Trump’s NY criminal case is not about “hush money,” it’s about election fraud!

Trump defrauded voters. Period.

The corporate media continually calls Donald Trump’s New York criminal case where he’s charged with 34 felonies the “hush money” case. It’s not. This case as Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has repeatedly stated, is about Trump “conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.” 

In other words, this case scheduled for a March 25 trial date is focused on Trump’s election fraud.

As the charges tell us, Trump committed crimes to illegally prevent voters from knowing very damaging facts about him shortly before the 2016 election. Why? Simple, Trump knew if voters learned weeks before the 2016 election—in the midst the firestorm caused by the infamous Access Hollywood tape where he bragged about sexually assaulting women—that he also had an affair with an adult film star just four months after his wife Melania had given birth to their child--he would lose.

That is why DA Bragg keeps saying the “core” of this case “is not money for sex,” it’s election corruption. Indeed, the very first line of the Statement of Facts that details the basis for the charges against Trump tells us that, “The defendant DONALD J. TRUMP repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”

The vitally important point here is that Trump didn’t falsify business records to hide his affair from his wife or friends at his country club. Rather, Trump did so for one reason: to hide “damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”

To that end, as the statement of facts details, “From August 2015 to December 2017, the Defendant orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects.”

“In order to execute the unlawful scheme, the participants violated election laws and made and caused false entries in the business records of various entities in New York,” as the statement of facts details. And “The participants also took steps that mischaracterized, for tax purposes, the true nature of the payments made in furtherance of the scheme.”

Why was Trump so desperate to conceal info about his affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels—as well as his much longer affair with former Playboy model  Karen McDougal --weeks before the 2016 election? The statement of facts answers that for us: “About one month before the election, on or about October 7, 2016, news broke that the Defendant had been caught on tape saying to the host of Access Hollywood: “I just start kissing them [women]. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab ’em by the [genitals]. You can do anything.”  

As a result, “The evidence shows that both the Defendant and his campaign staff were concerned that the tape would harm his viability as a candidate and reduce his standing with female voters in particular.”

That is why just three days after the Access Hollywood tape went public, Trump—with the help of his former lawyer Michael Cohen and his publisher friend AMI Editor-in-Chief David Pecker-- moved swiftly to pay off Daniels. Trump knew that it would have been devastating for his campaign if voters learned in the days following the Access Hollywood tapes release that Trump had an affair with a “porn star” a mere four months after Melania gave birth to their child. That is why Daniels was approached on October 10, 2016, with a deal to “prevent disclosure of the damaging information in the final weeks before the presidential election.”  Under the agreeement, Daniels was paid $130,000.

Even more damning for Trump was his team tried to delay paying Daniels until after the election because then—as laid out in the statement of facts—they “could avoid paying altogether, because at that point it would not matter if the story became public.” That is further evidence that Trump was solely paying off Daniels to illegally impact the election. But pressure built and finally on October 27, 2016—about two weeks before election day—the money was wired to Daniels from a Michael Cohen funded shell company.

That brings us to the crimes Trump is charged with for illegally covering up those payments because Trump did not want the public to know about any of this. As alleged in the charging documents, Trump “caused his entities’ business records to be falsified to disguise his and others’ criminal conduct.”

For example, Trump classified payments to his lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse him for the $130,000 he advanced to Daniels as legal expenses, citing a retainer agreement. Yet there were no such legal expenses and the retainer agreement was fictional as well. In fact, it was all fraudulent including the invoices and ledgers in Trump’s corporate ledgers.

Overall, the 34 felonies against Trump for falsifying business records break down as follows: 11 counts involve the checks, 11 center on monthly invoices Cohen submitted to Trump’s company, and 12 involve entries in the general ledger for Trump’s trust. The charges against Trump are all Class E felonies since they were committed in service of a second crime, namely violations of New York state and federal election laws. Each felony carries a maximum prison sentence of four years.

Now you see why DA Bragg has been repeatedly telling us, this is not a hush money case. In fact, the word “hush” does not appear anywhere in the Statement of Facts that accompanied the 34-count felony indictment nor in the charging document itself. Rather, the term “hush money” was wholly fabricated by corporate media. (Just as the corporate media uses the term “classified documents case” when in reality Trump is charged with 32 counts of violating the Espionage Act--meaning that matter should be called the Espionage case.)

Trump committed these felonies to conceal damaging information from voters because he knew if the information was revealed in the closing days of the campaign during the Access Hollywood backlash, he would lose. And Trump was right given he only won three key battleground states in 2016 by less than 80,000 votes. It’s likely that this information would have swung enough people in 2016—especially women of which he received 41 percent of their vote including 52 percent of white women—to not vote for him.

That is why we should never say this is a hush money case. It’s not. This is a case of election corruption by Trump where he intentionally defrauded voters. And that is why Trump is charged with 34 felonies.

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