Former U.S. president Donald Trump appears at Manhattan criminal court on April 16 in New York. The testimony in Donald Trump's hush money trial is all wrapped up after more than four weeks and nearly two dozen witnesses.Curtis Means/The Associated Press
One day in August, 2015, Donald Trump, Michael Cohen and David Pecker gathered at Trump Tower. The purpose of the sit-down, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Pecker would later tell a Manhattan court, was to hash out a plan for the following year’s election.
Mr. Trump had launched his presidential campaign two months earlier and wanted help from Mr. Pecker, a supermarket tabloid publisher best known for running the National Enquirer. Mr. Pecker would later testify that he agreed to find and suppress negative stories about Mr. Trump ahead of the vote. Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s lawyer and fixer, would co-ordinate the operation.
This scheme would ultimately lead to a US$130,000 hush-money payout to porn star Stormy Daniels, and years later, the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president.
This week, after hearing five weeks of testimony and Tuesday’s closing arguments, the jury in the historic case is expected to begin weighing Mr. Trump’s fate. The proceedings are the least serious of the four criminal indictments the former president faces, which also include prosecutions for trying to overturn the 2020 election and absconding with classified documents.
But the hush-money case is likely to be the only one to go to trial before Mr. Trump attempts to reclaim the White House in November. And prosecutors have framed it as being about far more than a personal peccadillo. Rather, they argue, it was a bid to illegally corrupt the 2016 election, implicitly tying it to a larger pattern of conduct by Mr. Trump, who would go on to attempt the complete reversal of the 2020 presidential vote.
The indictment charges 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up the payment to Ms. Daniels. Normally, these would be misdemeanours, less serious crimes under New York state law. Prosecutors, however, are asking the jury to find that they were committed to hide evidence of a violation of federal campaign-finance rules, a different crime for which Mr. Trump was not on trial. This would upgrade the charges to felonies. The prosecution maintains that the payoff was effectively an undeclared and illegal contribution to Mr. Trump’s election effort.
The ultimate effect of the case is riddled with unknowns, not least whether a conviction would tip the knife-edge election toward Mr. Trump’s rival, President Joe Biden. Either way, the evidence has offered a detailed look at how Mr. Trump has operated.
From the witness stand in a Lower Manhattan courtroom, those once close to Mr. Trump have described a clandestine world of adultery, lies, payoffs and intimidation – frequently accompanied by farcical scenes of screaming and threats. Here is a recap of what the jury heard.
Catch and kill
Shortly before Mr. Trump launched his candidacy in the lobby of Trump Tower in June, 2015, according to testimony from Mr. Cohen, the reality television star warned him: “Just be prepared: there are going to be a lot of women coming forward.”
Two months later, the fixer summoned Mr. Pecker for the meeting. The full plan, Mr. Pecker testified, was for the Enquirer to publish positive stories about Mr. Trump and negative stories about his political rivals, and for Mr. Pecker to let Mr. Trump know if he caught wind of anyone shopping around scandalous information about the candidate.
“I will be your eyes and ears,” Mr. Pecker recounted telling Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen. Mr. Pecker was happy to help out, he explained, because Mr. Trump regularly leaked him stories, including scoops on whom he would next fire on his reality show, The Apprentice.
In the following months, Mr. Pecker put the plan into effect. He ran yards of copy hyping Mr. Trump’s campaign and bashing his opponents. Mr. Cohen provided story ideas and vetted pieces before they ran, Mr. Pecker said. One particularly audacious story involved fabricating a photo showing the father of Senator Ted Cruz, Mr. Trump’s chief rival for the Republican nomination, with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the assassination of president John F. Kennedy.
Then, according to Mr. Pecker, on two occasions he performed what are known as “catch and kill” operations for Mr. Trump. In the first case, Mr. Pecker’s company, American Media Inc., or AMI, paid US$30,000 for the rights to the story of Dino Sajudin, a former Trump Tower doorman who claimed Mr. Trump had impregnated a housekeeper. In the second, AMI paid US$150,000 to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate who said she and the married Mr. Trump had an affair in 2006 and 2007.
AMI’s investigations, led by the Enquirer’s editor-in-chief at the time, Dylan Howard, concluded that Mr. Sajudin’s story was false and that Ms. McDougal’s was probably true. The outcome, however, was the same. AMI bought both stories with the intention of not running them. Mr. Sajudin and Ms. McDougal signed contracts that imposed US$1-million penalties if they took their allegations anywhere else.
At first, Mr. Pecker said, the plan was for Mr. Trump to pay AMI back. To that end, Mr. Pecker and Mr. Cohen intended to use a middleman and a shell company to hide the transaction. But as Mr. Trump dragged his feet, Mr. Pecker received legal advice on the campaign finance implications of such payments, he said, and decided to call off the reimbursement plan.
