Trump's Trials - Here's what you need to know about the New York hush money case

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

This week on Trump's Trials, host Scott Detrow and Domenico Montanaro are joined law professor Kim Wehle.On the eve of what should have been the start of the New York hush money trial we dive into the details of the case:Former President Donald Trump is facing 34 counts related to payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels over an alleged affair she had with Trump. The payments were made in the fall of 2016, just months before the election. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is claiming those payments are a form of election interference, with the theory being by paying off Daniels, Trump prevented information about the alleged affair from reaching voters. The case has been delayed to give the Trump team time to sort through hundreds of thousands of documents.Meanwhile, Trump's $454 million civil fraud judement is due in less than 48 hours. His lawyers are claiming they are unable to come up with the bond to pay the judgment. We look into what could happen if Trump does not pay the state of New York.Topics include: - New York hush money case - Southern District of New York documents - Civil fraud judgement due- What happens if Trump can't post the moneyFollow the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify for new episodes each Saturday.Sign up for sponsor-free episodes and support NPR's political journalism at plus.npr.org/trumpstrials.Email the show at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This week, we have an empire state of mind. From NPR, this is Trump's Trials, I'm Scott Deptrow. We love Trump! This is a persecution. He actually just stormed out of the courtroom. Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. As we have discussed, the New York hush money trial is not days away from beginning. It is on pause for at least a month.

But still, today we are going to focus on New York, because upcoming hearings and financial deadlines there will play a big role in determining what comes next for Donald Trump as he runs for president again. Early next week, a judge will determine what comes next in this trial, so we're going to review what this case is about and how those 34 felony counts could play politically. Remember, this is about hushed money payments and the final days of the 2016 election. And then there's this massive payment looming. Trump needs to come up with nearly a half billion dollars tied to that civil case about business fraud.

His lawyers say they can't secure the bond and if Trump cannot pay in the coming days, New York State could start seizing some of his assets. So New York is the focus today. And luckily for all of us, that gives Domenico Montanaro yet another opportunity to remind us all that he, just like Donald Trump, is from Queens. Jared Sussman In that concrete jungle where dreams are made of, Scott. Scott Sussman Let's go back as much as we love to always do to the final days of the 2016 presidential

election, a great time in our lives, great time in everybody's lives. This case is all about alleged hush money payments made in that period of time, which meant that voters were kept in the dark about this alleged sexual relationship that Trump had as voters made their final choices in 2016. Now we know about it. We've known about it through 60 Minutes. We've known about it through congressional hearings. We've known about it through all sorts of news reports. And now this upcoming criminal trial. Any sense of what voters will make of all of these details now as they get hashed out

in a criminal courtroom? Well, polling has shown pretty consistently that majorities think that Trump did something wrong. I mean, whether that's illegal or just unethical. And this week we had a new poll out that found what other polls have found, which is that majorities of independents think that Trump is guilty of the crimes that he's been accused of and significant percentages of them would not back him in a general election if he's found guilty.

You know, those people would also like to see a trial and a determination by a jury of his peers as to his guilt or innocence before the election. But Trump's team continues to score victories in trying to delay these cases. And as we hang out in one of those delays right now and wait for some upcoming key deadlines and hearings early next week, we're gonna take this time to refresh some of the key facts in this criminal case and also with these big hundreds of millions of dollars in payments that are looming. Stick around. We will do that along with constitutional law expert Kim Whaley after a quick break. Soon, people from Maine to Texas will experience nighttime during the day.

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CPR News, this is Colorado Matters. And you can find all of that and more in your pocket. Download the NPR app today. Big news stories don't always break on your schedule, but with the NPR app, news, culture, and podcasts are ready when you want them in your pocket. Download the NPR app today. We are back and we're joined by University of Baltimore law professor Kim Whaley.

