NEW YORK — Donald Trump tried to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election by preventing damaging stories about his personal life from becoming public, a prosecutor told jurors Monday at the start of the former president's historic hush money trial.
"This was a planned, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”
A defense lawyer countered by assailing the case as baseless and attacking the integrity of the onetime Trump confidant who's now the government's star witness.
“President Trump is innocent. President Trump did not commit any crimes. The Manhattan district attorney’s office should never have brought this case,” attorney Todd Blanche said.
The opening statements offered the 12-person jury — and the voting public — radically divergent roadmaps for a case that will unfold against the backdrop of a closely contested White House race in which Trump is not only the presumptive Republican nominee but also a criminal defendant facing the prospect of a felony conviction and prison.
Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump sits in the courtroom Monday at his criminal trial at Manhattan state court in New York.
It is the first criminal trial of a former American president and the first of four prosecutions of Trump to reach a jury. Befitting that history, prosecutors sought from the outset to elevate the gravity of the case, which they said was chiefly about election interference as reflected by the hush money payments to a porn actor who said she had a sexual encounter with Trump.
“The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again,” Colangelo said.
Former President Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower on his way to Manhattan criminal court Monday in New York.
The trial, which could last up to two months, will require Trump to spend his days in a courtroom rather than on the campaign trail, a reality he complained about Monday when he lamented to reporters after leaving the courtroom: “I’m the leading candidate ... and this is what they’re trying to take me off the trail for. Checks being paid to a lawyer."
Trump has nonetheless sought to turn his criminal defendant status into an asset for his campaign, fundraising off his legal jeopardy and repeatedly railing against a justice system that he has for years claimed is weaponized against him. In the weeks ahead, the case will test the jury's ability to judge him impartially but also Trump's ability to comply with courtroom protocol, including a gag order barring him from attacking witnesses, jurors, trial prosecutors and some others.
Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — a charge punishable by up to four years in prison — though it’s not clear if the judge would seek to put him behind bars. A conviction would not preclude Trump from becoming president again, but because it is a state case, he would not be able to pardon himself if found guilty. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Stormy Daniels arrives at an event Oct. 11 in Berlin.
The case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg revisits a years-old chapter from Trump’s biography when his celebrity past collided with his political ambitions and, prosecutors say, he scrambled to stifle stories that he feared could torpedo his campaign.
The opening statements served as an introduction to the colorful cast of characters that feature prominently in that tawdry saga, including Stormy Daniels, the porn actor who says she received the hush money; Michael Cohen, the lawyer who prosecutors say paid her; and David Pecker, the tabloid publisher who agreed to function as the campaign’s “eyes and ears" and who served as the prosecution's first witness on Monday.
Pecker is due back on the stand Tuesday, when the court will also hear arguments on whether Trump violated Judge Juan Merchan's gag order with a series of Truth Social posts about witnesses over the last week.
In his opening statement, Colangelo outlined a comprehensive effort by Trump his allies to prevent three separate stories — two from women alleging prior sexual encounters — from surfacing during the 2016 presidential campaign. That undertaking was especially urgent following the emergence late in the race of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump could be heard boasting about grabbing women sexually without their permission.
Colangelo recited Trump’s now-infamous remarks as Trump looked on, stone-faced.
“The impact of that tape on the campaign was immediate and explosive,” Colangelo said.
Within days of the “Access Hollywood” tape becoming public, Colangelo told jurors that the National Enquirer alerted Cohen that Stormy Daniels was agitating to go public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.
“At Trump’s direction, Cohen negotiated a deal to buy Ms. Daniels’ story to prevent American voters from hearing that story before Election Day,” Colangelo told jurors.
But, the prosecutor noted, “neither Trump nor the Trump Organization could just write a check to Cohen with a memo line that said ‘reimbursement for porn star payoff.'" So, he added, "they agreed to cook the books and make it look like the payment was actually income, payment for services rendered.”
New York City police officers stand guard Monday as the motorcade carrying former President Donald Trump arrives at Manhattan Criminal court in New York.
Those alleged falsified records form the backbone of the 34-count indictment against Trump. Trump has denied a sexual encounter with Daniels.
