Today, Explained - Florida man’s first criminal trial begins

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

The first of former President Donald Trump's four criminal trials began this week. Vox's Andrew Prokop explains what's at stake, and Vox's Abdallah Fayyad explains how he might (or might not) pay the mounting legal bills. This episode was produced by Jesse Alejandro Cottrell with help from Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, Matt Collette and Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jury selection continues for a second day in a Manhattan courtroom where former President Donald Trump is on trial for falsifying business records. Prospective jurors were asked 42 questions aimed at determining whether they can be fair and impartial, such as, can you be fair and impartial? Have you ever been a boogaloo boy or in Antifa? And what podcast do you listen to? Trump is required to be present in court for this trial that could last until June, and he talked to reporters today before entering the courtroom. I should be right now in Pennsylvania, in Florida, in many other states, North Carolina, Georgia, campaigning. This is all coming from the Biden White House because the guy can't put two sentences together.

He can't campaign. They're using this in order to try and win an election. Trump in court, coming up on Today Explained. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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President Trump is in court again today. Remind us which trial this is. What is this about? This is the New York trial against Trump brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, and it relates to hush money payments that were made back during the 2016 campaign. So if we turn the clock back to October 2016, in that time, there were many allegations coming forth of Donald Trump acting inappropriately with women, harassing women, sexually assaulting women. Tonight, a growing list of women are accusing Donald Trump of inappropriate conduct, including sexual assault. I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. And when you're a star, they let you do it.

You can do anything. Grab them by the. He was grabbing my breasts and kissing me, and I was wearing a skirt. And his hands started going towards my knee and up my skirt. Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress, said that she was going to go forward alleging that she had a consensual sexual

encounter with Trump about a decade prior. This was in the final days of the campaign. It would have been a big story. It would have been highly embarrassing to Trump. So instead, Trump's loyal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid her $130,000 to keep quiet. After the election, the Trump organization essentially paid Cohen back by saying that they were just paying Cohen's legal fees because he was their lawyer. But that wasn't really what they were doing. The startling admission by Rudy Giuliani leaves President Trump facing new legal questions this morning. The president's new lawyer says that Mr. Trump actually repaid the $130,000 that attorney Michael Cohen gave to the adult film star.

The specific charge against Donald Trump is 34 counts of falsifying business records for improperly logging these hush money payments as legal expenses in his corporate records. There is a theory that the original payments to Stormy Daniels were also illegal, that they violated federal campaign finance law. In fact,

Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to this charge, but Trump himself was never charged. Cohen admitted to multiple crimes, including more than $4 million in tax evasion, as well as campaign finance violations for paying off women at the direction of the president to keep quiet about affairs. When the federal prosecutors, which had investigated this, abandoned the case, that's when the Manhattan district attorney, who at the time was Cyrus Vance Jr., took over. That office started a big investigation of Trump's business, relying on allegations made by Cohen. Eventually, that resulted in charges against the CFO of the Trump organization, Alan Weisselberg, but no criminal charges against Trump himself. But as the investigation continued, there was a return to this element of the hush money case, which had come up initially back in 2016.

And eventually, Vance's successor, Alvin Bragg, decided to charge Trump with this last year. Donald Trump says these charges are politically motivated, that Alvin Bragg has overstepped. You've done some analysis of this. How abnormal are these charges? They are definitely abnormal. It's strange for so many resources to be sunk into an investigation like this for charges that were just falsifying internal business records that didn't really have a victim, per se. The real controversy over this, though, is that Bragg decided to charge these as felonies rather than misdemeanors. This could have been charged as a misdemeanor offense, but that wouldn't have involved the risk of prison time, and it wouldn't have involved

making Donald Trump a convicted felon. So in the end, he charged these 34 counts of falsifying business records as felony counts. His justification for doing that, he says, is that the business records were falsified with the aim of committing or concealing another crime of some kind. And this was a controversial claim that Bragg made in the legal community. There was a lot of debate about whether this was called for, this was appropriate, especially because he wasn't 100% clear about what other crime Donald Trump was being charged with trying to commit or conceal. His team eventually laid out different theories of what that crime could be, but they argued that, you know, by New York state law,

they don't actually have to say it was this specific crime. All right. So Trump says it's politically motivated. Some analysts say, huh, you know, interesting. This is a little bit unusual. And yet Donald Trump yesterday did go on trial. Before he got into the courtroom, he did give a little bit of a speech. This is an assault on America. Nothing like this has ever happened before. There's never been anything like it. Every legal scholar said this case is nonsense.

