The 34 counts of falsifying business records would normally be misdemeanors, lower-level charges that would not normally result in prison time. But they were bumped up to felonies — which carry up to four years behind bars — because, Bragg says, they were done in an effort to commit or conceal other crimes.
“There are an awful lot of dots here which it takes a bit of imagination to connect,” said Richard Klein, a Touro Law Center criminal law professor. Bragg said the indictment doesn’t specify the potential underlying crimes because the law doesn’t require it. But given the likelihood of Trump’s lawyers challenging it, “you’d think they’d want to be on much firmer ground than some of this stuff,” said Klein, a former New York City public defender.
Bragg is “going to bring in witnesses, he’s going to show a lot of documentary evidence to attempt to demonstrate that all these payments were in furtherance of the presidential campaign,” said Jerry H. Goldfeder, a veteran election lawyer in New York and the director of Fordham Law School’s Voting Rights and Democracy Project.
It’s similar to an argument made by former Sen. John Edwards, the Democrat accused of funneling nearly $1 million in under-the-table campaign contributions to hide his pregnant lover during his 2008 run for president. Edwards had argued that the payments were a personal matter, intended to keep things secret from his wife. A jury acquitted the Democrat on one charge and deadlocked on other counts. He wasn’t retried..
But Cohen has also admitted in court to lying before, and Trump’s lawyers will no doubt try to use that to their advantage. Cohen to cover up that he was negotiating the Moscow Trump Tower project on Trump’s behalf during his presidential campaign. Cohen pleaded guilty in a parallel federal case to campaign finance violations and other charges in connection to the hush money payments.
'What a frickin' country. Just doing my normal grifting that I've been doing for half a century, and, wham!, they're fingerprinting me. What's a conman to do?'
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