Next came Ms. Daniels, a porn industry actor, writer and director. She claimed to have had sex with Mr. Trump in his Lake Tahoe hotel room during a celebrity golf tournament in the summer of 2006. In court, she recounted making fun of the pyjamas he was wearing when she arrived (“Does Hugh Hefner know you stole his outfit?”) and spanking him with a rolled-up copy of a magazine with his face on the cover, as punishment for repeatedly interrupting her.
When she tried to leave, she said, Mr. Trump put pressure on her to stay by dangling career opportunities and mocking her difficult upbringing. He could help her “get out of that trailer park,” she recalled him saying. During sex, “I was staring at the ceiling,” she said. “I was trying to think about anything other than what was happening there.” Mr. Trump denies that he had sex with Ms. Daniels.
In October, 2016, just a month before the election, Ms. Daniels’s then-lawyer and agent, Keith Davidson, contacted Mr. Howard about selling her story. When Mr. Trump learned of this, Mr. Cohen said, he flew into a rage.
“Women will hate me. Guys, they think it’s cool. But this is going to be a disaster for the campaign,” Mr. Cohen quoted Mr. Trump as saying. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump gave clear orders: “Push it out as long as you can. Just get past the election.”
Mr. Trump was concerned only about the election and did not seem to care what effect the adultery accusations would have on his marriage, Mr. Cohen said. “How long do you think I will be on the market for?” he recalled Mr. Trump saying. “Not long.”
At first, Mr. Cohen made excuses not to send Ms. Daniels the money. When Mr. Davidson threatened to have Ms. Daniels give her story to the Daily Mail, Mr. Cohen said, Mr. Trump relented. “Just do it,” Mr. Cohen recounted Mr. Trump telling him.
This time, Mr. Pecker refused to pay. So Mr. Cohen drew US$130,000 from his home equity line of credit, set up a shell company called Essential Consultants and wired the money. Ms. Daniels signed a non-disclosure agreement under the pseudonym “Peggy Peterson.” (Mr. Trump was “David Dennison.”)
In January, 2017, Mr. Cohen said, he and Mr. Trump agreed on a repayment plan, scrawled out in the hand of Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer. In total, Mr. Cohen would receive US$420,000: reimbursement for the payment to Ms. Daniels, reimbursement for another US$50,000 expense and a US$60,000 bonus, with the total doubled to cover taxes.
Mr. Cohen said he and Mr. Trump further finalized this arrangement at an Oval Office meeting shortly after Mr. Trump took office as president in 2017. The payments, disguised as a legal retainer, came in the form of monthly cheques from Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen said.
Mr. Cohen’s invoices, the cheques and the Trump Organization’s books were all falsified, the prosecution alleges, to make these payments seem like legitimate fees for service. In reality, Mr. Cohen said, he performed almost no legal work for Mr. Trump while receiving the payments, save for helping first lady Melania Trump with a deal to have her wax likeness installed at Madame Tussauds.
Throughout their testimony, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Pecker put Mr. Trump at the centre of the hush-money schemes. They recounted instance after instance of Mr. Trump’s personal involvement in orchestrating payouts.
In a recording Mr. Cohen made at the time on his phone, which was played in court, Mr. Trump asked of Ms. McDougal’s story, “What do we got to pay for this, 150?” before suggesting they “pay with cash.”
When The Wall Street Journal revealed the payment to Ms. McDougal four days before the election, Mr. Pecker recalled, a “very upset” and “agitated” Mr. Trump calling to berate him. In post-election meetings at Trump Tower and the White House, Mr. Pecker said, Mr. Trump asked him about Ms. McDougal and thanked him for his handling of the situation. In one phone call to discuss extending Ms. McDougal’s hush-money contract, Mr. Pecker said, Mr. Trump had two of his White House aides, Hope Hicks and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, join in.
Everything began to unravel in early 2018. Other reporters followed the Wall Street Journal’s reporting. Ms. McDougal and Ms. Daniels broke their silence.
Mr. Pecker received a letter from the Federal Election Commission. Mr. Cohen tried to reassure him that Jeff Sessions, then the attorney-general, would make the case go away.
“Why are you worried?” Mr. Pecker recalled Mr. Cohen asking him. “Trump has him in his pocket.” This manifestly did not happen. Ultimately, AMI paid a US$180,000 fine for effectively making illegal campaign contributions with its payoffs.
In Mr. Cohen’s case, the FBI showed up at his hotel with a search warrant in April of that year. Later that day, Mr. Cohen said, Mr. Trump called him one final time, saying, “Don’t worry. I’m president of the United States. There’s nothing here. Everything’s going to be okay. Stay tough.”
That summer, Mr. Cohen chose to plead guilty to his role in the payout to Ms. Daniels – along with several other unrelated crimes – and turned on his former boss.