It should never have been brought. And then he walks inside the courtroom and what happens? Basically, the judge dealt with some issues early on in the morning. He denied a request from Trump for the judge, Wan Merchan, to recuse himself. Judge Merchan said he was not going to recuse himself. He had no reason to recuse himself. Judge Manchon said he was not going to recuse himself. He had no reason to recuse himself. Trump has complained that the judge's daughter is in the political consulting field and works for Democrats and argued that that was a conflict of interest, but he said it wasn't.

They discussed various matters involving what type of evidence would be permitted to be argued at trial. One of the big rulings here was that the judge would not allow the Access Hollywood tape, the infamous tape, when Trump talked about sexually assaulting women, to be played at the trial. The comments could be quoted, but the tape itself could not be played at the trial. The comments could be quoted, but the tape itself could not be played at the trial. So, you know, Judge Mirshan has not been too sympathetic to Trump and his legal arguments in general in the lead up to this case, turned down a lot of motions from Trump's legal team. But he did rule against prosecutors on a few evidentiary matters. I wouldn't say these are major tea leaves for how the case would go, but they are significant. The prosecutors wanted to introduce the other sexual assault allegations

that had been made by various women against Trump during this period. The prosecutors argued that this provides important context for why Trump may have wanted to hush up Stormy Daniels. But the judge ruled that, you know, this was complete rumors, complete gossip, complete hearsay, and would be too prejudicial to introduce this type of information. How did Donald Trump behave in the courtroom yesterday? Well, apparently he fell asleep at one point. Maggie Haberman, who was in the courtroom reports for the New York Times, Mr. Trump appeared to nod off a few times, his mouth going slack and his head drooping onto his chest. At other points, he kind of sort of scoff. As I said before, he gets bored easily. He

fidgets a lot. He has to sit there. He can't be on his phone. He can't look at Truth Social. He can't, you know. After those initial matters that the judge ruled on regarding evidence and so forth, then we started the process of jury selection. And that is a really big deal. The decisions made during jury selection may determine the outcome of this trial, considering how so many people have preconceptions about Donald Trump, considering that it takes a unanimous jury to convict Trump or anyone, that really what Trump is looking for is just one sympathetic juror who he hopes would side with him, give him the benefit of the doubt, would hold strong and vote against conviction. So it's quite possible that the decisions in jury selection are more important than anything that will happen at the trial itself afterward. And there is a very lengthy questionnaire designed to

sort out who might find it impossible to be impartial. Close to 100 prospective jurors were called into the courtroom on Monday, and more than half of them told the judge they could not be impartial and they were excused. In fact, one of the excused jurors was overheard saying in the hallway, I just couldn't do it. The goal is... What's at stake here? What should people be keeping an eye out for as this trial proceeds? This trial is going to be a tough go for Trump, I would expect. The actual evidentiary and factual issues in the case, I'm not even sure how disputed they will be. If Trump is convicted, he could go to prison. This is not a violent crime.

So there is a question about whether he would actually be sentenced to prison for it. Now, as far as the stakes for the campaign, it was widely expected that if Trump was charged, it would hurt his campaign in the Republican primary. Instead, the opposite happened. And he saw a boost in the polls after this particular indictment back in the spring of last year. And now he is the nominee in waiting. There's still a question, though. If a jury finds Trump guilty, if he is a convicted felon on Election Day, will there be a voter backlash? If Trump was actually convicted, they might have to rethink supporting him. Not most of Trump's supporters, but a significant chunk, more than enough to swing the election to Biden, if these people are truly serious about this claim.