Blanche, the defense lawyer, sought to preemptively undermine the credibility of Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges related to his role in the hush money scheme, as someone with an “obsession” with Trump who cannot be trusted. He said Trump had done nothing illegal when his company recorded the checks to Cohen as legal expenses.
“There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It is called democracy,” not a crime, Blanche said.
Blanche challenged the notion that Trump agreed to the Daniels payout to safeguard his campaign. Instead, he characterized the transaction as an attempt to squelch a “sinister” effort to embarrass Trump and his loved ones.
“President Trump fought back, like he always does, and like he’s entitled to do, to protect his family, his reputation and his brand, and that is not a crime,” Blanche told jurors.
The efforts to suppress the stories are what’s known in the tabloid industry as “catch-and-kill” — catching a potentially damaging story by buying the rights to it and then killing it through agreements that prevent the paid person from telling the story to anyone else.
Besides the payment to Daniels, Colangelo also described other arrangements, including one that paid a former Playboy model $150,000 to suppress claims of a nearly yearlong affair with the married Trump. Colangelo said Trump “desperately did not want this information about Karen McDougal to become public because he was worried about its effect on the election.”
He said jurors would hear a recording Cohen made in September 2016 of himself briefing Trump on the plan to buy McDougal’s story. The recording was made public in July 2018. Colangelo told jurors they will hear Trump in his own voice saying: “What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?”
Trump denies McDougal's claims of an affair.
The first and only witness Monday was Pecker, the then-publisher of the National Enquirer and a longtime Trump friend who prosecutors say met with Trump and Cohen at Trump Tower in August 2015 and agreed to help Trump’s campaign identify negative stories about him.
Pecker described the tabloid's use of “checkbook journalism,” a practice that entails paying a source for a story.
“I gave a number to the editors that they could not spend more than $10,000” on a story without getting his approval, Pecker said Tuesday.
The New York case has taken on added importance because it may be the only one of the four against Trump to reach trial before the November election. Appeals and legal wrangling have delayed the other three cases.
Read more:
Where each Trump case stands
Classified documents case
Updated
Pictured: Boxes of records stored in a bathroom and shower in the Lake Room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
Special counsel Jack Smith has been leading two federal probes related to Trump, both of which have resulted in charges against the former president.
The first charges to result from those investigations came in June when Trump was indicted for mishandling top secret documents at his Florida estate. The indictment alleges that Trump repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and classified map.
A superseding indictment issued in July added charges accusing Trump of asking for surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago estate to be deleted after FBI and Justice Department investigators visited in June 2022 to collect classified documents he took with him after leaving the White House. The new indictment also charges him with illegally holding onto a document he’s alleged to have shown off to visitors in New Jersey.
In all, Trump faces 40 felony charges in the classified documents case. The most serious charge carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon on May 7 canceled the May 20 trial date in the case, postponing it indefinitely. She struck a paragraph from the indictment June 10 but denied a defense request to dismiss some of the charges. The paragraph concerns allegations that Trump, in 2021 and while no longer president, showed a classified map of a foreign country to a representative of his political action committee while discussing a military operation that he said was not going well. Defense lawyers said the paragraph was prejudicial because it was not connected to any crime charged in the indictment
Walt Nauta, a valet for Trump, and Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager at Trump’s Florida estate, have also been charged in the case with scheming to conceal surveillance footage from federal investigators and lying about it.
Trump, Nauta and De Oliveira have pleaded not guilty. Lawyers for Nauta and De Oliveira asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in April to throw out the charges they face. The judge did not immediately rule.
Election interference
Updated
Pictured: Supporters of former President Donald Trump protest Jan. 6, 2023, outside of the Supreme Court on the second anniversary of the riot at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s second case against Trump was unveiled in August when the former president was indicted in Washington on felony charges for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The four-count indictment includes charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States government and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding: the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. It says that Trump repeatedly told supporters and others that he had won the election, despite knowing that was false, and describes how he tried to persuade state officials, then-Vice President Mike Pence and finally Congress to overturn the legitimate results.
After a weekslong campaign of lies about the election results, prosecutors allege, Trump sought to exploit the violence at the Capitol by pointing to it as a reason to further delay the counting of votes that sealed his defeat.
