Here are the three keys to Trump’s defense in hush money lawsuit
Former U.S. president and presumed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump sits in court on the first day of opening arguments in his trial for falsifying documents at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, April 22.
Victor J. Blue/Reuters
Manhattan prosecutors have long telegraphed how they’ll frame their historic criminal case against former President Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump paid hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, prosecutors allege, to keep her from selling the story of their sexual encounter to National Enquirer. (Mr. Trump denies the affair ever occurred.) Then, they say, he falsified business records to cover up the payment’s existence – all to ensure that news of his alleged infidelities was not splashed on front pages prior to the 2016 presidential election.
How Mr. Trump’s attorneys will defend him has been less clear. Until Monday, that is – when both the prosecution and defense made opening arguments summarizing their approaches before the newly empaneled jury in case of The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump.
Why We Wrote This
For the first time ever, a former U.S. president is on trial in a criminal case. As arguments began before a New York jury on Monday, the public is hearing Donald Trump’s hush money defense argument for the first time.
Trump attorney Todd Blanche’s relatively concise opening statement in the trial outlined three key points the defense will push: The prosecution’s key witness is a convicted liar, Mr. Trump himself was not directly linked to the payoff, and there are holes in the prosecution’s complicated arguments.
1. Undermining key witness Michael Cohen
Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen made the actual payment to Ms. Daniels with $130,000 of his own money, for which he says he was reimbursed. He will likely be the central witness called by the prosecution. He says that Mr. Trump personally ordered him to pay Ms. Daniels and subsequently directed the cover-up of Mr. Cohen’s reimbursement from Trump company funds.
The Trump defense intends to paint Mr. Cohen as a convicted liar who wanted a job in the new Trump administration but did not get one. In November 2018, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to a congressional committee about efforts to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Mr. Cohen has ulterior motives to want to damage his former boss, Mr. Blanche told the jury on Monday, including revenge for perceived slights. After serving prison time for convictions on campaign finance violations and tax fraud, Mr. Blanche said, Mr. Cohen has become fixated on bringing down Mr. Trump, whom he accuses of betrayal.
“He’s obsessed with President Trump even to this day,” Mr. Blanche said in court.
2. Rejecting direct connections to Trump
A second aspect of the Trump defense seems likely to be an attempt to distance the former president from any actions taken to deal with Ms. Daniels or other efforts to kill damaging stories before they appeared in tabloid print.
It may be difficult for Mr. Trump’s lawyers to portray him as completely uninvolved. His signature appears on some of the checks to Mr. Cohen that prosecutors say were reimbursement for the hush money payment.
But “President Trump had nothing to do with the invoice” involved in the repayment, Mr. Blanche said.
After winning the 2016 election, Mr. Trump separated himself from business concerns, putting up “a wall” between the White House and the Trump Organization, his lawyer told jurors in his opening statement.
Unlike many previous presidents, however, Mr. Trump did not divest himself of his businesses or put them in a blind trust during his time in office.
3. Asserting a house of cards
A final aspect of the Trump defense may be to cast the prosecution as little more than a rickety structure of unrelated legal elements stuck together with glue and a stapler.
Hush money per se is not illegal, after all. Mr. Trump instead is being charged with business records violations for falsifying payments made to Mr. Cohen. Prosecutors say that this was done with the intent of keeping the Daniels story hidden until the election had safely passed – a separate fraud allegation that, connected to the records violations, raises the entire alleged crime to the level of a felony.
Mr. Trump’s defense seems intent on highlighting the documents aspect of the charges in their arguments, an attempt to downplay the seriousness of the alleged actions and paint them as no big deal, as a misstated checkbook entry at worst.
Mr. Blanche seemed to telegraph this kind of approach when he noted that the checks allegedly used to repay Mr. Cohen totaled $420,000, while the initial hush money payment to Ms. Daniels was only $130,000.
Why such a large overpayment?
“This was not a payback. ... [Mr. Cohen] was President Trump’s personal attorney,” Mr. Blanche told jurors.
In any case, Mr. Blanche added, the prosecution’s entire theory of the case is wrong.
“I have a spoiler alert: There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy,” Mr. Blanche said.