This is the Biden team's big hope for turning things around, that Trump will be convicted, that they can make it central to their message that Trump is actually a convicted felon. Vox's Andrew Prokop. Candidate Trump planned to pay for his legal bills by taking his social media company public. Coming up, how that's been going. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.

You can go to ramp.com slash explained. Ramp.com slash explained. R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. I explained comes from Ramp. If you're a finance manager, you're probably used to having to toggle between multiple disjointed tools just to keep track of everything. And sometimes that means there's limited visibility on business spend. I don't know what any of that means, but Ramp might be able to help. Ramp is a corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your back pocket. Ramp's accounting software automatically collects receipts, categorizes your expenses in real time.

You can say goodbye to manual expense reports. You will never have to chase down a receipt again. You can customize spending limits and restrictions so your employees are empowered to purchase what your business needs. And you can have peace of mind. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained. Cards are issued by Suttonyad a policy editor at vox who's been covering among other things donald trump's many financial debts so donald trump is still in a lot of debt in just the two recent civil lawsuits alone, the New York fraud case

and the E. Jean Carroll case for defamation, he owes nearly half a billion dollars in civil damages. And that hasn't changed. But what Trump has done just a few weeks ago is take his social media company, Truth Social Public, which means that it's now a publicly traded company. Anybody can become a shareholder in that company. And that company was valued at some $8 billion when it was initially put public. Since then, the value of the stock has plummeted and the overall value of the company has really plummeted. Tonight, Truth Social tanking Donald Trump's shares today,

plunging more than 18%. And the share price has already fallen by half. Trump himself has actually lost almost $3 billion since Truth Social went public less than three weeks ago, all on paper. It's still worth billions of dollars, but the value of it now is moving much more toward reality than its initial offering. But that could always change. If investors have a change of heart about how they feel about the company, you know, this is probably going to be a very volatile stock in the near term, especially before the election. Do you have a Truth Social account? I don't have a Truth Social account. I do.

You do? And I'll tell you, it's just like Twitter. But it does make me wonder, seriously, because I do love a good valuation. I do love a good IPO. What would make this company worth billions of dollars? That's one of the shocking things since the company went public is just how overvalued it is. So, you know, for context here, Truth Social had reported that it made a whopping total of $4 million in revenue last year, in the whole year. And it had lost $58 million.

It's not uncommon that a company worth billions of dollars doesn't actually make profit. But usually when that's the case, they're still making a whole lot more than $4 million in revenue. And they at least are a promising good. Investors are interested in where it's going. The thing with Truth Social is when in the span of a year you only make $4 million, and yet you're valued at something in the ballpark of Reddit, which yes, might lose money, but in a year makes about $800 million a year. You know, there's something really detached from reality there. So that's, I think, one of, you know,

the interesting things about Truth Social going public is understanding why it is so overvalued. And that has a lot to do with the fact that its, you know, principal owner is running for president of the United States. You're saying this valuation was probably not a correct valuation. Who are the people that valued this company as high as they did? Looking at this company, what financial analysts are calling it is that it's really not too dissimilar from meme stocks. Only in 2021 could we use a GameStop stock to totally fuck over every hedge fund and Wall Street scumbag. You know, when people invested in companies like GameStop

because they had an affinity for the company more so than because they actually wanted to make a wise financial investment. A bunch of Reddit users have banded together to take down Wall Street through the use of GameStop. GameStop. Dumb money. In this particular case, you know, there are a lot of, you know, small investors, small-time investors who, you know,

are buying a few stocks here and there essentially to show their affinity or loyalty to Donald Trump. You know, they kind of want to, you know, just stand with him and kind of it's a way to express their support. Just like wearing a Trump T-shirt is also be a part owner of his company, even if it's a small scale. But it's also drawing in a lot of big time investors. And that's, I think, where it can really go sideways is once it starts drawing in, you know, these big time investors, be they, you know, special interest groups, you know, individual, you know, wealthy people, you know, foreign businesses, you know, it's just kind of a way to buy influence in a second Trump term should he win because they're going to be co-owners of his company. And what they do with their stock, whether they sell it all at once, whether they buy up more, has direct impact on Donald Trump's net worth.

