Trump faces trial on criminal hush money charges: What to know

Donald Trump has used every legal tool at his disposal to try to dismiss, diminish or delay the four active criminal cases against him.

But on Monday, barring a last-minute court intervention, Trump will become the first former president ever to be tried on felony charges.

The trial in New York Supreme Court centers on allegations that Trump falsified business records as part of a scheme to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment in 2016 to porn star Stormy Daniels, who says she had an extramarital affair with Trump years earlier.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accuses Trump of using a “catch and kill” tactic to hide damaging information from voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

This case may be the only one of Trump’s 88 criminal charges across four separate cases to make it to trial before the Nov. 5 presidential election.

If he is convicted in this case, the 77-year-old ex-president could be sentenced to serve time at New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex or in a state prison.

Here’s what to know about the historic trial:

Under New York law, a person is guilty of that crime when their records are falsified with the intent to commit or conceal another crime.

The D.A. alleges Trump and others violated election laws in order to carry out an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 election, by buying and suppressing negative information about him.

Central to Bragg’s case is Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney. In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges related to hush money payments made to two women before the 2016 election.

Cohen is expected to be a key witness in the trial, where he will say Trump directed him to make those payments.

To pay Daniels covertly, the D.A. alleges, Cohen opened a bank account for a shell company he had created specifically to facilitate the payment. He then transferred $131,000 into that account from a home equity line of credit. On Oct. 27 — less than two weeks before the 2016 election — Cohen wired $130,000 to Daniels’ lawyer in exchange for her silence about the alleged tryst with Trump.

After the election, Bragg says, Trump reimbursed Cohen for the payment through a series of monthly checks, processed by the Trump Organization, which recorded them as payments for legal services rendered in 2017 through a retainer agreement.

Those records were false, the D.A. alleges.

Trump and Cohen were also allegedly involved in a 2016 hush money payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who received $150,000 from the then-publisher of the National Enquirer to keep quiet about her own alleged affair with Trump.

Bragg also cites a $30,000 payment by that publisher, American Media Inc., to a former Trump Tower doorman for the rights to a story about Trump fathering a child out of wedlock. After determining that the story was untrue, the publisher’s CEO David Pecker wanted to end the deal — but he held off until after the 2016 election at Cohen’s instruction, the D.A. alleges.

The trial was originally scheduled to start March 25, but it was delayed until Monday in order to give Trump’s team time to look at some recently acquired documents.

Yes. New York law requires defendants to attend their trials, with few exceptions.

Trump has voluntarily attended a number of hearings in the hush money case and his other criminal cases, generating waves of mainstream media attention that his regular campaign events no longer muster.

Trump had also been scheduled to sit for a deposition Monday in a separate lawsuit related to the public merger of his media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, but that appearance was reportedly postponed.

Falsifying business records in the first degree is a Class E felony that carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison.

But the sentence a defendant ultimately receives is often far below the maximum, and Trump’s age and lack of a prior conviction could also play in his favor in any potential sentencing decision.

His antagonism toward presiding Judge Juan Merchan and others related to the case — including the judge’s daughter — may work against him, however.

“I think there is a substantial risk that he will be convicted and that he will face a sentence of incarceration,” said Norm Eisen, a legal analyst who aided House Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment, in a press briefing Thursday previewing the hush money trial.

“When you have the falsification of business records that is intended to aid, conceal, or commit serious crimes, that receives sentences of jail time regularly,” Eisen said.

Trump can continue to run for office even if he is convicted and jailed.

Trump has not yet said if he plans to testify in his defense. When he took the stand in November in his New York civil business fraud case, Trump angrily lashed out at the judge, the state’s attorney general and many other “haters.”