The prosecution wanted to make it clear on the first day: the trial against Donald Trump – the first time in history that a former US president is subject to criminal proceedings – It is not a sexual scandal but it goes much further than that. Although the plot talks about infidelity with a porn actress, a playboy bunny and a series of betrayals, the accusation against the former head of the White House said this Monday that the case is “an attempt to interfere in 2016 elections”, to hide negative information about the candidate for the White House from voters. Trump denied the charges and pleaded not guilty.
Wearing a dark suit and blue tie, Trump, 77, was present in the Manhattan court on the first day of the trial in the case of payment to porn actress Stephanie Gliffords, now 45, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels.
In their allegations, prosecutors claim that, when he was already president, Trump allowed his company to falsify records to hide the disbursements he had made to Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and confidant. Who was the one who paid US$130,000 to Daniels? so that he would not talk about the relationship during the campaign.
The Prosecutor’s Office was concerned with framing the process not as a minor crime (the falsification of accounting documents) but as something more serious (the violation of the electoral campaign financing law). He could be sentenced to 4 years in prison and thus see his political career complicated, although if he still won the elections in November he could still govern from prison.
“This case is about a criminal association. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a plan to manipulate the 2016 election. He then covered it up by repeatedly lying in his New York business documents,” Matthew Colangelo, one of the three prosecutors, said in his opening statement.
The plot
“In the end, we are confident that they will have no reasonable doubt that Trump is guilty of falsifying documents with the intention of hiding an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the elections,” he added, addressing the 12 jurors, while the magnate shook his head.
Evidently, without saying so, the prosecution sought to link what happened in the 2016 elections with its actions 4 years later, in 2020, when it did not know the result of the elections that gave Joe Biden the winner and He allegedly sought to manipulate electoral authorities according to another judgment that follows separately.
“Donald Trump is innocent, he has not committed any crime,” said lawyer Blanche, who then attacked the credibility of Cohen and Daniels calling them consummate liars, motivated by resentment and money.
Daniels says she met Trump in 2006 during a golf tournament at a hotel and that he invited her to the room, where they had sex. Daniels gave details of the meeting and went so far as to describe the magnate’s penis as “a mushroom.” They saw each other a few more times, although she never said the relationship was “romantic.”
The meetings happened when Trump was already married to Melania and they had a little son together, Barron. But 10 years later, in 2016, in the middle of the electoral campaign, Daniels wanted to publish the story and There the magnate would have decided to silence her with money that he later did not settle accordingly.
Prosecutors argue that it was a pattern of crime by the tycoon: when there was a problem or story that could affect his electoral ambitions, He bought silence with payments that he did not later record as campaign expenses.
According to prosecutors, the conspiracy began a few months after Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 in a meeting between him, his lawyer Cohen and the editor of the National Enquirer tabloid, David Pecker.
The three “decided to hide negative information about the magnate to help him get elected” using the tabloid’s “catch and kill” practice: exclusively buying the rights to a story to never publish it and prevent it from being published in another medium, he argued. the prosecution.
So, Pecker first paid $30,000 to a Trump Tower doorman to bury the rumor of an alleged extramarital paternity, then 150 thousand dollars to the Playboy bunny Karen McDougal to silence her previous relationship with the magnate. And she also helped Trump when Stormy Daniels approached the tabloid to reveal her former affair with the mogul.
Pecker brought the matter to the attention of Cohen, Trump’s lawyer and right-hand man, who paid $130,000 out of his own pocket and was later reimbursed by his boss with a series of checks recorded as “legal services” instead of recording them as an expense. campaign. Cohen and Pecker, who were then friends of Trump, reached agreements with the justice system and are now testifying in the trial against the former president.
This is one of the four criminal cases that the tycoon faces. With various strategies, Trump has tried to postpone the trials so that they do not affect his electoral campaign. However, this process, which could culminate in June, could be the only one that would have a ruling before the presidential elections on November 5.
So far the cataract of trials that Trump faces does not seem to affect him too much in the polls and his followers remain firm with their leader who consider that everything is a “witch hunt.” But when he is tied in the polls with Biden and needs to go out into the field to campaign, he must be stuck in New York for at least 6 weeks to be sitting on the bench.