Today is a significant day in the history of the United States - for the first time since the proclamation of the state, the president of the country appeared before a jury as accused of criminal offenses. 12 New Yorkers will have to decide whether former and possibly future President Donald Trump is guilty of fraudulently forging documents to cover up a criminal conspiracy to “rig the election” and elect Trump as president of the United States in 2016.
This is exactly how the New York prosecutor’s office formulates Trump’s crime. Explaining the case to the jury, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said that in the midst of the election campaign, presidential candidate Donald Trump conspired with his assistant Michael Cohen and the owner of the National Enquirer tabloid David Pecker. Together they developed a “criminal plan” to prevent the publication of any information discrediting Trump that could lead to his defeat in the election.
The plan, according to prosecutors, was simple: if any stories discrediting Trump from his turbulent past surfaced, the National Enquirer would buy exclusive rights to publish those stories - not for the purpose of publishing them, but to “bury” them. In the US publishing industry, this practice is called catch and kill.
The plan worked twice - Pecker paid for two potentially dangerous stories for Trump, and in one of the cases the story was recognized as a worthless fabrication (a former Trump Tower doorman heard from someone that the presidential candidate had an illegitimate daughter from a subordinate) - however, on the eve of the elections, Donald decided that this rumor also needed to be “killed.” The doorman was paid one and a half hundred thousand dollars for silence.
But Pecker refused to pay that amount to former porn star Stormy Daniels, who claimed that she had an intimate meeting with Trump - the owner of the tabloid said that it was too expensive and he could no longer afford it. This, in fact, is what brought Trump to the dock today - after the Washington Post published a recording of his boastful monologue about women, the presidential candidate decided that publishing Daniels' story would compound the harm and could be a fatal blow to the campaign. According to the indictment, he ordered Cohen to “kill” the story himself, promising to repay the payment later.
Cohen paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 of his own money for her silence. At Trump’s trial, he will testify for the prosecution: the former “fixer” admitted that he paid on Trump’s direct orders, and then wrote him fictitious invoices for “legal services” to cover up compensation payments. Prosecutors charge the president with a total of 34 acts of falsification: payments on fictitious accounts, false entries in accounting books, signatures on checks to Cohen. “He lied over and over and over again to cover up the conspiracy,” prosecutor Colangelo told jurors.
Trump's lawyer said that his client has not committed any crimes and is not guilty of anything. “Catch and kill,” according to the defense attorney, is a common publishing practice; all newspapers do this.
The first day of hearings ended quickly. The jury listened to speeches from the prosecution and defense, then David Pecker's explanations about the editorial “kitchen” of tabloids like the National Enquirer. Pecker said that his publication practiced “checkbook journalism” - buying juicy stories from the servants of various important people. Payments over $10,000 required the owner's personal approval.
The accounting fraud charged against Trump is classified as a lesser offense in the United States, but the maximum penalty for it is 4 years in prison. The prosecution especially emphasizes the aggravating context of these falsifications - “criminal conspiracy to falsify the election campaign.”
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