The Journal. - The Origin Story of Trump's Guilty Verdict

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

A New York jury has found former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 charges. WSJ reporter Joe Palazzolo recalls the original investigation that eventually led to Thursday's conviction, and legal reporter Corinne Ramey describes the scene as the verdict came down. Further Reading: - Nine Memorable Moments From Donald Trump’s Hush-Money Trial  - A History of WSJ’s Hush-Money Investigation  Further Listening: - Donald Trump’s First Criminal Trial Is Underway  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yesterday, 12 New Yorkers handed down a momentous verdict. The former President Donald Trump found guilty on all 34 counts. Count one, guilty. Count two, guilty. Count 33, guilty. Count 34, guilty. Guilty. Count 34. Guilty. Guilty on all 34 counts. Former President Donald Trump was found guilty on 34 charges for falsifying records to cover up hush money paid to Stormy Daniels. Today, inside Trump Tower, he maintained that he is innocent.

So we're going to be appealing this scam. We're going to be appealing it on many different things. He wouldn't allow us to have witnesses. He wouldn't allow us to talk. He wouldn't allow us to do anything. The judge was a tyrant. Trump's sentencing is set for July, and there are still a lot of unknowns, especially around how this will impact the election. But now Trump is a felon, and how he got here began at The Wall Street Journal. Let's kick this off with the usual things. If you could introduce yourself, tell us who you are, what you do. My name is Joe Palazzolo. I work on the investigations team at the Wall Street Journal. And are you the person who started all of this? I am one of the people who started all of this.

Yes, I am. Way back in 2016. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Linebaugh. It's Friday, May 31st. Coming up on the show, the conviction of former President Trump and the investigation that your next vacation. Ready to kick off?

Discover exciting games and events. Plus, find amazing hidden gems in cities full of adventures, delicious food, and diverse cultures. You'll love it so much you'll want to extend your stay beyond the matches.

Get the ball rolling on your soccer getaway. Head to visittheusa.com. So, your reporting on the Stormy Daniels case goes way back to 2016. How did it start? It started with a tip. A tip that there was a lawyer going around involved in paying off women who had alleged romantic connections with Donald Trump. You know, we made a ton of calls. We create these spreadsheets and drop names into them of anyone sort of connected to the people

that we're looking at. We started checking out Trump's old Playboy videos, you know, where he makes these appearances and seeing who the Playmates were. Eventually, we found sources who led us down the path toward Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate. So, like, you get this tip, you start making calls. What did you uncover? Yeah, so after we had been, you know, smiling and dialing, as former editor Mike Sikanoffy would say, for a couple of weeks, we got a big break. One of our sources called and said that he thought he might be able to help us out.

And that help turned out to be this brown folder with a ribbon tie that we retrieved from someone under the brass clock at Grand Central. In that envelope was a contract between Karen McDougal and the National Enquirer, in which McDougal sold her story to the tabloid for $150,000. Her story was that she had an affair with Donald Trump in 2006, which Trump denies. This kind of contract is called a catch and kill. You buy the rights to the story so no one else can publish it, but you never publish. You kill the story. In November 2016, days before the presidential election, Joe and his team published a story about the payment to McDougal.

How did Trump and his team respond to that story? They didn't engage with it much. They said, we don't know anything about this and these allegations are false. anything about this, and these allegations are false. Okay, so Karen McDougal was the starting point of your reporting, but then that brought in Stormy Daniels, and that was sort of the center of this case that we had the verdict on yesterday. When did Stormy Daniels get involved in your reporting? So Stormy Daniels was kind of always involved in the reporting, and we knew that she had a connection to Trump. Stormy Daniels had been photographed with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament back in 2006.

And there was a report that came out by this celebrity muckraking site, Smoking Gun, that talked about how Daniels had met Trump at this golf tournament at Lake Tahoe. And it didn't say that they had necessarily had an affair, but it was suggested. Joe and the team reported that in 2016, Stormy Daniels had been paid to keep her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump to the tune of $130,000. Trump has denied this encounter with Daniels.

How did you then connect Trump directly to those payments? Well, initially we didn't. We connected Michael Cohen to those payments. Michael Cohen was Trump's longtime lawyer and fixer. We had been given information that he had created a shell company with some obvious name like Damage Control Inc. And we didn't know where, but our best guess was in Delaware because he had formed companies there in the past. So yeah, so we just poured through thousands of records. Looking for a name.