Kim, thanks for being back with us. Great to be here. I want to zoom out in a moment with this New York case, but first, let's start with this delay because that was in the news last week. There's going to be this hearing about it on Monday. The Southern District of New York, that's federal prosecutors, they handed over thousands of documents related to this case and they are still providing documents. Now, Manhattan's district attorney, Alvin Bragg, said that due to this late dump of documents, it made sense to give a little bit of a pause for

Trump's legal team to review this. What is going on here? Can you explain kind of the back and forth and why these documents would be coming at such a late stage? Amy Quinton Trump asked for these documents independently of Alvin Bragg and DOJ didn't produce them until recently and there are a lot of them, at least in number 100,000 or so. One of the explanations apparently is that some of the documents known as witness statements or 302s, the FBI calls them, weren't actually created until December. And so the Southern District just didn't have some of the documents to give Donald Trump

until recently. Now, I know we're going to talk a little bit more about the underlying charges that Alvin Bragg's office brought, but the relationship here is Michael Cohen. Donald Trump's former lawyer and fixer was investigated and pleaded guilty to election-related crimes to the Southern District of New York. So essentially this bunch of documents relates to the Michael Cohen federal case. But because Michael Cohen will probably testify in the Alvin Bragg local criminal case,

that is why there's some overlap here. But Bragg said, I think just this week in a filing, there's only a couple, few hundred of these documents that are relevant to the prosecution, his prosecution, and most of them help, according to Bragg, the government, not Trump. So I don't think this is going to derail things the way we've talked about in some of the other criminal cases pending against Trump. There's been some significant delays. I don't think that'll happen here. So for the benefit of people listening who kind of hazily remember Michael Cohen testifying

before Congress, and that might be the extent of things, can you catch us up on what this case is about? Because delay or not, we are almost certain this is going to be the first criminal case in all of the cases we're talking about. What's the gist of this case? The gist of this case has to do with the adult film star Stormy Daniels, who in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, before the first time Trump ran for office in October,

was paid $130,000 by Michael Cohen to basically not go public about her alleged sexual relationship with Donald Trump. The question in the federal case against Michael Cohen, among others, was whether that amounted to a violation of the criminal parts of the federal election laws on the theory that if you are making contributions or expenditures in a campaign, you're spending money to help a candidate get elected, that needs to be disclosed under the federal campaign and election laws. And that the failure to disclose that constituted a, in Michael Cohen's case among with other charges, a crime. He pleaded guilty to those

charges. Coen. Coen did. But because that wasn't a jury verdict, that doesn't really stand as a precedent that is binding in the theory even against Cohen. That is the idea that hush money payments, which on their own are not illegal, separately constitute a campaign violation. Some people disagree on whether that's a legitimate legal theory, but all that being said, the Cohen case, he did plead guilty.

So Alvin Bragg is essentially, and we can untangle this, but is essentially using that same theory to prosecute Donald Trump under New York law, not under federal law. And then there's the business filing side of this in that Trump repaid Cohen, making it seem like they were legal payments. So there's fraud aspects of this as well. So that's kind of the second layer. What Bragg indicted Trump for was falsification of business records, which in New York is a misdemeanor.

The way to pump that up to a felony is to say, you falsified business records to essentially cover up some other crime. The other crime is the Stormy Daniels payoff to avoid it affecting his election chances in 2016. So falsification of business records is routinely charged in New York, but it's usually charged in connection with other crimes, kind of an add-on thing. Here it's the only thing. It's the only thing that's been charged against Trump is this falsification of business records. And the way that Bragg got it from a misdemeanor to a felony is to tack on the argument that the reason Michael

Cohen papered this 130,000 payout as essentially attorney's fees in various documents was to cover up the payoff to help help the election. But yeah, the falsification was the paper trail that suggested that this was just payment of attorney's fees when really it was reimbursement to Michael Cohen for paying off Stormy Daniels. So Stormy Daniels wouldn't go public about her affair with Donald Trump just literally weeks before November 4th of 2016. Matthew 20 And Kim, I want to come back to you on this, but I want to go to Domenico on this because that is the political crux of this that you

have Trump and his allies saying that this is a political case, that this is not something that would have been prosecuted, certainly not at a felony level in any other setting. This was about kind of going back and seeing, let's find something to bring a case against Donald Trump with. That is what you hear over and over again. And then the flip side is this argument from Alvin Bragg that this is something that could have affected the outcome of the election. I mean, what do you make of that framing on either side? Well, and we have to remember when we think about why the Southern District of New York

