This post was last updated on October 5th, 2024 at 12:53 pm
The former co-conspirator who escaped accountability is now in the dock.
The justice system finally caught up with Individual-1 a.k.a. Donald J. Trump.
On the opening day of Trump’s historic trial for his porn-star-hush-money caper—no former president has ever been on trial for criminal charges—New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan had to clear up a few pending legal issues before moving to the arduous task of selecting jurors. One of those matters concerned the criminal case of onetime Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who, according to filings submitted by federal prosecutors, broke the law at the behest of a person identified as “Individual-1.”
The immediate question for Merchan was whether and how prosecutors in New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office could refer to Cohen’s 2018 guilty plea for violating election law. Cohen was nabbed for making the illegal in-kind contribution to Trump’s 2016 campaign at the center of this case: the $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels to keep mum about her alleged affair with Trump. He will be a key witness for Bragg.
Both sides have been arguing over what can and can’t be said about that guilty plea during this trial. To discredit Cohen, Trump’s lawyers want to cite Cohen’s other guilty pleas (tax evasion, making false statements to a bank, and lying to Congress), which were unrelated to the Daniels affair. But they’d rather jurors not hear about Cohen’s plea regarding the hush-money deal because that would reinforce the idea that the payment to Daniels was a felony. To win this case, Bragg’s team must prove that Trump falsified business records—that is, recorded the $130,000 payment as a legitimate legal expense for the Trump Organization—and did so to cover up a felony. The prosecutors, naturally, want the jury to know that the federal court that tried Cohen has determined the payment was a felony violation of campaign law. Trump’s defense team is expected to contend Cohen’s payment was not an election law violation.