Yeah, looking for a name. And it was not entirely successful until we had another source tell us that it was Resolution something. And so then we found this company called Resolution

Consultants LLC and sure enough Michael Cohen's name was on it we were elated but it turned out to be a false start because Cohen had quickly formed the company and then dissolved it so it couldn't have been the one that he actually used so then we looked at all of the companies that were formed on the date that he dissolved that company and that is what led us

to Essential Consultants LLC, which in fact was the entity he used to transfer the money over to Stormy Daniels' attorney. Okay, so you reported these payments from Cohen. When did President Trump enter the picture? So the first couple of stories, you know, what we knew, of course, was that Michael Cohen had made the payment. And we strongly suspected, just based on his relationship with Trump, that he would not have done this without authorization from Trump. And so all of us were sort of focused on figuring out to what extent Trump was involved. And, you know, over the course of, you know, the first half of 2018, we found that he was intimately involved. You know, he was directing the effort to keep Stormy Daniels quiet after the

report came out about the hush money agreement. The pieces all started falling into place and kind of culminated in a story that we did later that year that showed all the ways in which Trump was knowledgeable about and involved in the hush money. How did Trump and his team respond? They didn't. You know, it was a very uncharacteristic response to a negative story. He didn't even address the story until he was cornered on Air Force One in April of 2018 and asked about it.

You know, and he said that he didn't know about the payment. What motivated your reporting? Why was it important? We wouldn't have written the story if it was just he allegedly had an affair with Karen McDougal or he had this sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels. The point was that he paid to keep them away from people. So like that, it was like he sort of is the one that drove our interest by deciding that these were important enough to keep from voters. And if they were important enough to keep from voters, then they were important enough for us to reveal to voters. from voters, then they were important enough for us to reveal to voters.

So it's one thing to write these stories and uncover what happened. But for that reporting to then get picked up by prosecutors, did you ever think that was going to happen? No, I don't think we did. But the state prosecutors in New York decided that they had enough to build a case exclusively around the falsification of the records tied to the Daniels payment. And that's the case that 12 New Yorkers delivered a verdict on yesterday.

That's next. Walk with us. Connect to the land that connects us all. Grow with us. Come together and make space for each other. Eat with us. Taste the many flavors of our cultures. Laugh with us. Smile.

Joke. And bring each other joy. Come. Walk with us. Indigenous Tourism Alberta. 1800 Tequila believes that taste is more than just a detail. It's everything.

Taste changes the game. It attracts all the attention. Taste elevates everyday moments into extraordinary experiences. Savor the best taste in tequila. 1,800. Taste is everything. Please enjoy responsibly. We love Trump!

We love Trump! We love Trump! For six weeks, the Manhattan criminal courthouse has been a scene. Lock him up! Lock them up! TV crews, Trump supporters, Trump opponents. And inside the courthouse, our colleague Corinne Ramey has been covering the entire trial. What was Trump being charged with? What was Trump being charged with?

Trump was charged with, or I guess I should say, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for covering up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Alvin Bragg, the prosecutor who brought the case, argued this was not a case just about hush money. They talked about the case as a case about election interference and said that Trump was seeking to cover up a conspiracy to illegally influence the election. And the way he had done so was through these hush money payments. So take us into the court yesterday afternoon and that moment before they read the verdict. So I was in the overflow room and my colleague

Jim was in the courtroom. And the odd thing about this arrangement is that I'm like, have a delay, a 15 second delay so that he heard the verdict before I did. So I'm sitting here watching the Google Doc that he's writing in, and he starts writing like, guilty, guilty, guilty. And so that was how I found out the verdict was watching him write it down. And then after the judge asks, Trump lawyers, do you want us to poll the jury? Which means, you know, make sure that it's a real unanimous verdict, that everybody agrees it's the verdict. And the Trump lawyers say yes. And so the judge goes through and asks each juror if this is the verdict.

And while he's doing that, Trump is intensely focused on those jurors. He looked sort of... I mean, he always in court sort of has a scowl on his face, but he looked sort of extra intense, like he was sort of staring into their eyes in some way. Can you walk us through some of the moments from the trial that ultimately might have led the jury to this verdict, starting with Trump's side? Trump's defense was sort of several things. One was that he, you know, the false records themselves were from 2017. At this point, he's sitting in the Oval Office, he's in the White House, and his lawyers argued, like, he's running the country.

You know, an invoice may have crossed his desk, you know, he signed a check, but he wasn't involved in a false records cover-up or sort of the minutia of his accounting staff in New York at this time. How did the prosecutors overcome that defense? The prosecutors, I mean, I think one of the tricky things about this case is Michael Cohen. That Michael Cohen... Trump's former lawyer, Trump's former lawyer and former fixer, he was on the stand for several days, and he was the one who could tell the whole story, from the beginning to the end, in terms of both what happened around the 2016 election and the cover-up afterwards.

