Former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves State Supreme Court in New York, on Thursday, April 25, 2024, during his trial on charges of falsifying business records. Trump has maintained he is not guilty of any of the charges. After prosecutors' lead witness painted a tawdry portrait of "catch and kill" tabloid schemes, defense lawyers in
In New York — the first of Trump's four criminal cases to go to trial — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with hush money payments meant to stifle negative stories from surfacing in the final days of the 2016 campaign. Over several days on the witness stand, Pecker has described how he and the tabloid parlayed rumor-mongering into splashy stories that smeared Trump's opponents and, just as crucially, leveraged his connections to suppress seamy stories about Trump.