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By Éric Lach
In 2006, at a celebrity passing tournament on the shores of Lake Tahoe, Donald Trump met adult film star Stormy Daniels. According to Daniels, things happened intimately. (“There was nothing crazy about sex,” he continued. ) A decade later, Trump ran for president as something of a Republican family man, gaining prominence among conservative and evangelical voters. Daniels decided to go public: Her encounter with Trump took place when he was already married to his third wife, Melania. Looking for a media outlet that could approach the story with the finesse it demanded, Daniels’ agent contacted the National Enquirer.
A day earlier, the Washington Post had posted the tape “Access Hollywood” on its website. Trump can be heard talking about grabbing women by the genitals. The Republican Party is panicking. Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House, told his colleagues that it was OK to “abandon” Trump, to save his own electoral skin in November. There has been talk of replacing him on the presidential list. In the midst of this frenzy, the editor of the National Enquirer contacted Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, who was given a sum of one hundred and thirty thousand dollars to buy Daniels’ silence and thus avoid some other scandal. Cohen paid the fees himself and reimbursed them through Trump. Organization into several installments known in company records as “installments” for “services rendered. “
Would Trump have lost the 2016 presidential election if Stormy Daniels had gone public?Manhattan prosecutors would probably think so. That question is at the heart of this week’s criminal trial against Trump, the first against a former president in U. S. history. Trump faces thirty-four counts of falsifying business records, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said is part of a plan to “conceal destructive data and illegal activities from the American electorate before and after the 2016 election. “The case is known as the “Stormy Daniels Case of Silence,” which has made it less difficult for the public to dismiss as it seems like a small thing. In fact, the argument put forward by prosecutors in court records centers on something closer to election interference. The case involves Trump, who lied before coming to power.
Many legal experts believe a guilty verdict is likely. “I think Bragg has shown that he wouldn’t have said yes if he hadn’t known it was a very smart deal,” said Andrew Weissmann, a law professor at New York University and told me former special counsel Robert Mueller in charge of the investigation. In many ways, this is an undeniable fraud case, with a documentary trail of evidence and a defendant with strong motives to commit the crime.
And yet, the case has also sparked heated debate among jurists and former prosecutors. Last year, after the indictment was announced, Boston University law professor Jed Shugerman wrote a hard-hitting op-ed in the Times titled “Trump’s Impeachment Is a Legal Embarrassment. “Shugerman is not a fan of Trump; I only had doubts about the strength of the case. “Even if he survives a challenge that may succeed in the Supreme Court, the trial will most likely not begin until at least mid-2024, perhaps even after the 2024 election,” he said. Wrote.
Part of that skepticism had to do with the original way Bragg made the accusations against Trump. In New York, falsifying a business record is a misdemeanor. However, the crime can become a felony if it is committed to facilitate and conceal a so-called underlying crime. In the Trump case, the underlying crimes discussed in the charging documents come with violations of federal election law, to which Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018. The Trump case is historic not only because it is the first of its kind involving to a former president. However, because it is a legal maneuver: using federal law to increase state fees for falsifying business records. “Expansion of jurisdiction,” Shugerman called it. And yet, the law professor recognizes today that he underestimated the case. “I still think there are people, well-intentioned people, who have priced this case on a curve,” he said. But he was convinced thanks to the arguments he heard from colleagues and friends. “Now I’m more likely to say that it’s right for the lawsuits to continue and that Trump deserves a chance at the appeals court,” he said. He also believes a conviction is likely.
Shugerman was convinced by legal arguments. Others are turning to the case because of the opportune moment. For much of the past year, Bragg’s case has been marred by other criminal cases opposing Trump — in Georgia, Florida and Washington, D. C. — regarding his pre- and post-presidency moves. Elections of 2020. Se thought to be more potent and vital than the Manhattan secret cash case. But, one after another, the other dossiers have been left behind. The Supreme Court intervened in the Jan. 6, 2021, case, particularly slowing down the process. procedures. In Georgia, the Fulton County District Attorney’s decision to have an appointment with the attorney he had turned to oversee his sprawling election interference case nearly derailed the whole thing. The trajectory of American history may now revolve around the Bragg case. , which is expected to last six to eight weeks. Trump will have to attend every day.
For years, Manhattan district attorney’s workplace officials referred to the hush money case as a “zombie case,” because of its propensity to come back from the dead. Inside the workplace, prosecutors engaged in the same debate about the viability of the case that would later erupt publicly, once the fees were announced regardless, in April 2023. “Paying cash for silence is not a crime under New York state law,” said Mark Pomerantz, an attorney who worked in the DA’s office. wrote, in “People v. Donald Trump,” a privileged account of the office’s investigation into the former president. The effort began under Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, Jr. , the son of Secretary of State Jimmy Carter, who had been criticized for dropping a 2012 case against two of Trump’s youths focused on his handling of the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium project in Lower Manhattan. In 2021, Vance recruited Pomerantz as assistant special counsel, to bolster the bureau’s prosecution of Trump.
In “The People vs. Donald Trump,” Pomerantz writes that he and other board members tried to be artistic in the case of zombies, to get around the upheavals that Shugerman and others would later identify. At one point, Pomerantz even thought of it as the concept of treating Cohen and Trump’s payment to Daniels as an act of extortion by the adult film actress, a way of portraying Trump as both victim and culprit in the same case. Even if Trump had been extorted, falsifying business records is a crime. . Eventually, that and other investigations failed, Pomerantz writes, and the zombie case “went back to the grave” in March 2021, when the bureau turned its attention to an investigation into Trump’s asset price inflation.
