With closing arguments in the Donald Trump hush money case scheduled for after the Memorial Day holiday weekend, one former prosecutor offered up a game plan for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office to follow that could secure a conviction.
In a column for Salon, former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut argued that the jury should be reminded over and over again that the heart of the case stems from what he calls the "Trump Tower conspiracy."
As he explained, prosecutor Matt Colangelo cut to the chase with his opening statement to the jury when he told them, "This case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up to corrupt the 2016 presidential election; then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records."
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Those records are in evidence in documents shown to the Trump jury with Aftergut writing, "You know the three categories of falsified records: checks, invoices, and vouchers maintained in the Trump Organization’s books. The conspiracy is a key way that the law makes a defendant criminally liable for all the acts done by his co-conspirators in furtherance of their agreement. Once the conspiracy is proven, it does not matter that it isn’t charged or that the defendant didn’t personally create some of the documents."
Pointing to the checks given to former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, the ex-prosecutor noted, "Your common sense tells you that neither the defendant nor his sons [Don Jr. and Eric] would have signed the 11 checks for $35,000 without inquiring and learning the reasons for those sums from his CFO or Cohen. Cohen testified that he, Trump and Weisselberg discussed those reasons at a January 2017 Trump Tower meeting."
He then added, "Under the law, to defraud is to deceive. Corrupt businesspeople falsify business records to deceive someone. People wanting to keep a scandal covered up commit acts of falsification later to continue the deception," before adding, "The post-election coverup by false business records was intended to maintain that deception by also deceiving New York officials charged with preventing candidates from promoting their elections unlawfully and federal election officials charged with monitoring the limits on campaign contributions in quarterly reports. "
More importantly, he added, the prosecution's closing needs to move beyond Cohen and focus back on the documentation.
"This is not a case about Michael Cohen, it’s a case about facts. Documents and testimony from credible witnesses corroborate Cohen. The testimony of Hope Hicks corroborated Cohen when she told the court that the defendant failed to try to convince her in 2018 that Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels on his own and “out of the kindness of her heart,” he wrote before concluding, "The totality of proof establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump was at the hub of a conspiratorial scheme to falsify business records with an intent to defraud New York officials, federal officials and the public in order to promote his own candidacy in the 2016 election."
