, a New York law eliminated bail for most nonviolent crimes.
Protesters on both sides gathered outside the courthouse. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene made an appearance but was ushered away as demonstrators banged on her car’s windows.
Trump had no mug shot taken. Still, his campaign put a fake one on a T-shirt.
We don’t yet know who will pay Trump’s legal bills — him or his donors.
Most hush payments are not a crime, but the question is murkier for politicians.
The White House hopes the chaos of Trump’s legal challenges will remind some voters why they chose President Biden in 2020.
Read the indictment, with annotations.