In their charging documents, prosecutors referenced a half-dozen unindicted co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside of government who they said had worked with Trump to undo the election results and advanced legally dubious schemes to enlist slates of fake electors in battleground states won by Biden.
The Trump campaign called the charges “fake” and asked why it took two and a half years to bring them. He has pleaded not guilty.
The case had been set for trial on March 4 in federal court in Washington. But that date was canceled amid an appeal by Trump on the legally untested question of whether a former president is immune from prosecution for official acts taken in the White House.
The Supreme Court injected fresh uncertainty into the trial date, saying Wednesday that it would hear arguments in late April. That leaves it unclear whether a trial can be completed before the November election.
Hush-money scheme
Updated
Pictured: Former President Donald Trump speaks before entering the courtroom Feb. 15, 2024, at Manhattan criminal court, where he faces state charges stemming from hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to bury allegations of extramarital sexual encounters.
Trump became the first former U.S. president in history to face criminal charges when he was indicted in New York in March on state charges stemming from hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to bury allegations of extramarital sexual encounters.
Originally set to proceed to trial March 25, Manhattan Judge Juan Manuel Merchan agreed to a 30-day delay starting March 15 until April as he sought answers about a last-minute evidence dump that the former president's lawyers said hampered their ability to prepare their defense. The trial kicked off with jury selection April 15. A full jury was seated April 18.
Trump has already pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Each count is punishable by up to four years in prison, though it’s not clear if a judge would impose any prison time if Trump were convicted.
The counts are linked to a series of checks that were written to his lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse him for his role in paying off porn actor Stormy Daniels, who alleged a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, not long after Melania Trump gave birth to son Barron. Those payments were recorded in various internal company documents as being for a legal retainer that prosecutors say didn’t exist.
Opening statements provided a clear roadmap of how prosecutors will try to make the case that Trump broke the law, and how the defense plans to fight the charges on multiple fronts.
Lawyers presented dueling narratives as jurors got their first glimpse into the prosecution. Still to come are weeks of what's likely to be dramatic and embarrassing testimony about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee's personal life as he simultaneously campaigns to return to the White House in November.
Georgia election indictment
Updated
Pictured: People watch as the motorcade with former President Donald Trump travels to the Fulton County Jail Aug. 24, 2023, in Atlanta.
Trump is charged alongside 18 other people — including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law by scheming to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss.
The indictment, handed up in August, accuses Trump or his allies of suggesting Georgia’s Republican secretary of state could “find” enough votes for him to win the battleground state; of harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud; an, attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of Electoral College electors favorable to Trump.
In the months since, several of the defendants, including lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, have pleaded guilty.
An appeals court on June 5, 2024, halted the case while it reviews the lower court judge's ruling allowing Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to remain on the case.
The Georgia Court of Appeals' order prevents Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee from moving forward with pretrial motions as he had planned while the appeal is pending. While it was already unlikely that the case would go to trial before the November general election, when Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee for president, this makes that even more certain.
The appeals court docketed the appeals filed by Trump and eight others and said that “if oral argument is requested and granted” it is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 4. The court will then have until mid-March to rule, and the losing side will be able to appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.
Trump and eight other defendants had tried to get Willis and her office removed from the case, arguing that a romantic relationship she had with special prosecutor Nathan Wade created a conflict of interest. McAfee in March found that no conflict of interest existed that should force Willis off the case, but he granted a request from Trump and the other defendants to seek an appeal of his ruling from the state Court of Appeals.
Special prosecutor Nathan Wade formally withdrew March 15, 2024, after a judge ruled he had to leave or Willis couldn't continue to pursue the charges. His resignation allows Willis to remain on the most sprawling of four criminal cases against the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election.
Arizona election indictment
Updated
Pictured: Former New York Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani speaks Dec. 15, 2023, outside the federal courthouse in Washington. Guiliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, was among those indicted April 24, 2024, in an Arizona election interference case.
An Arizona grand jury on April 24, 2024, indicted former President Donald Trump 's chief of staff Mark Meadows, lawyer Rudy Giuliani and 16 others for their efforts to use so-called fake electors to try to overturn Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
The indictment names 11 Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring that Trump won Arizona in 2020, including the former state party chair, a 2022 U.S. Senate candidate and two sitting state lawmakers. They're charged with nine counts each of conspiracy, fraud and forgery. The identities of seven other defendants, including Giuliani and Meadows, were not immediately released because they had not yet been served with the charges.
