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Donald Trump attempted to “corrupt” the 2016 election when he asked his team to buy the silence of a porn actress who threatened to go public with allegations of an extramarital affair, Manhattan prosecutors said during opening arguments in the first criminal trial against of a former U.S. Chairman.
Trump's lawyer, Todd Blanche, responded that his client was “veiled in innocence” and was simply trying to “protect his family, his reputation and his brand.” The 77-year-old former president was “not on the hook” for how the payments were organized or recorded by his employees, which he “had nothing to do with,” Blanch added.
Competing accounts of the events at the heart of the “hard money” case against Trump came as the first — and possibly only — criminal trial to proceed against the Republican presidential nominee before the November election.
As Trump sat at the defense table in a cold Manhattan courtroom Monday morning, silently glowing, the seven men and five women in court heard Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo outline a “catch and kill” plan that was allegedly orchestrated by the former president. and his inner circle to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Daniels had threatened to go to the press with her story about how she had an affair with the then-reality TV star in 2006, Colangelo said, a revelation that would have been even more damaging to Trump's campaign after the furor over publication of one Access to Hollywood tape, in which he was heard bragging about grabbing women's genitalia.
Trump continued to cover up the transactions behind the $130,000 payment, Colangelo added, because he “wanted to cover up his and others' criminal behavior.”
“This was a planned, coordinated, long-term conspiracy. . . to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal spending,” he said. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”
Blanche said Trump was dealing with a “weak” attempt to embarrass him with false allegations and that he acted perfectly legally in trying to suppress the story. “You're going to learn that companies do this all the time,” he told jurors, adding: “There's nothing wrong with trying to influence an election — it's called democracy.”
The start of the six-week trial comes just over a year after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed the first criminal charges against a former US president, charging Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Like any criminal defendant, Trump must be present every day, a requirement he has complained will limit his campaign ahead of the November election. Court will be adjourned on Wednesdays if the case proceeds as scheduled, Judge Juan Merchan said last week.
Trump condemned the court and prosecutors on social media and once again denounced the case as a witch hunt as he walked into the courtroom Monday morning. “This is being done as election interference, everybody knows that,” the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee for the White House told reporters.
After closing arguments, the court heard briefly from the prosecution's first witness, former National Enquirer editor David Packer, who allegedly engaged in the catch-and-kill scheme by buying exclusive rights to anti-Trump stories — and then preventing them from being published.
Merchan adjourned early for the day because of the Jewish holiday of Passover and to allow a juror to attend an emergency dental appointment.
Last week, 12 jurors and six alternates were selected from a pool of nearly 200 New Yorkers from the Manhattan borough, who were carefully screened to ensure they did not have an overwhelming bias against Trump. All said they could be impartial in deciding the facts of the case, although some expressed distaste for his policies and personality.
The former president still faces criminal charges in three different courts for his alleged efforts to block a peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election and for keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida. It is unclear when the remaining criminal cases will be heard.
Trump also faces a series of civil lawsuits and is appealing a nearly half-billion-dollar fraud judgment awarded to the New York attorney general earlier this year. A judge on Monday refused to consider the attorney general's request to revoke Trump's $175 million bond in that case, in a reprieve for the former president.
Another milestone in Trump's legal woes will be reached later this week, when the US Supreme Court hears arguments on whether he can claim presidential immunity for acts he's been accused of while in office. The outcome of that challenge has no bearing on the New York case, which is brought under state, not federal, law.