might have documents related to this case, it's because there was a potential crime committed when it comes to campaign finance law. So they were looking into this because in the summer of 2016 and then toward October of 2016 when a payment was eventually made to Stormy Daniels as well as to Karen McDougall the former Playboy Playmate in this quote-unquote catch-and-kill effort from National Enquirer Where essentially she sold her story to the National Enquirer the Trump people pay the National Enquirer $150,000 so they're never gonna run it so that they don't run the story right and Remembered in the context of that time period, I mean, we had almost two dozen women

accused Trump of sexual misconduct. And at the time in October of 2016, you had the Access Hollywood tape that came out where Trump is talking about the things he would do with women, to put politely, because we can't talk about exactly how they talked about that in that recording. In the moment, everyone thought that was the end of his campaign. Yeah. Imagine if you had this on top of that. I think that there would be a little bit more piled on. Just one of those things is just tawdry.

It's another aspect of Trump's conduct. It's clearly before he was president, obviously. But all of these cases, like we've talked about before, you're talking about conduct before, during, and after he was president for all four of these criminal cases. And then, of course, there's the civil cases where now we see Trump owing New York half a billion dollars. And we're going to get into those in detail in a few minutes. But Kim, obviously prosecutors always make choices. What's fair and what's not fair when it comes to the way that Bragg's actions are being

framed, whether or not it's a political case? Well Donald Trump filed a motion to dismiss the indictment raising a number of arguments, including selective prosecution, that he was somehow being singled out. And that's a very high standard to satisfy and it was rejected. So just from a legal standpoint, the question is whether Bragg's team can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these crimes occurred and persuade the jury of this kind of complex sort of a tortured fact pattern. It's definitely a difficult narrative for people to get their minds around.

But I don't think, to your point, police officers decide, they'll sit behind the bushes and they don't pull everybody over. They only pull certain people over. And Donald Trump has thrust himself into the national spotlight and is now on his third attempt to secure really unparalleled power. So to say that it's political, yeah, it's political in part because of what his posture is.

And I think the position of the Manhattan DA is that, and I tend to agree with this, is that people that are in power or seeking power, they probably should have a little more scrutiny, not less scrutiny, because the abuses of power are a problem than sort of just, you know, Joe Shmendrick on the street. It's funny related to this, right? Because Trump will say, if I wasn't running for president, none of this would be happening. And in some respects, that's true because- It would have been a violent campaign finance report. Because also, when you run for president, there's a whole lot more scrutiny that comes regardless.

And we're not talking about legal scrutiny necessarily, but when you talk about people looking into your life, your past behavior, and then there's a lot more people who want to come out of the woodwork to maybe sell their story to somebody to say, hey, this guy that's getting so much attention, let me tell you this thing that happened between us. And then prosecutors start to see whether or not these things violate laws.

And yeah, he probably wouldn't be getting the kind of attention and the kind of scrutiny that he's getting if he weren't running for president, but it doesn't mean that he didn't do what he's being accused of. I mean, think about Paula Jones, right? She came out about alleged sexual harassment when Bill Clinton was president. The case was unfolding while he was president, but it was about his time as the Archist for our governor. Long story short, that produced the impeachment process while he was president.

That had tremendous political fallout for him. You know, and maybe, maybe not she wouldn't have come out if he was had just kind of gone off into the sunset as a private citizen. So we've seen this before. Donald Trump is not somehow, you know, victimized in ways that other politicians, you know, can say they have not been in the same level of scrutiny. All right, let's talk about those $454 million now. That is the penalty plus interest due on Monday. Trump and his team have said that he has not been able to secure a bond. He did just make a lot of money merging his truth social

network, but he's not allowed to touch that money for several months. So that won't help here. Okay, so it Kim, assuming Donald Trump does not come up with about a half billion dollars in the next few days, what happens next? Why is the timing so important for Trump right now here? Well, Trump needs to, under New York law, secure a bond in order to avoid having to pay the full judgment during an appeal. He can appeal, but without the bond or without putting in some kind of escrow the full amount of the judgment, he has to actually pay up pending resolution of the appeal. So this process is about being able to basically put everything on hold while

he asks the appeals court in New York to reverse the underlying judgment. And Domenico, we had a moment of Trump, the candidate and political figure kind of undermining his own legal team where his lawyers claimed into filing. He doesn't have the cash. He's having a hard time coming up with bonds. And then he posts on his social media platform, through hard work, talent, and luck, I currently have almost $500 million in cash. Same. Yeah. But...

