Prosecutors face challenges linking Trump to falsification scheme

Alvin Bragg is hoping to convince a jury that former President Donald Trump committed felonies by allegedly falsifying business records, but to do that, the Manhattan district attorney must prove Trump acted with intent.

Over the last three weeks, prosecutors have called upon witnesses to deliver, at times, salacious testimony about Trump, and they have entered dozens of records into evidence. However, they have struggled to tie Trump directly to what Bragg, an elected Democrat, claims was a felonious payment scheme.

Tuesday marked the most dramatic day of witness testimony in the trial thus far after porn star Stormy Daniels took the witness stand and rehashed graphic details about an alleged sexual encounter she had with Trump in 2006.

The testimony was captivating for jurors and the public and provided color to her story, which Trump’s ex-attorney Michael Cohen paid $130,000 in 2016 to hide. However, some critics found it lacked substance.

Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, called Daniels’s testimony a “dumpster fire.”

“The value of the testimony was entirely sensational and gratuitous, yet [Judge Juan Merchan] was fine with humiliating Trump,” Turley wrote in an op-ed.

Defense attorneys repeatedly raised objections to Daniels’s testimony, calling it “extremely prejudicial” and asking for a mistrial, but Merchan denied the request.

“I agree that it would have been better if some of these things had been left unsaid,” Merchan conceded, though.

Other trial days involved drier but more substantive material, including prosecutors entering into evidence a paper trail of payments to Cohen that are at the heart of Bragg’s case. However, the links between Trump himself and those documents remain unclear.

Bragg, according to his indictment, accused Trump of knowingly falsifying business records, which would normally be a misdemeanor. But Bragg claimed Trump did so with the “intent to commit another crime,” which strengthens the charges to felonies. In an accompanying statement of facts, Bragg said the other crime was related to the 2016 election, though it remains unclear what specific other law Bragg believes Trump broke.

Trump participated in a scheme to violate “election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York,” Bragg wrote in the statement of facts. Trump “also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme,” he wrote.

Trump paid Cohen $420,000 in 11 installments in 2017, and, according to evidence, the payments included a reimbursement to Cohen for the payment Cohen made to Daniels. Trump Organization accountants categorized the payments as “legal expenses,” which Bragg has claimed was a willful falsification for tax purposes.

Testimony from former Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney was less dramatic than that of Daniels, but it shed light on why the payments were categorized the way they were. The categorization as “legal expenses” was accurate because the payment was for a lawyer, McConney testified. The payments were recorded within the limitations of an antiquated accounting program and “legal expenses” was the best option available from a computer system’s dropdown menu, McConney said.

Trump’s attorney Emil Bove asked McConney who made the decision to categorize the payments as legal expenses, and McConney replied that he himself did.

McConney also testified that he had no knowledge of Trump being aware of the payment structure set up for Cohen and that former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg had crafted it.

“In none of the conversations that you had with Mr. Weisselberg did he suggest that President Trump had told him to do these things?” Bove asked.

“Allen never told me that,” McConney said.

Defense attorneys also underscored the busyness of January 2017, when Trump took office, saying the change involved making drastic accounting adjustments within Trump’s company and that the president himself was not focused on the minutia of a payment plan for Cohen.

Asked if January 2017 was a “period of flux and chaos” at the Trump Organization, McConney replied, “That’s putting it mildly.”

Prosecutors did submit evidence in the form of an audio recording that showed Trump had an awareness in September 2016 that Cohen had arranged a payment to suppress a story about a second woman, former Playboy model Karen McDougal. The audio was unrelated to the Daniels payments but still signaled Trump had at least some knowledge of Cohen making hush money payments on Trump’s behalf.

New York-based attorney Karen Agnifilo, who formerly worked in high-level positions in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, has been openly critical of Trump, but she said during a podcast this week that prosecutors have not yet proven Trump knew the details of Weisselberg’s payment plan.

“The thing that the defense has done a great job at is distancing Trump from that crime,” Agnifilo said.

She noted that no witness has been able to show any “direct evidence that Donald Trump had any knowledge or intention to falsify the business records, and that’s what the crime is.”

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“So far, there’s been no direct evidence that Donald Trump knew that they were going to record it differently in the books and records. That I think is unfortunately going to rely on Michael Cohen,” she said.

Prosecutors are expected to use Cohen’s testimony to fill the void of evidence that would conclusively connect Trump to the payment plan created by Weisselberg. However, defense attorneys are expected to go after Cohen’s credibility, in part by highlighting how he has in the past pleaded guilty to fraud and perjury-related crimes.