Bragg's prosecutors will seek to upend that 2016 campaign strategy against Trump: The tactics that helped propel him to victory will be admitted into evidence and reconsidered far beyond the courtroom. Aides and friends who lied on Trump's behalf will take the witness stand to testify against him.
Among them: David Pecker, the tabloid publisher who bought and buried damaging stories about Trump; Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman who tried to spin reporters; and Cohen, the fixer who paid Daniels. Pecker, who ran the company that owned it National Researcheris scheduled to go first and is expected to recount for the jury several conversations with Trump about the hush money, according to a person familiar with the plan.
Trump faces 34 charges and up to four years behind bars, but more is at stake than his freedom. If convicted, he could lose his right to vote, including voting for himself. If he were to take back the White House, he would be the first convicted felon to serve as commander-in-chief. And the question of how he could serve a prison sentence, should it come to that, if he doesn't get parole, could tear the country apart.
America has become accustomed to seeing Trump break its customs and is now witnessing a phenomenon that is the first in its 248-year history. Presidents have been impeached, thrown out of office and rejected at the polls. Trump is about to be the first to have his fate decided not just by voters, but by 12 citizens on a jury.
They all come from Manhattan, the borough that Trump made famous and where he is now deeply unpopular. According to legal experts, a favorable jury gave Bragg an advantage at trial.
But the jury, which was finalized last week and includes six alternates, is no rubber stamp: It includes at least two people who have expressed some affection for the former president, and it only takes one skeptical member to force a judgment, a result. which Trump would celebrate as a victory.
The stakes are high for Bragg, too. He stakes his career and legacy on a prosecution he inherited, rejected, and then transformed.
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When he took office in 2022, he refused to bring a financial fraud case against Trump that his predecessor had prepared, sparking a scandal when two prosecutors resigned in protest.
But Bragg continued to investigate and soon revisited the hush money deal, an episode that had become known internally as “the zombie case” because it kept coming back to life. Just over a year after taking office, Bragg impeached the former president.
Three other indictments in three other cities followed, but with those cases stuck in a backlog, Bragg's trial may now be the only one Trump will face before the Nov. 5 election.
The Manhattan case includes all three hush money deals: with Daniels, with a former Playboy model, and with a door attendant who told a story about Trump fathering a child out of wedlock.
Pecker and the National Researcher he bought the doorman's silence, whose story turned out to be false. They also bought the rights to the story told by the model, Karen McDougal, and then never wrote it, a practice known as “catch and kill.”
Then there was Daniels, who was keen to sell her story of a sexual encounter with Trump. Pecker drew the line there: his price was too high.
Instead, he and a senior editor alerted Cohen, who soon paid Daniels $130,000 not to tell his story.
Cohen has said he acted at Trump's direction, but the former president is not charged for the payment itself. Instead, he is accused of covering up the transaction by disguising the repayments to Cohen.
In internal records, Trump's company marked those payments as legal expenses, citing a retainer agreement. However, no such expenses existed, prosecutors say, and the retainer agreement was fictitious.
Trump is accused of engineering – or at least condoning – the cover-up. His company, prosecutors argue, produced 34 false records supporting the counts against him: 11 checks, 11 monthly invoices Cohen submitted and 12 entries in the Trump trust's ledger.
Trump signed several of the checks at the White House, as prosecutors will likely point out at trial.
But directly linking Trump to the plot to falsify those records is another matter.
His lawyers are likely to argue that he was unaware and that Cohen handled the details. Cohen laid out the repayment plan with Trump's chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, who is serving a prison sentence for perjury and will not testify, records show.
The lack of a first-hand witness to corroborate Cohen's account is a potential flaw in the case, but it may not be fatal. Prosecutors plan to introduce a document containing Weisselberg's handwritten notes on the repayments, key evidence showing Cohen did not act alone.
And under the law, prosecutors don't have to prove that Trump personally falsified the records. Already in the first week of the trial, Steinglass laid the groundwork with a simple analogy: He asked prospective jurors if they could agree that if a husband hired a hitman to kill his wife, the husband was just as guilty as the man who took the judgment out. trigger
“Can you all follow the same kind of logic in this case?” Steinglass asked the prospective jurors. Many said they could.
Cohen is expected to offer the closest thing this case has to a smoking gun: He is likely to say that, in early 2017, he and Trump discussed the repayment scheme in the Oval Office.
If Trump testifies in his own defense, that could pit Cohen's word against Trump's — a he-said, he-said story with two questionable narrators.
However, the prosecution is expected to note that Cohen told many of his lies for Trump. And prosecutors will offer evidence corroborating the broad strokes of Cohen's story, which could persuade jurors when they hear his testimony about the crucial Oval Office meeting.
Trump's White House executive assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, who has been identified as a potential witness, could confirm that Cohen met with Trump, although she cannot confirm what they discussed.
Pecker can back up at least some of Cohen's testimony about Trump's involvement in the hush money deals. And a recording Cohen made of a call he had with Trump will capture the former president discussing the deal with McDougal.
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“The prosecution's argument is that you can trust Michael Cohen beyond a reasonable doubt about his isolated conversation,” said Horwitz, the former prosecutor. He called the approach “Prosecution 101.”
This article originally appeared on The New York Times.
