Trump’s Manhattan Trial Is About a Lot More Than Hush Money
In April 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced that his office had charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. The case is historic. It is the first ever prosecution of an American president (current or former), and one of the most important trials of alleged election wrongdoing in American history. My book, Trying Trump: A Guide to His First Election Interference Criminal Trial, is a complete guide to understanding what will happen and why it matters.
As DA Bragg has explained, the Manhattan case charges Trump with “conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.” The trial will center on Trump’s alleged efforts to conceal a hush money payment made to Stephanie Clifford, an adult film star also known as Stormy Daniels, for the exclusive rights to her story of a sexual encounter with Trump. As part of an alleged “catch and kill” scheme orchestrated by Trump with his fixer Michael Cohen and David Pecker, the former CEO of American Media, Inc. (AMI), which published supermarket tabloids including the National Enquirer, Cohen paid Daniels $130,000. Trump reimbursed Cohen, and Trump and Cohen allegedly falsified their business records to conceal the true nature of those payments, which the District Attorney’s Office alleges should have been claimed as a campaign-related expense. The 34 counts consist of one count for each of the 11 checks to reimburse Cohen, also for 11 fake corresponding invoices and 12 corresponding false ledger entries.
Make no mistake: The Manhattan case is not just about hush money. According to the presiding judge, Justice Juan Merchan, “the charges arise from allegations that Defendant attempted to conceal an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 presidential election.” As Bragg described it, the “core” of the case “is not money for sex... It’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then... lying in New York business records to cover it up… That’s the heart of the case.” Bragg and his team built the case as a “clear-cut instance of election interference, in which a candidate defrauded the American people to win the White House in 2016.”