Donald J. Trump scandals captivate the Court, but the Hush-Money affair hinges on dry details

Donald J. Trump is on trial on 34 counts of what might be the most boring crime in New York's penal code: falsifying business records.

Yet over nine witnesses and two weeks of testimony, jurors were treated to hours of fascinating court theater.

There was talk of a sex scandal with a porn star, a clandestine recording of a future president and the tearful testimony of a former confidante before the eyes of the witness stand. There was even a celebrity appeal: Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan and reality TV star Tila Tequila were all vetted this week, sparking laughter in the Lower Manhattan courtroom.

The phrase falsification of business records, however, was not uttered to the jury during testimony. Not even once.

This striking omission underlines the prosecution's strategy for the opening phase of testimony: highlighting the sordidness and softening the case. Although the defense has already taken this approach, legal experts say it represents the prosecution's best chance of winning the case, the first criminal trial of a U.S. president.

In their opening statement, Manhattan district attorneys presented the false records to jurors, presenting them as mere lies on paper concealing a secret payment to the porn star. But linking Mr. Trump to these records is not simple. Only one witness directly links Mr. Trump to the falsification of the records, and that person, as the defense likes to point out, is a convicted liar.

So the prosecution began with the strongest card in hand, eliciting testimony about the sordid stories Mr. Trump is accused of covering up. Prosecutors say he covered them up to protect his 2016 campaign from scandal, orchestrating an illegal plot to undermine the integrity of a presidential election.

Mr. Trump is not charged with conspiracy, but New York law requires prosecutors to demonstrate that Mr. Trump falsified records to cover up another crime. The alleged election conspiracy, in all its lurid details, would essentially establish his motivations.

By bringing conspiracy to the forefront, prosecutors captivate the jury while laying the groundwork for evidence to emerge on business records. Starting next week, prosecutors are expected to begin making the connection between the anthrax and the substance.

It was a smart way to start the case, said Marc F. Scholl, who worked in the Manhattan district attorney's office for nearly four decades, specializing in white-collar crimes and working on dozens of cases. cases including the accusation of false business records.

Comparing the trial to a puzzle, Mr. Scholl added that before it is completed, the prosecution will have to provide all the pieces.

This strategy carries risks, including that jurors might blame prosecutors for subjecting them to a parade of trash. Two members of the jury are lawyers, the kind of arbitrators who might ignore what the defense calls salacious noise.

Mr. Trump's lawyers also argue that prosecutors are using sleight of hand, leveraging the exciting election conspiracy to make up for a lackluster case of false records. They presented the files as harmless documents, the writing of which did not constitute a crime.

This business records violation that the people have brought against President Trump, the 34 counts, ladies and gentlemen, are really just 34 pieces of paper, said Mr. Trump's lead attorney, Todd Blanche, to the jury during his opening statement.

These pieces of paper all come from the secret $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, who in the final days of the 2016 campaign was running through her history of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump is not accused of making the payment, it was his fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who bought his silence, but the former president is accused of having falsified the 34 files while reimbursing Mr. .Cohen.

Those records, 11 checks addressed to Mr. Cohen, 11 invoices from Mr. Cohen and 12 entries in Mr. Trump's general ledger, obscured the true purpose of the reimbursement, prosecutors say. Invoices and ledger entries claimed Mr. Cohen made money from legal fees accrued during a 2017 representation retainer.

They were lies, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told the jury during his opening statement. There was no mandate contract. Cohen was not paid for his legal services. The defendant was reimbursing him for an illegal payment made to Stormy Daniels on the eve of the election.

Prosecutors do not need to prove that Mr. Trump personally falsified the records, only that he pushed someone like Mr. Cohen to do so. Mr. Cohen, who has fallen out with Mr. Trump and is expected to be the prosecution's star witness, will most likely testify that in early 2017, he and Mr. Trump met in the Oval Office and confirmed the stratagem. They had agreed that Mr. Cohen would submit the false invoices to Mr. Trump's company, according to prosecutors. Shortly afterward, Mr. Cohen received his first check.

Mr. Blanche, who has maintained that Mr. Trump had nothing to do with the records, attacked Mr. Cohen's credibility at every turn, calling him a criminal and an admitted liar. Mr. Cohen, however, maintained that he committed most of his crimes for Mr. Trump, including a guilty plea to federal charges involving hush money.

In Manhattan, Mr. Trump is one of dozens of defendants to face charges of falsifying business records over the past decade. Prosecutors can charge it with a felony, rather than a misdemeanor, only if a defendant falsified records to commit or cover up another crime and the district attorney's office almost always charges him with a felony.

