Prosecutors tie Trump hush money to 2016 election
What happened
The case of The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump began in earnest this week, with prosecutors pledging to prove that hush-money payments and falsified business records were part of an attempt to meddle in the 2016 presidential election. During the campaign, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo argued in his opening statement, Trump spearheaded “an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election” by buying up unflattering stories about himself. And when repaying fixer Michael Cohen $130,000 for hush money given to quash porn star Stormy Daniels’ story of a tryst, Colangelo said, Trump fraudulently recorded the sum as “legal fees.” Former National Enquirer owner David Pecker, the first witness, testified that in an August 2015 meeting Trump directly asked him to find ways to “help the campaign.” Pecker said he participated in a “catch and kill” scheme that bought the silence of Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also claimed to have slept with Trump.
“Donald Trump is innocent,” defense attorney Todd Blanche countered in his opener, and “had nothing to do” with recording the financial transactions. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence the election,” he added. “It’s called democracy.” In a separate hearing this week to determine whether Trump’s recent social media posts about trial participants violated a gag order, Blanche said his client had simply responded to “political attacks.” Judge Juan Merchan was unconvinced, telling Blanche, “You are losing all credibility with the court.” Hours later, Trump took to Truth Social again, blasting the “Corrupt D.A.” and calling Merchan a “Rigged Judge who is working for the Democrat Party.”
What the columnists said
In this historic trial, “it all comes down to criminal intent,” said Robert Katzberg in Slate. And prosecutors have an important piece of new evidence: a 2016 election-night text to Pecker, from the lawyer who crafted the “catch and kill” contracts, lamenting, “What have we done?” That makes it hard to argue that the deals weren’t “connected to the election.” It was a surprise, too, that the defense proclaimed Trump “innocent”—a word lawyers “typically stay away from” because they need only raise reasonable doubt.
A tabloid kingpin: What a fittingly “Trumpy” first witness, said Chris Brennan in USA Today. Pecker testified that, through Cohen, Trump ordered stories taking down his 2016 primary rivals. He said the Enquirer faked a photo purportedly showing the father of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in cahoots with JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald—a claim Trump would repeat often—and ran stories linking Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) to drug trafficking. Pecker characterized Trump as a “micromanager,” which suggests Trump can’t claim ignorance of the transactions.
Yet I fear this case will be “a historic mistake,” said law professor Jed Handelsman Shugerman in The New York Times. Falsifying business records is usually a misdemeanor, and to elevate it to a felony, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is employing a tangle of “untested legal interpretations and applications” of state and federal statutes, stretching the definition of “election interference” to include anything that might sway voters. The payments themselves are “not unusual or illegal,” said Jonathan Turley in the New York Post. There’s a reason Bragg’s prosecutorial approach hasn’t been tried before: A presidential candidate paying hush money to prevent a sex scandal, while seamy, is “not a crime.”
In court, though, Trump is not projecting the confidence of someone on the cusp of vindication, said Molly Jong-Fast in Vanity Fair. The 77-year-old looks “sad, old, and tired.” Trapped in a chilly courtroom—he pleaded through his lawyers to have the thermostat turned up “just one degree”—he’s not even “allowed to drink Diet Coke.” When he isn’t dozing off, he stares into space.
But out of court, Trump is feisty, said Andrew Egger in The Bulwark. He has “utterly ignored” Merchan’s gag order, spewing venom at him, Bragg, Cohen, and the jury. Perhaps he knows that “the more acting out” he does, “the greater his chances of conga-lining the whole proceeding into a mistrial” that will help him politically. Only one-third of American voters believe Trump acted illegally in this case. And Trump has already raised $5.6 million in the first week of the trial, through fundraising emails arguing that the trial is a witch hunt. You can almost hear the justice system “creaking from the strain of trying to contain him.” Will it be able to?