A flawed witness
Mr. Trump’s defence is taking several tacks. One is to contend that the case is a mere “bookkeeping” dispute.
“The 34 counts, ladies and gentlemen, are really just pieces of paper,” said Todd Blanche, Mr. Trump’s lead defence lawyer, in his opening statement to the court.
Another is to argue that the payments to Mr. Cohen really did represent legitimate fees for legal services, and that the business records were therefore not false.
A third is to distance Mr. Trump from the payoffs made on his behalf.
The centrepiece of the defence’s strategy, however, was a bid to discredit Mr. Cohen. Mr. Blanche accused Mr. Cohen of lying on the witness stand in a bid for revenge against Mr. Trump.
In an effort to pre-empt this, prosecutors called Mr. Cohen as their last witness, so that many details of his account had already been related by others and backed up by documents.
Prosecutors also had Mr. Cohen run through an exhaustive list of his misdeeds. He went to federal prison for his part in the payment to Ms. Daniels, and also pleaded guilty to unrelated counts of tax evasion and lying to Congress. On the stand, he admitted to making US$4-million selling his influence over the White House to large corporations during the first year of the Trump administration. Mr. Cohen portrayed himself as a former Trump sycophant who felt “on top of the world” while in Mr. Trump’s employ.
Mr. Blanche prodded Mr. Cohen for more confessions. Mr. Cohen conceded that he didn’t think he should have been charged with tax evasion, and therefore had lied to a federal judge when he expressed contrition for the crime.
He also admitted under Mr. Blanche’s questioning to stealing US$60,000 by inflating the amount of reimbursement he was owed for paying a company to rig an online poll about famous businesspeople, in a bid to improve Mr. Trump’s standing.
“You stole from the Trump Organization,” Mr. Blanche said. “Yes, sir,” Mr. Cohen replied.
Since turning on Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen said, he had made US$4-million from a podcast and two books about the case.
Although Mr. Cohen’s demeanour in court was restrained and cautious, the defence gave the jury glimpses of his bombastic persona by playing podcast clips in which he shouted about his excitement over seeing Mr. Trump arrested. On social media and in podcasts, Mr. Cohen has referred to Mr. Trump as a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain” and “dictator douchebag.”
Mr. Cohen, however, flatly denied accusations he is now lying to incriminate Mr. Trump. In one dramatic moment, Mr. Blanche accused Mr. Cohen of fabricating a telephone conversation with Mr. Trump about the payment to Ms. Daniels.
“That. Was. A. Lie!” Mr. Blanche shouted. “You can admit it.” Mr. Cohen replied: “No, sir, I can’t.”
In the end, Mr. Trump did not make good on his promises to take the stand in his own defence. The only substantive witness his lawyers did call, a lawyer named Bob Costello, turned out to be a headache.
Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger used a string of Mr. Costello’s own e-mails to show that he had been part of a covert effort by the White House to keep Mr. Cohen from turning on Mr. Trump.
And he was almost tossed from the witness stand after he talked over objections, muttered “jeez” in response to a ruling by Justice Juan Merchan and rolled his eyes. The judge cleared the courtroom, admonished Mr. Costello and threatened to strike his testimony from the record if he didn’t change his behaviour.
An ungovernable defendant
Throughout the trial, Mr. Trump’s personal theatrics drew almost as much attention as the scenes described on the witness stand. The former president repeatedly violated a gag order prohibiting him from intimidating witnesses, jurors and court staff. Justice Merchan fined Mr. Trump US$10,000 and threatened to send him to jail if he kept at it.
So Mr. Trump came up with a workaround. Every day in the latter part of the trial, he brought a large rotating entourage with him, including several people he is auditioning to be his vice-presidential running-mate. They would go out and launch the sort of verbal attacks Mr. Trump was prohibited from making.
Mr. Trump also repeatedly griped about the cold temperatures in the 1930s-era courtroom after Justice Merchan refused a request by Mr. Blanche to turn up the heat.
The trial even had some trouble nailing down a jury after several prospective jurors, and one who had already been chosen for the panel, became fearful of being harassed if their identities were disclosed.
Mr. Trump’s defence combed through potential jurors’ social media profiles to cull those with histories of disparaging the former president. Prosecutors tried to eliminate anyone likely to have conservative politics. A conviction must be unanimous, meaning that even a single juror could hang the decision.
Mr. Trump frequently appeared to doze off, sitting back in his chair with his eyes closed. District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the official who decided to bring the case, attended parts of the trial in person, including Mr. Cohen’s testimony.
Each charge against Mr. Trump carries a maximum four-year penalty. But even if convicted and sentenced to prison, it is unlikely that he would start serving his sentence before the election. Likely, he would remain free pending an appeal.
Still, a conviction would put voters in the position of having to choose whether they want a felon in the country’s highest office.