In Mr. Trump’s case, District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg said the former president was trying to cover up the election conspiracy.

In a conversation with the judge last week, Mr. Braggs's attorneys confirmed that they had relied on a little-known election law that prohibits conspiracy to promote or prevent the election of any person to office. public office by illegal means.

New York law does not require prosecutors to prove an election conspiracy, even though the criminal charges hinge on that.

Mr. Bragg did not include election conspiracy in his accusations, in part because Mr. Trump’s conduct is too old. The legal deadline to file these charges expired years ago, while the False Business Documents Act provides greater latitude.

Yet during the first two weeks of testimony, there was no shortage of evidence suggesting that the plot existed and functioned exactly as Mr. Trump intended.

The prosecution began its trial last week with David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, taking jurors behind the scenes of the plot to protect Mr. Trump's campaign. Shortly after announcing his candidacy, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Pecker and Mr. Cohen at his midtown Manhattan office tower, where they hatched a plan to buy and bury any damaging stories that might arise and jeopardize the campaign, Mr. Pecker said. .

Prosecutors called it a Trump Tower plot.

During several days of testimony, Mr. Pecker exposed the supermarket tabloids' shady practice of catch and kill, in which The Enquirer bought the rights to stories it did not publish. For $150,000, Mr. Pecker discovered and killed the story of Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who said she had a months-long affair with Mr. Trump while he was married.

Mr. Trump was supposed to repay Mr. Pecker, and on Thursday prosecutors released the recording Mr. Cohen surreptitiously made of him discussing the deal with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen suggested that they believe not only Ms. McDougal's story, but all the dirt that Mr. Pecker had heaped on Mr. Trump over the years, speaking indirectly about the transfer of all this information regarding our friend David.

Mr. Trump agreed that the transfer would cover them in case something happened to Mr. Pecker or his magazine. Maybe he'll get hit by a truck, Mr. Trump said.

But when Mr. Cohen suggested they put in place financing to cover the deal, Mr. Trump hesitated: What financing? he asked, before ordering Mr. Cohen to pay in cash.

(Mr. Pecker, the jurors already know, was never repaid.)

The prosecution also called Keith Davidson, the lawyer who negotiated the secret deal for Ms. Daniels. He offered jurors a window into the machinations, portraying Mr. Trump as the hidden hand controlling the process.

Michael Cohen did not have the authority to actually spend the money, Mr. Davidson told the jury, adding: “My understanding was that Mr. Trump was the beneficiary of this contract.”

Under cross-examination, Mr. Trump's lawyers attacked both Mr. Pecker and Mr. Davidson, questioning their credibility and ethics. One defense lawyer, Emil Bove, even described Mr. Davidson as a serial extortionist, accusing him of undermining not only the Trump campaign, but also Ms. Tequila and Mr. Sheen.

Yet these attacks could taint not only the witnesses, but also the man they were testifying about, the former and perhaps future president, who allowed them into his circle.

The basic truth is that you take your witnesses as you find them, and inevitably the sleazy, unethical and questionable conduct of witnesses will make them vulnerable to attacks by the defense, said Steven M. Cohen, professor of law and former federal prosecutor. But these witnesses will no doubt be quick to remind the jury that they were not the perpetrators of this behavior. Mr. Trump was.

On Friday, prosecutors questioned Hope Hicks, Mr. Trump's former spokeswoman, about the Trump campaign's frantic efforts to contain the fallout from the leak of Ms. McDougal and Ms. Daniels' stories. During cross-examination by Mr. Bove, Ms. Hicks began to cry as she described working for the man who launched her career.

But Mr. Bove used his final question of the week to point out something that she knew nothing about the files. The question seemed intended to imply that whatever dramatic details she provided to the jury, none proved that Mr. Trump had committed a crime.

In the coming days, prosecutors are expected to return to the accusation that Mr. Trump falsified records related to Mr. Cohens' reimbursement. They will likely question employees of Mr. Trump's company who handled the payment, then, at what could be the trial's crucial moment, call Mr. Cohen to the stand to tell him that the former president orchestrated the false files.

At the climax of Mr. Colangelos's opening statement, after detailing the prosecution's evidence regarding conspiracy, deal-making and scandal made for the tabloids, he returned to the business records.

Read the documents, the emails, the text messages, the bank statements, the handwritten notes, all of it, he implored the jury. This inevitably leads to only one conclusion: Donald Trump is guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records.

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