In November 2021, Bragg was elected to succeed Vance as Manhattan District Attorney and took office the following January. He looked at the inflated assets case that Pomerantz and others had worked on and made the resolution not to pursue it further. Pomerantz resigned. In his resignation letter he criticized Bragg. “I am concerned that his resolution means that Mr. Trump will not be fully held accountable for his crimes,” Pomerantz wrote. “I have worked too hard as a lawyer, and for too long, to become a passive component of what I consider a serious lack of justice. »He spent part of the following year preparing “The People Against Donald Trump,” in which he calls Bragg a coward who hesitated to go after Trump for political reasons. But Pomerantz also admits to having a little tunnel vision on his part. “Alvin would possibly have had an idea that some of us, and perhaps me especially, had become Captain Ahab in the pursuit of Donald Trump as the ‘great white whale’ of accused criminals, and that we had lost our attitude and our ability to read the facts. as it should be because we sought with all our might to reach that mark in our lives,” Pomerantz wrote. He doubted Bragg would ever register charges opposing Trump and wondered what that would mean for the country and the rule of law. The e-book was published in February 2023. Two months later, Bragg accused Trump.
Questions remain about Bragg’s case: Why haven’t federal prosecutors brought such charges against Trump, for example? (In Cohen’s federal case, Trump was known in court records as “Individual-1. “) But one user who has never downplayed Bragg’s case is Trump himself. Just this week, he asked his attorneys to make three separate attempts to postpone the case, all without success. He doesn’t need to face a jury. Things don’t end well for him in court. Last year, the courts ordered him to pay about one hundred million dollars to journalist E. Jean Carroll (whom Trump attacked in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodguy in the 1990s and later defamed him) and almost one billion dollars to the State of NY. York for inflating his wealth in his monetary statements. (New York Attorney General Letitia James took the case to civil court after Bragg abandoned it in criminal court. ) Trump has denounced the secrecy case as a politically motivated targeted prosecution intended to damage his electoral prospects. . “Democrats are salivating,” Trump wrote in an email to his supporters this month. “They think the photographs of me sitting in court will mark the end of the MAGA movement. ” Does the Trump component also think the same? I have had the joy of seeing him in a courtroom on several occasions. When he’s forced to sit quietly for a while, it’s less difficult to realize that he’s an older guy who’s in serious legal trouble. “Haggard,” two veteran political journalists agreed, after sitting in Judge Juan Merchán’s courtroom in Manhattan Criminal Court a few weeks ago and watching Trump walk down the aisle during a break in a one-day initial hearing.
Weissguyn, a former member of the Mueller investigation, told me that Trump’s legal team, led by Todd Blanche and Susan Necheles, was “really smart. “He compared Necheles to John Adams protecting British infantrymen after the Boston Massacre. But Trump has a knack for making even the smartest lawyers look bad. Earlier this week, it was revealed that Blanche had sent a subpoena to a guy named Jeremy Rosenberg, who lives in Brooklyn, thinking he was the Jeremy Rosenberg who had once been an investigator in the district attorney’s office. “I don’t have any records for you,” the Brooklyn boy replied to Blanche, adding that he kept the fifteen dollars they sent him to offset the charge of printing and mailing the requested documents.
By and large, Trump’s legal strategy in his cases has been to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. He has denied wrongdoing, but in practice his lawyers have focused less on his presumption of innocence than on procedural and constitutional objections. Trump, the master of optics and narrative, is reduced to technical arguments. When it became clear that those technical arguments were invalid in his civil instances, Trump resorted to action. He disappointed the judges, muttered and complained inwardly. within earshot of the jury. ” I’d love to,” he growled, when a ruling at the time of Carroll’s two lawsuits against him threatened to evict him from the courtroom.
There is no doubt that Trump will try to make his trial in Manhattan as unpleasant for everyone as it is for him. Previously, he publicly attacked Judge Merchan’s daughter, who worked on the virtual campaigns of Democratic Party candidates. Merchan has tried to set the limits of Trump’s rhetoric on the issue, however, the former president is determined to test those limits. He has already blatantly called for violence. ” How many corrupt, biased, corrupt New York judges of Joe Biden – “Protection Agency”?”Do I have to submit before someone steps in?” she recently wrote about Truth Social, her social media platform. Such outbursts are likely to intensify as the trial progresses.
There’s an old saying in American politics that a campaign’s most valuable resource is the candidate’s time. Four days a week for the next month and a half, Trump will be present in the Merchan courtroom, where cameras and cellphones are allowed, cut off from the rest of the world. In addition to Cohen and Daniels, witnesses are likely to come with former White House communications director Hope Hicks, former National Enquirer editor David Pecker and other Trumpworld figures. It’s like the end of “Seinfeld,” with all those minor actors returning while the protagonist faces legal consequences. If convicted, legal experts are divided on the kind of consequences you would face. Falsifying records in the first degree is punishable by up to 4 years in criminal punishment and a fine of $5,000. But if Trump is convicted, Merchan will have discretion to decide the sentence. As a first-time offender, criminal conviction is a certainty. And the Constitution prohibits a convicted felon from serving as president. ♦
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