Donald Trump has become the first-ever former US president to face criminal charges.
On Tuesday, the former president appeared in court to plead not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, facing an indictment brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. The charges all stemmed from a five-year-old scandal: the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.
Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen paid Daniels that money shortly before the 2016 election. But in 2017, Trump and his company, the Trump Organization, repaid Cohen in installments, logging those repayments as legal fees for services performed that year. Bragg alleges that characterization is false and illegal, violating the state’s business records laws. You can read his indictment and statement of facts at the links provided.
Bragg also alleges that these business records were falsified “to conceal criminal conduct” — which allows him to charge all these counts as felonies, rather than misdemeanors. In a press conference, Bragg cited the federal cap on campaign contributions and a state law against conspiring to promote a candidacy by unlawful means.
You may be thinking: “Stormy Daniels … That’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.” Indeed.
The world first learned of Daniels in 2018, when the Wall Street Journal broke news that Cohen had arranged the payment, made shortly before the 2016 election so the adult film actress wouldn’t go public with her claim to have had an affair with Trump. Cohen, already under investigators’ scrutiny, eventually pleaded guilty in August 2018 to violating federal campaign finance laws with that payment and others, in charging documents that famously identified Trump as “Individual-1.”
Cohen claimed he’d made the illegal payment at Trump’s direction, so there was much speculation about whether Trump was on the hook for violating campaign finance law too. But instead, the case fizzled out. A…
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