Here are the new revelations – and key questions – from Donald Trump’s unsealed indictment
The most obvious candidate for that aggravating element is the admission from Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that he arranged a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in consultation with Trump and to aid Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The references to federal election violations are virtually certain to be the focus of pre-trial motions from Trump’s attorneys, who have contended publicly that this state-law offense cannot be piggybacked on a federal-law crime. “The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme,” the statement says.
But recording the money, falsely, as legal fees subjected Cohen to significant income-tax liability — meaning that any trickery the men engaged in may actually have benefitted state and federal coffers. That may be why Bragg’s team doesn’t deem the practice “fraud,” and why no tax fraud or evasion charge was included in the indictment.For Trump to be convicted of falsifying business records, the records at issue have to be, well, business records.
The key question, and one that is sure to feature in efforts by Trump’s lawyers to derail the case, is whether documents that happened to pass through the Trump Organization or handled by Trump Organization personnel are automatically classified as business records, even if the source of the funds was Trump’s personal accounts.
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