Trump, who is described in the indictment as an unindicted co-conspirator, has argued that he can’t be prosecuted for acts he committed while serving as president. The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday will hear arguments on his bid to avoid federal prosecution over his efforts to reverse his loss.
With the indictments, Arizona becomes the fourth state where allies of the former president have been charged with using false or unproven claims about voter fraud related to the election. Heading into a likely November rematch with Biden, Trump continues to spread lies about the last election that are echoed by many of his supporters.
Descriptions of other unnamed defendants point to Mike Roman, who was Trump’s director of Election Day operations; John Eastman, a lawyer who devised a strategy to try to persuade Congress not to certify the election; and Christina Bobb, a lawyer who worked with Giuliani. Eastman and Bobb did not respond to text messages seeking comment, nor did a lawyer who is representing Roman in a case in Georgia.
The 11 people who had been nominated to be Arizona’s Republican electors met in Phoenix on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign a certificate saying they were “duly elected and qualified” electors and claiming that Trump carried the state. A one-minute video of the signing ceremony was posted on social media by the Arizona Republican Party at the time. The document was later sent to Congress and the National Archives, where it was ignored.
Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes. Of the eight lawsuits that unsuccessfully challenged Biden’s victory in the state, one was filed by the 11 Republicans who would later sign the certificate declaring Trump as the winner.
Their lawsuit asked a judge to de-certify the results that gave Biden his victory in Arizona and block the state from sending them to the Electoral College. In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa said the Republicans lacked legal standing, waited too long to bring their case and “failed to provide the court with factual support for their extraordinary claims.”
Days after that lawsuit was dismissed, the 11 Republicans participated in the certificate signing.
The Arizona charges come after a string of indictments against fake electors in other states.
The Republicans facing charges are Kelli Ward, the state GOP’s chair from 2019 until early 2023; state Sen. Jake Hoffman; Tyler Bowyer, an executive of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA who serves on the Republican National Committee; state Sen. Anthony Kern, who was photographed in restricted areas outside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack and is now a candidate in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District; Greg Safsten, a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party; energy industry executive James Lamon, who lost a 2022 Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat; Robert Montgomery, chairman of the Cochise County Republican Committee in 2020; Samuel Moorhead, a Republican precinct committee member in Gila County; Nancy Cottle, who in 2020 was the first vice president of the Arizona Federation of Republican Women; Loraine Pellegrino, past president of the Ahwatukee Republican Women; and Michael Ward, an osteopathic physician who is married to Kelli Ward.
Civil cases
Updated
Pictured: Former U.S. President Donald Trump, with lawyers Christopher Kise and Alina Habba, attends the closing arguments in the Trump Organization civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court on Jan. 11, 2024, in the Manhattan borough of New York.
Beyond the criminal cases, Trump has also been the subject of a civil proceeding in New York City. The state's attorney general, Letitia James, argued that Trump and his companies engaged in a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth.
A judge has ordered Trump and his companies to pay $355 million as a penalty in the case. Trump won’t have to pay out the money immediately as an appeals process plays out, but the verdict still is a stunning setback for the former president.
New York state lawyers and an attorney for Trump settled their differences in April over a $175 million bond that Trump posted to block a large civil fraud judgment while he pursues appeals.
The agreement cut short a potential court hearing in Manhattan that was to feature witnesses.
The bond stops the state from potentially seizing Trump’s assets to satisfy the more than $454 million that he owes after losing a court case brought by the Democratic attorney general. She had alleged that Trump, along with his company and key executives, defrauded bankers and insurers by lying about his wealth.
If he’s ultimately forced to pay, the magnitude of the penalty, on top of earlier judgments, could dramatically diminish his financial resources. And it undermines the image of a successful businessman that he’s carefully tailored to power his unlikely rise from a reality television star to a onetime — and perhaps future — president.
That ruling comes on top of the $83.3 million Trump was ordered to pay to E. Jean Carroll in January for his continued social media attacks against the longtime advice columnist over her claims that he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store. He was already the subject of a $5 million sexual assault and defamation verdict last year from another jury in the case.
