Prosecutors want to present steamy details at the hush money trial.
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The hush money trial could be embarrassing for Donald Trump.
For the past couple of weeks, the spotlight has been focused on the timing of Donald Trump’s four criminal trials and the prospect that at least two of them might not go to a jury before this fall’s election. And the one trial that seems certain to be held before Election Day — his so-called hush money case — has often been dismissed by experts and observers as old, legally dubious and lacking in the sort of weighty issues that sit at the heart of, say, his two election interference cases.
But the hush money case arguably is an election interference case, centering on allegations that, on the eve of the 2016 presidential race, Trump falsified business records as part of a scheme to buy the silence of a porn star to keep her from going public with claims that they had an affair.
And as the trial draws nearer — it is set to start on March 25 in Manhattan — it’s become apparent that prosecutors would like to tell a wide ranging story full of tabloid details, one that could be personally embarrassing to Trump.
The hush money case, which is being prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, the district attorney in Manhattan, has always been an awkward mix of the serious and the profane, based around a seamy tale of extramarital sex, business records and presidential politics. Trump’s aides are blunt that he particularly hates this case given the nature of the story that prosecutors intend to put in front of the jury.
The basics are these: In the waning days of Trump’s first run for the White House, the porn star Stormy Daniels threatened to reveal an affair she says she had with him — a scandalous development that could have damaged his campaign. So, according to prosecutors and their star witness, the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump arranged to buy her silence. In so doing, employees working at his direction falsified a series of invoices, checks and ledger entries to cover his tracks.
But recently, Bragg and his team asked Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the trial, for permission to tell a much more sweeping tale, one involving not just a single secret payoff but three of them. They also want to relate in detail how Trump used his ties to a publisher of supermarket tabloids to preemptively stop embarrassing accounts about him from seeing the light of day, a process known as “catch and kill.”
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Source: nytimes.com