Can you give us a for instance? Tell us what actually could happen if somebody owns a big part of Truth Social or is heavily invested in Truth Social and they want something from Donald Trump. How do you leverage that? One of the things that the group Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington had pointed out is that one of the major investors in the company that merged with Truth Social, his name is Jeffrey Yoss. And he also happens to be one of the biggest investors in ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok in the U.S. You know, so we don't know

exactly how he influenced Trump's views on TikTok, but we do know that when the bill to ban TikTok came to the floor of the House and Congress, Trump came out against banning TikTok in the U.S., not a position he had taken before. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it. The thing I don't like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger. And I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people. And, you know, it's all conjecture here. You know, did Jeffrey Yost, you know, buy his way into influencing Donald Trump to change his mind on that? You know, it could be true. We don't really know. But that's just like an illustration into how, you know, this can really all go awry.

This is why ideally you want people in public office to divest from their businesses while they're in office so that they actually put the interest of the country and their constituents ahead of their own business interests. If Trump hasn't really divested from that business and knows exactly, you know, how that deal is going, is he going to put his own financial interest, you know, ahead of the country's, you know, if he's also on the side negotiating some treaty between the United States and that country. Remind us again, how much debt does Donald Trump have? And if he were to sell his shares in Truth Social today, tomorrow, early next week, would it clear all his debts? So Trump has debt on a rolling basis.

Right now he has hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. His problem for now is that he actually can't sell his stock in Truth Social. So while on paper it inflated his net worth a whole bunch, it hasn't materially changed his life in the sense that it hasn't actually given him any cash to pay off that debt. And he can't sell his stock for, I think, another six months. This is a standard operating procedure for mergers. You know, part of the reason they do that, you know, is that they want their principal shareholders

to commit to the stock when it goes public so that it doesn't tank. Because, you know, if Trump sells his shares in this company, it's going to essentially go under. There's no other reason investors will want to be there. And so if he can't sell his stock for six months or so, how is he actually paying for all of these legal bills? So for now, you know, he, for example, secured a bond from a lender for his financial fraud case in New York. Since he's been running for office again,

you know, he's been using his campaign fundraising to cover his legal bills. Now, things like civil damages, and that has to come out of his own pocket. But when it comes to hiring lawyers, when it comes to court fees, that money has been coming from his campaigns and PACs. One of the PACs, it's like the majority of its fundraising

has actually been directed toward Donald Trump's legal expenses, not television advertisements or ground operations, you know. So it's really diverting a lot of money that could otherwise be used for conventional campaigning to using it toward bailing Donald Trump out. I've gotten emails from the Trump campaign asking if I can give a couple bucks. Is there any evidence that people are getting tired of this? There was some evidence before that people are getting tired of Trump using a lot of his money for his legal fees. I think part of that evidence was the fact that he was being well out-fundraised by Joe Biden in his re-election campaign. His fundraising numbers had kind of slouched a little bit. But as the general election

picks up, that will certainly change. And the most recent fundraising numbers kind of show that he has now picked up some of his big donors again in the most recent filing shows that he raised $65 million and is far outpacing his numbers from last year. So donors are coming back to Donald Trump, you know, especially when we're talking about big donors who have a lot at stake this election. You know, they're probably going to put a lot of money behind Trump and not really care how he spends that money so long as it gets him to the White House. So we're probably going to see his fundraising numbers improve as we get closer to November. But he is still being out-fundraised by President Biden and still has a long way to go to make up for that deficit. That was Vox's Abdullah Fayyad.

Today's show was produced by Jesse Alejandro Cottrell and Hadi Mouagdi. Amina El-Sadi is our editor, Laura Bullard and Matthew Collette, and Amanda Llewellyn fact-checked, and Rob Byers and Patrick Boyd engineered. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you