But Michael Cohen's problematic. He's, you know, pleaded guilty to lying. He's a disbarred attorney. He has all these social media posts where he says he wants Trump to go to jail. And so they had Cohen be their last witness, and they had various ways of setting the jury up to believe Michael Cohen. They showed Trump was a micromanager. They had witnesses read portions of Trump's books where he's talking about his approach to money, how he likes to be involved in every details of financial negotiations and deals and arrangements. And so they were arguing that Cohen is telling the truth

because it makes sense that, look, there's all this other evidence that this is how Trump acts, that he wants to be involved in this stuff. And so it doesn't take a leap of faith to think that Cohen's telling the truth. Other witnesses for the prosecution included Stormy Daniels and David Pecker, the former publisher of

the National Enquirer. Pecker testified that he pledged to protect Trump from scandalous gossip. Prosecutors had argued that Pecker and Trump and Cohen conspired to sway the election for Trump by, among other things, having kind of buying up stories that could hurt his electoral prospects. And it made me realize that having Pecker as the first witness and really setting the stage for telling this sweeping story about an election conspiracy, a conspiracy to interfere with the election, was a big part of what prosecutors were trying to do. And what did sort of top line yesterday?

What did Trump say in response to the verdict? He said what he said all along. This is a rigged trial that, you know, various ways of saying that this is unfair. This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt. It's a rigged trial, a disgrace. So what happens from here? 34 guilty verdicts.

What's next? The judge scheduled Trump's sentencing for July 11th. And I think the big question is, what happens? Both sides will have the opportunity to argue for what they believe is an appropriate sentence. And I really have no idea what the judge will do. He has a lot of discretion here because there's no sort of mandatory required sentence. And so he could send Trump to jail. He also might not. In looking at other cases, it's fairly common for a first-time offender who's in his late 70s, no other crimes,

to receive probation or other sorts of lighter sentences. He's been convicted and is a felon. He is, yes. The first president to be a felon. What does that mean for him? You know, practically, he can still run for president. You know, the Constitution gives several things that you have, or requirements to meet if you run for president and says nothing about being a felon. He can still vote as long as he's not incarcerated. And so maybe being a felon is more a political question than a practical one for Trump at this point.

How would you describe how big of a moment yesterday was? It was a huge moment. I mean, I think it was, you know, on one level, it's a big moment for Trump and sort of sets up the next phase of this trial, which is sentencing, which has all kinds of other unprecedented questions. But it was also a huge moment politically because it really is going to shape kind of the rest of the election going up until November.

You know, right after the verdict, I was walking out of the courthouse and I looked at my phone and I already had a fundraising email from Trump, like fundraising off of the trial verdict. Like they were prepared to send this out. You know, one from Biden, not that long afterwards. And so, you know, discussion of this trial,

of Trump being a felon, of whatever his sentence is, and sort of what that means to voters and whether it matters and what it says about our politics is certainly going to be something that's a big part of our election this year. The moment you saw the verdict, describe that moment. What were you doing? Where did you see it? You know, I was working, and first we got the alert that the jury had reached a verdict,

and then there's this pause, and it was just enough time to build up this anxiety inside of me. And I wasn't anxious about, again, the outcome necessarily. It wouldn't have mattered to me one way or the other. It was just that something was going to happen after all of this time, after eight years. But it felt momentous for me having been involved in this so long. And this story kind of never stopped surprising us over the years. You know, it was like we just started with one thing

and then, you know, it led us to another and another and another. And it was so iterative and so kind of shocking at every turn that I kind of felt that maybe I would be immune to shock in the story at this point, but I'm like, I'm clearly not. Because, yeah, I mean, when the verdict came down, yeah, I had like a physical response. And now that there's a verdict, a guilty verdict, how do you reflect on this moment?

Well, I mean, for starters, like there's this line that we're hearing a lot from Trump supporters that, you know, this sets a precedent. And now you're going to have, you know, Texas, deep red Texas judges prosecuting, you know, Democratic elected officials. And so, like, is this the start of a tit for tat? Was this a just case? Was it worth it? of a tit-for-tat? Was this a just case? Was it worth it? I mean, these are all sort of questions that are not necessarily for me to answer, but they're certainly things that I think about and will continue to think about. That's all for today, Friday, May 31st.

Additional reporting in today's episode by Alex Leary. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Catherine Brewer, Maria Byrne, Victoria Dominguez, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphreys, Ryan Knutson, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singhi, Lai Ying Tang, Jivika Verma, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis, and me, Kate Leinbach. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathaniana Zamise, and me, Kate Leinbaugh. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Nathan Singapak, So Wiley,

and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis. The next episode in our series Trillion Dollar Shot is out on Sunday. It's a deep dive into how a new class of drugs are changing bodies, fortunes, and industries. Keep an eye out for it. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.