Former President Donald Trump is facing 34 felony charges of falsifying business records for his role in an alleged scheme to bury potentially negative stories about his personal life prior to the 2016 election.
State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan unsealed the world’s most talked about indictment on Tuesday afternoon at the Manhattan Criminal Court on Centre Street, marking the first time a former U.S. president has faced criminal charges.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all of the charges.
The newly unsealed charges center on what Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office painted as a “catch and kill” scheme to prevent negative stories about Trump from going to press during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Bragg's office released a statement of facts shortly after unsealing the indictment, which can be read here:
Most of the counts are related to a $130,000 payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels just before the election. Daniels claims to have had an affair with Trump a decade earlier and had been weighing going public with her story during the campaign.
The payment to Daniels came from Michael Cohen, who was Trump’s personal attorney and fixer at the time. Cohen, who has already served prison time for his role in the scheme, was reimbursed with monthly checks processed through the Trump Organization and submitted invoices designed to make them look like consulting payments — each of which is the subject of a separate charge Trump now faces.
The scheme was finalized in a 2017 meeting in the Oval Office, according to court documents filed by the district attorney’s office.
The prosecution’s court filings also lay out two instances in which the former president is accused of working with Cohen and David Pecker, then-CEO of National Enquirer publisher AMI, to suppress stories. AMI paid $30,000 to a former Trump Tower doorman who claimed he had a story about a child Trump conceived through an extramarital affair, as well as $150,000 to another woman, Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.
The arrangements came after Trump, Cohen and Pecker met at Trump Tower in 2015, with Pecker agreeing to look out for potentially negative stories about Trump and run damaging stories about his political opponents, according to a filing from Bragg’s office. In the case of McDougal, AMI acquired the rights to her story and had originally agreed to transfer it to a Cohen shell company; AMI later changed its mind before transferring the rights to Cohen.
Each of the charges Trump is facing is a Class E felony, the lowest-level felony in state law. Usually, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor charge, but in this instance prosecutors elevated it to a felony by claiming that Trump was using the documents to commit and conceal another crime. The prosecution’s filings make that case in part by highlighting the AMI payments to McDougal and the doorman.
Bragg’s office is leading the prosecution, which stems from a yearslong investigation launched during the administration of his predecessor, Cy Vance.
“The People of the State of New York allege that Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election,” Bragg said in a statement. “Manhattan is home to the country’s most significant business market. We cannot allow New York businesses to manipulate their records to cover up criminal conduct.”
Trump is set to deliver a prime time response from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida at 8:15 p.m.
Read the full indictment here.
