News
Leave a comment

Trump’s Hush Money Trial Turns to a New Phase: the Paper Trail | National News

Trump’s Hush Money Trial Turns to a New Phase: the Paper Trail | National News


After spending weeks building a narrative that Donald Trump and his inner circle went to great lengths to conceal hush money payments made to silence claims of extramarital sexual encounters with the former president, the prosecution on Monday delivered the receipts.

In what amounted to a boring but seemingly bulletproof testimony, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team walked jurors through bank statements, invoices, emails and handwritten notes that appeared to bolster their case, showing how a series of payments made to Trump’s former lawyer were disguised as legal expenses when in fact they were reimbursements for money he paid to silence a former porn star, and that the money came directly from Trump’s personal bank account.

Trump, the first former U.S. president to face a criminal trial, is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business documents to cover up allegations of extramarital affairs that threatened his 2016 White House campaign. He pleaded not guilty.

Taking the stand for most of Monday was Jeffrey McConney, who worked as the corporate controller at the Trump Organization, and who arranged the reimbursement for a $130,000 pay-off made by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, fixer and confidant. The hush money payment, which rests at the heart of the case, was given to Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had an affair with the former president.

McConney testified that in 2017, Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization and McConney’s boss at the time, told him that Cohen was owed money and instructed him on how to repay Cohen. Entered into the record was a bank statement from a shell company that Cohen established, Essential Consultants LLC, with hand-written notes from Weisselberg, which specified that Cohen would be paid a bonus and money to cover a tax burden – in addition to a reimbursement of $130,000.

The Week in Cartoons April 29 – May 3

“Allen Weisselberg said we had to get some money to Michael, we had to reimburse Michael. He tossed a pad toward me and I started taking notes on what he said,” McConney testified. “He kind of threw the pad at me and said, ‘Take this down.’”

In providing evidence of the breakdown of the payments, McConney’s testimony appears to undercut an important argument from Trump’s defense team, which is that the payments made to Cohen couldn’t be for a hush money reimbursement since he received so much more than $130,000.

In another significant moment for the prosecution, the jury was shown the invoices from Cohen, and McConney testified that he didn’t send the invoices to the Trump Organization’s legal department for review – as he would otherwise do with invoices for legal services. Nevertheless, McConney said that, as directed by Weisselberg, he told the head of payroll at the time to mark them as “legal expenses,” and to say they were being paid as part of a “retainer” agreement.

McConney also said that beginning in March 2017, the reimbursement checks came out of Trump’s personal account. What’s more, McConney told the jury, Trump watched his finances closely, especially any outgoing cash, and the payments, he said, also received sign-off from Trump’s two adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

“Somehow we’d have to get a package down to the White House, get the president to sign the checks, get the checks returned to us and then get the checks mailed out,” he said.

Deborah Tarasoff, an accounts payable supervisor who’s worked for the Trump Organization for roughly two decades, testified Monday afternoon after McConney and told the same story. She said that Trump was required to sign all the checks from his personal account, including after he became president. They sent the checks back and forth to the White House by FedEx.

It’s unclear how the developments sat with jurors – though reporters inside the courtroom observed that they appeared engaged with the testimony and financial documents presented, despite how technical and dry it seemed compared to last week’s high-profile witnesses and dramatic testimony.

In cross-examination, Trump’s attorney attempted to show the jury that McConney simply facilitated the transactions as instructed by Weisselberg, and didn’t have much knowledge about what the payments were for. McConney agreed, and it ended up being a line of questioning that the prosecution seemed fine with accepting.

“You were told to do something and you did it?” the prosecuting attorney asked McConney, to which he replied, “Yes.”



Source link

Leave a Reply