Donald Trump is running for president to stay out of prison. But what happens if he has to run for president to try to stay out of prison — while he is already in prison?
What if he is running from Rikers?
On Thursday, that possibility became very real, very fast, after Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts in a case in New York state court. The jury only deliberated for a day before issuing a sweeping verdict convicting him of charges related to paying hush money to a porn actress.
Trump is now a convicted felon in a very complicated legal situation, brought on by his utter disregard for the rule of law.
Over the past year, he has been facing criminal charges in four separate cases, but his defense has had very little to do with proving his innocence in any of them. The facts in all of the cases go against him, and he and his lawyers know it. Instead, his legal strategy has been to delay the cases until he can win the presidential election, and then quickly abuse his presidential powers in order to kill the two federal cases against him.
The state cases, however, pose a greater threat to him, as he wouldn’t have any ability to pardon himself, should he win.
In state court in Georgia, where Trump is accused of election interference, he is relying on a friendly, Republican-dominated state legal and political system, where efforts are already underway to discredit the local prosecutor. If that doesn’t work, Georgia’s Republican-dominated pardon board (its members are appointed by the Republican governor) will probably find some legal loophole to help Trump wriggle out of any punishment, especially if he is elected president.
Then there is New York.
Trump was unable to bully the state’s legal system into delaying his case there, and the judge showed little patience for the antics Trump has employed with impunity in other legal venues. All of that helped guarantee that the New York trial would take place before the election, even as his other cases were delayed and faded from political view.
When the state charges were first brought against Trump in New York, pundits with little understanding of the legal system immediately branded the case to be weak, overdrawn, and too complicated. But the basic facts of the case are actually straightforward, revealing a criminal conspiracy that was designed to help Trump win the White House in 2016.
It wasn’t too weak, too overdrawn, or too complicated for the jury.
Think back to Friday, October 7, 2016. In the closing weeks of the presidential election between Trump and Hillary Clinton, a Washington Post story was posted online that night reporting on a 2005 “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump talked openly about how he frequently groped women, adding that, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Almost immediately, shocked Republican leaders began to call on Trump to drop out of the presidential race. It was the biggest crisis of the Trump campaign.
Trump’s campaign barely survived. But what would have happened to Trump if other scandals had come out immediately after the “Access Hollywood” tape became public? What if the “Access Hollywood” tape was quickly followed by the revelation that Trump had sex with a porn actress while he was married?
In his closing arguments in the New York trial, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass emphasized the connection between the political firestorm surrounding the “Access Hollywood” tape that was engulfing the Trump campaign in October 2016 and the scheme to silence Stormy Daniels, the adult film star. Steinglass pointed out that the deal to pay off Daniels was made just after the “Access Hollywood” tape came out.
“It’s critical to appreciate this,” Steinglass told the jurors. “Stormy Daniels … would have totally undermined his strategy of spinning away the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape.”
So to avoid another big scandal on top of the “Access Hollywood” scandal, a combination punch that could have knocked him out of the presidential campaign, Trump engaged in a plot to secretly pay off Daniels and bury the story. As part of the cover-up, he fraudulently falsified records about the transactions involved in his scheme.
Charges related to that cover-up were at the heart of the New York state case, including the falsifying of business records in order to hide the fact that he paid back his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for his payment to Daniels.
To bolster the argument that Trump engaged in a wide-ranging fraud to hide damaging news in the middle of the presidential campaign, the New York case also featured the role of the sensationalist tabloid National Enquirer in the practice of the “catch and kill” of stories potentially harmful to Trump. David Pecker, the former chief executive of the company that owned the Enquirer, testified during the trial in New York that he was involved in three payments to silence people with negative information about Trump: a Trump Tower doorman who said Trump had an illegitimate child, a former Playboy model who had an affair with Trump, and Daniels.
Sentencing in the case will be July 11 — less than a week before the Republican National Convention.
Update: May 30, 2024, 8:12 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a quote from prosecutor Joshua Steinglass.
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