Sometimes it's through hard work, sometimes it's not. But you know, I mean, the fact is Trump also has this merger and public offering for Truth Social, which he claims could be worth some three, three and a half billion dollars, which by the way is more than all of what he's apparently worth according to Forbes. By Kim, his team is claiming they can't come up with money, they can't come up with a bond. There's certainly a long history of him not paying people back when they loan him money. So you can see why he might have a hard time finding a half billion dollars. But what happens next? Does the state scrutinize whether they're telling the truth

when it comes to that? Do they look at seizing properties? How does this generally work? If this were to move forward, Letitia James could, you know, start getting law enforcement to start seizing assets and, you know, this isn't my act, you know, Dominica would know more about this, but politically, that might be good for Trump to have, you know, TV footage of James trying to get, you know, the judgment actually enforced with money. I mean, a judgment is just a piece of paper. It's only so good as someone actually is willing to pay up. So that's essentially the step she would take and given he has properties

all over the world with complex holdings, it could be a mess to untangle. Domenico, do you think that's true? I'm not sure. I mean, I think that we've talked a lot before about how Trump is viewed very differently among Republicans as he is among independents in a general election. And you know, there's an argument to be made that he can continue to say that he can raise money because he can claim victimhood and look, it's on TV, they're coming after my properties.

At the same time, if this is spotlighted, it's on camera, people then are renewing an interest in asking questions about why is the state of New York, for example, going and trying to seize something that looks like Versailles in his Seven Springs estate in Westchester County, New York. You know, there could also be a class warfare argument that Democrats can make about how Trump is rightfully getting what he deserves. You know, people are so dug in, it's like we're fighting World War I sort of trench warfare when it comes to views of Trump because, you know, we're going to have a very long general

election here, seven and a half months to go until this election, and you're really talking about moving people at the margins. Yeah, yeah. And just we've a lot of attention on that, those Westchester County estates. James has talked a lot about 40 Wall Street, his lower Manhattan property, other options as well. And just to fill it out, I mean, Elise Stefanik, who's a key ally these days of Donald Trump in Congress and somebody who seems to be on the short list for vice president, puts out a statement the other day saying, the weaponization against Joe Biden's political opponent, President

Donald Trump is an absolutely unprecedented form of election interference. It is fundamentally un-American, it goes on. So like that's how these possible seizures would be framed. It was a little bit of a holding pattern week, but I'll still end it with the question that we end each episode with. And Kim, I'll start with you. Did you see anything that happened this week that could fundamentally change either these criminal cases or the presidential election? Kim Buechner Well, we didn't get a chance to talk about Mar-a-Lago. But the rulings that are happening down there with Judge Eileen Hannon relating to whether the Espionage Act is a legitimate charge, one of the charges in that case.

Nat Sinclair There's the documents case. Kim Buechner And the double jeopardy clause that could end up killing that case, yes. Yes, we've focused on that lately. We will certainly come back to that very soon. That is a good point. A lot of questions about what Judge Cannon is doing and how she is thinking about this case. Domenico, what about you?

Well, I really think that this idea of what gets seized, if anything gets seized, is the thing that I'm really paying attention to because I do think that there is something to the imagery of having an attorney general going and seizing properties if that's the case and Trump having his back against the wall. And we know when Trump has his back against the wall, he's not somebody who cowers, he's somebody who sort of fires back. So- Or flails. Right. And what does that mean? Right?

Because politically that'll certainly have lots and lots of ramifications like a snowball sort of going downhill. I'm really looking to see how that winds up playing out and, you know, whether or not there winds up being a case that starts in late April as we kind of expect. Yeah. That senior political editor and correspondent, Domenico Montanaro. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Also joined by Kim Whaley, constitutional law expert from the University of Baltimore. Thanks Kim. Thank you. We'll be back next week with another episode of Trump's Trials. Thanks to our supporters who hear the show sponsor free. If that is not you, still could be. You could sign up at plus.npr.org or subscribe on our show page and Apple podcasts. This show is produced by Tyler Bartleman, edited by Adam Rainey, Krishnadev Kalamore, and Steve Drummond. Our executive producers

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