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The prosecution made its opening statement in the Trump trial on Monday. The accusation: Targeted pacts with media companies and influencing elections.
Donald Trump oversaw a “planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election” that included hush money payments to an adult film actress, prosecutors told jurors Monday. It was the opening statement in the first criminal trial against a former US president.
“It was election fraud, plain and simple,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Colangelo told jurors in a packed and heavily guarded courtroom. In the criminal case, the defendant Trump is also the likely Republican candidate for the presidential election in November.
Trump is said to have “planned, coordinated […] “Conspiracy to Influence the 2016 Election.”
In the hallway outside the courtroom, Trump denounced the case and other legal battles he is waging – with his usual shouting and anger at a system he said treated him unfairly for political reasons. “I should be in Georgia now; I should be in Florida right now,” Trump said.
Colangelo spent about 40 minutes Monday morning describing the evidence he said would prove Trump broke the law. The prosecutor spoke calmly and deliberately – never raising his voice and keeping his hands in his suit pockets for most of his speech.
Plea in the trial: Prosecutors accuse Trump of a secret deal
Trump's crimes, the prosecutor said, stemmed from a secret election-year deal with the tabloid National Enquirer developed. So he tried to suppress bad stories about his sex life. The conspiracy is said to have been hatched during a meeting between Trump, the tabloid's then CEO David Pecker, and Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer at the time.
This pact eventually led to Cohen arranging a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels. That was intended to stop her from going public about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump that she had years earlier, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors expect Cohen to testify that Trump intentionally misrepresented the refunds to him to conceal what the money was used for. Cohen's testimony will be “damaging” and compelling, Colangelo said. He added: “I suspect the defense will do everything they can to get you to reject his testimony precisely because it is so incriminating.”
Throughout the prosecutor's presentation, Trump showed little emotion, often not looking at Colangelo and occasionally writing short notes to his lawyers. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche countered when addressing the panel that the prosecution's evidence would collapse because it was built on Cohen's lies.
Opening playdoer by prosecutor Colangelo: Trump shows little emotion
“President Trump did not know that Mr. Cohen was also a criminal for all the years he worked for him,” Blanche said. “He cheated on his taxes, he lied to banks, he lied about side businesses.” Blanche said that when the FBI began investigating Cohen, he tried to “blame virtually all of his problems on Trump,” and he continues to do so.
“Michael Cohen was obsessed with President Trump, he remains obsessed with President Trump today,” Blanche said. Cohen later spoke out on social media, using a slur for Trump and saying, “Your attacks on me reek of desperation. We all hope you will take the stand to defend yourself.”
Trump's alleged hush money payments could be proven with documents
Cohen is considered a central point in the prosecution's case, and how jurors view him may ultimately determine whether they convict Trump. Colangelo said jurors will be convinced that Cohen is telling the truth about the hush money payments because his statements are “supported by statements from other witnesses” as well as bank records, emails and text messages.
Trump himself will provide some of the evidence of his guilt, Colangelo said, because jurors will “hear Donald Trump's own words on tape, in social media posts, in his own books and in videos of his own speeches.” The district attorney of Manhattan Gov. Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records for classifying the reimbursement payments to Cohen as legal costs. Trump denies the allegations.
Prosecutor Colangelo in the Trump trial: “No politician wants bad press”
Cohen's payment to Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, was made “at the direction of Donald Trump and for his benefit, and he did it with the specific goal of influencing the outcome of the election,” Colangelo said. “No politician wants bad press. But the evidence at trial will show that this was not spin or strategy,” he said.
He continues: “This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal spending, to silence people who said bad things about his behavior had to say using fake corporate filings.” Blanche pushed back against that characterization, saying the prosecutor was trying to portray legal behavior as if it were a criminal conspiracy.
Trump's lawyer in the trial: “There is nothing illegal”
“There is nothing illegal about what happened between AMI, Mr. Pecker, Mr. Cohen and President Trump,” Blanche said, referring to American Media Inc., the then parent company of Enquirer. “Things like this happen regularly when newspapers make decisions about what to publish and how to publish it. This happens all the time with famous and wealthy people. It doesn't matter if it's a plan – it's not against the law.
Prosecutors said Trump was motivated to stop Stormy Daniels from speaking publicly, in part because the Washington Post in October 2016 revealed the existence of an “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump made graphic comments about groping women's genitals. Fearful of the damage that more stories of sexual misconduct could do to his candidacy, Trump and his allies wanted to prevent more scandalous stories from coming to light, Colangelo said.
Colangelo: Trump wanted to prevent further scandals from being made public
After opening statements, the prosecution called Pecker as the first witness. He suggested his testimony could be used to educate jurors about the seedy world of tabloid sex scandals and Trump's alleged role in preventing some of those stories from surfacing.
Pecker said that in his role as CEO of the company, the National Enquirer and other celebrity-focused publications, approved any payment of more than $10,000 for a story. “We did checkbook journalism and paid for stories,” Pecker said, describing a practice common among American tabloids and in some other countries but generally not part of mainstream journalism.
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Prosecutors do not allege that Pecker was part of the plan to bribe Daniels, but that the agreement he made with Trump and Cohen to “catch and destroy” bad stories about the presidential candidate shows that Trump was motivated , to keep such stories secret because of the election.
To support this point, Colangelo said that when it looked like he would have to pay Daniels, Trump initially tried to postpone the whole matter until after the election, when it would no longer have been as important. But when Daniels' representatives made it clear they would go public before Election Day, Trump decided to pay, prosecutors said.
Pecker spoke on the witness stand for only about 20 minutes Monday before court closed for the day. He is expected to return to court on Tuesday to continue his testimony. A key element of his presentation will be what specific statements he believes Trump made and how the two – the witness and the defendant – interact in court.
Accusation against Trump of violating a news blackout ten times during the trial
Before Pecker takes the stand, however, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan plans a hearing this morning on prosecutors' request to convict Trump of at least 10 alleged violations of a news blackout.
Trump was instructed not to publicly criticize the witnesses or the family members of the judge or prosecutor. Prosecutors allege he brazenly and repeatedly violated that order and are asking the judge to impose a $1,000 fine for each violation. Trump's lawyers have argued that it is unfair to ask Trump to remain silent about Cohen when Cohen repeatedly publicly criticizes him.
To the authors
Shayna Jacobs is a federal courts and law enforcement reporter on the national security team at The Washington Post, where she covers the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.
Devlin Barrett writes about the FBI and the Justice Department and is the author of October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election. He was part of the reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 and 2022. In 2017, he was a co-finalist for the Pulitzer for Feature Writing and the Pulitzer for International Reporting.
Tom Jackman has covered criminal justice for the Washington Post since 1998 and moderates the True Crime blog. He previously reported on what was happening in the courts for the Kansas City Star.
Hannah Knowles is a national politics reporter at The Washington Post covering campaigns. She previously reported for the Post's general division.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German. This article was first published in English on April 23, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com“ was published – as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.
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