There are 34 charges contested by the prosecutor Alvin Bragg against Donald Trump, as many as the recordings of payments made to Michael Cohen to reimburse what was then his lawyer, and ‘fixer’, of the 130 thousand dollars that had to buy Stormy’s silence Daniels. In reality, the money paid was more: Cohen agreed with President Trump and Allen Weisselberg – the then CFO of the Trump Organization, convicted in recent months of tax fraud in a trial presided over by Juan Merchan, the same judge in the Trump trial – for a total refund of $420,000 to cover the tax increase. The final agreement was sealed in a meeting in the Oval Office.
This provided that the sum would be paid to Coehn in monthly payments of $35,000 in 2017, with checks being marked, and justified in the books, as fees for legal services. The falsification of company registers is a minor offence, the so-called misdemeanor, but it becomes a real crime, felony, if it was committed to cover another criminal action. And on this revolves the whole accusatory thesis of Bragg, according to which Trump forged with “the intent to defraud” and “commit another crime or cover it up”. That is, hiding the payment made to the porn star so as not to reveal the relationship she had with the tycoon in 2006.
And in support of this accusatory thesis, Bragg describes what he calls a “catch and kill scheme”, a scheme to “capture and cover up” scabrous revelations that could have damaged Trump’s candidacy, in which David Pecker, former CEO of the ‘American Media Inc (AMI), which controls tabloid tabloid National Enquirer, and who, like Cohen, was a key witness before the grand jury.
The indictment papers shed more light on the role played by Pecker, who in August 2015 allegedly approached Cohen and Trump expressing his willingness to buy the tycoon exclusive compromising stories and then cover them up. Bragg’s prosecutors have no doubts that Trump was aware of the ‘scheme’: “between election day and inauguration day, the defendant met with Pecker privately at Trump Tower, thanked him for how he had handled the stories of the ‘doorkeeper’ and the ‘woman 1′”, they write, specifying that Trump invited Pecker to his inauguration and then to a dinner at the White House.
Thus two new protagonists emerge, in addition to Stormy Daniels, of this story of ‘hush money’: the woman who is referred to as ‘woman 1, i.e. the former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who received 150 thousand dollars from Ami for the exclusive of the revelation of her relationship with Trump which was never published by the National Enquirer.
And then the ‘doorman’, the former Trump Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, who was paid $30,000 between October and November 2015, after Pecker learned that he was trying to sell information about an alleged illegitimate son of Trump.
In theory, it is legal for a publishing company to buy the exclusive rights to a story and then not publish it, but for Bragg the payments in question were illegal, again due to the forgery of the recordings and the intent, recalling that according to the electoral law of New York “it is a crime to plot to promote a candidacy by illegal means”.
The centrality of Cohen’s testimony obviously emerges from the papers, who, sentenced in 2018 to three years for the Daniels affair, has for years been Trump’s main accuser, in front of the judges and in public, above all to demonstrate – also through audio of the interviews with the then president that the lawyer recorded – how the former president knew about the scheme to pay to avoid damaging his candidacy. Enough to try to postpone payments until after the elections, and then not have to make them.
“The defendant ordered counsel A to try to delay payment to woman 2 as much as possible – the prosecutors write thus referring to Cohen and Daniels – and explained that if he could defer it until after the elections, then he could avoid doing it, because at this point it wouldn’t have mattered if the revelations had been public.”