America’s Lowlife is enmeshed in so many criminal and civil cases – for stuff like insurrection, rape, classified document theft, find-me-enough-votes, fake elector slates, financial fraud – that even those of us who track his perfidies had largely forgotten about Stormy Daniels. Until yesterday.
He’s going to trial! Finally.
Circle March 25 on your calendar, because even though the Stormy case is supposedly a minor matter – an appetizer before the entrees, as it were – it just so happens that falsifying business records is illegal in New York state. As the prosecutor’s Statement of Facts puts it, “The defendant…repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election…In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York. The participants mischaracterized…the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.”
Trump has been indicted in four criminal cases. This was the first. Ever since the Manhattan DA dropped the hammer on him 10 months ago, he has tried everything (immunity! selective prosecution!) to get the case thrown out. All his efforts failed. His last resort, predictably, was to rail outside the courthouse yesterday that the case in question – hiding his $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy – is “election interference.” But the truth, of course, is that when he bought Stormy’s silence two weeks before the 2016 balloting, hiding crucial info from the voters, that coverup was election interference.
Maybe Trump would’ve been elected anyway; maybe swing voters wouldn’t have cared if Stormy had gone public to reveal that Trump had bedded her while wife Melania was home with a newborn baby. (Evangelical Christians certainly wouldn’t have cared; having already gone full MAGA, they were comfortable with their hypocrisy.) But Trump was clearly worried about Stormy on election eve – this was right after the release of the Hollywood Access grab-’em-by-the-pussy tape – so he discussed a plan of action with his wise men: In-house fixer Michael Cohen and National Inquirer publisher David Pecker.
Cohen is already on record with what happened next. In a sitdown in Trump Tower, he and Trump phoned Pecker. Trump asked Pecker, “How bad do you think this could hurt me with the campaign?” Pecker replied, “It can’t be good.” To which Trump replied, “Let’s not forget about upstairs” – referring to Melania. The next morning, according to Cohen, the boss gave the OK to pay hush money and keep voters in the dark. Falsifying business records to hide the money made it a criminal act.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has the goods – texts, emails, documents, and witnesses – starting with Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 and went to jail for abetting Trump’s scheme. He put up the $130,000 – via a complicated route, including a shell company – and Trump reimbursed him, signing monthly checks to Cohen at $35 grand a pop.. At Cohen’s sentencing, prosecutors stated that he made the payments “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump – who, in court papers, was called “Individual-1.” And in the signed hush money agreement with Stormy’s lawyer, Trump went by a pseudonym, “David Dennison.” (We know this, thanks to a government search warrant.)
This case might seem like chump change – compared to, say, plotting to overthrow a free and fair 2020 election with help of a violent insurrection. Lest we forget, however, Al Capone was brought down not for murdering people, but for screwing with his taxes. And it’s no small beans that Trump/Individual-1/Dennison plotted to defraud the voters; as Judge Juan Merchan concluded yesterday, when he set the trial date in his courtroom, the charges in this criminal case are “severe.”
That grinding sound you hear is the wheel of justice. Somewhere in the Kremlin, Trump’s murderous patron is probably puzzled about the impending trial: “Make me to understand. How this DA not fall from window or die from natural causes in prison?”
Sorry, pal, that’s not how things work over here.
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Meanwhile, the judge in the financial fraud case today slapped Trump with a $360 million fine and banned him from running any NY business for the next three years. One particular sentence in the ruling says it all: Team Trump’s “complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological.” That character trail will be on the ballot in November.