Trump has become the first former U.S. president convicted of felony crimes.
Donald Trump became the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes Thursday as a New York jury found him guilty of falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn actor who said the two had sex.
Jurors convicted Trump on all 34 counts after deliberating for 9.5 hours.
Trump is the first president to be indicted and convicted on criminal charges after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office charged him with 34 counts of falsifying business records, alleging he hid salacious information from voters to boost his electoral prospects in the 2016 presidential election.
The former president pleaded not guilty and denied all wrongdoing.
Sentencing is scheduled for July 11.
The verdict caps a yearslong legal saga that began not too long after Trump declared presidential run in 2015.
The ‘catch and kill’ deal that started it all
In August 2015, National Enquirer publisher David Pecker testified that he met with Donald Trump and Michael Cohen in Trump Tower to discuss how his “magazines could do to help the campaign.”
Pecker told jurors that he agreed to serve as the “eyes and ears” of Trump’s presidential campaign by identifying negative stories about Trump related to women.
“The entire purpose of this meeting at Trump Tower was…to manipulate and defraud the voters, to pull the wool over their eyes in a coordinated fashion,” Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told jurors during his closing statement about the alleged scheme.
To honor his agreement, Pecker testified that his company caught and killed two stories to help the campaign – paying $30,000 to a former Trump property doorman who falsely alleged that Trump had a child out of wedlock and $150,000 to Karen McDougal, who alleged a months-long affair with Trump, – an alleged affair the former president has long denied.
In October 2016, Pecker also flagged to Michael Cohen that adult film actress Stormy Daniels was shopping a story of her 2006 alleged sexual encounter with Trump, though Pecker declined to buy the story himself.
Michael Cohen testified that he brought the story directly to Trump – speaking with the then-Republican nominee nearly two dozen times in the month ahead of the election – and ultimately paid for the story out of his own pocket on Trump’s orders.
Trump later reimbursed Cohen in 2017 by making a series of $35,000 payments, labeled in business records as legal expenses pursuant to a retainer agreement.
Prosecutors alleged that Trump’s description of the payments disguised their true purpose so voters would never learn about the hush-money payment, though a 2018 Wall Street Journal report uncovered the payment.
Of course, we will never know if this effort to hoodwink the American voter made the difference in the 2016 election, but that’s not something we have to prove,” Steinglass said. “The point is that the reimbursement to Cohen was cloaked in false business records to hide the conspiracy.”
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