First, Daniels. During the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, she tried to sell her story of a decade-old affair with Trump, which he denies. Daniels’s representatives approached The National Enquirer. But its publisher, David Pecker, was a longtime ally of Trump’s who had agreed to look out for potentially damaging stories about him. Eventually, he helped arrange a deal in which Trump’s lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about the affair.
Later, when he was president, Trump reimbursed Cohen, and prosecutors say that’s where the fraud began. Trump’s company classified the repayment as legal expenses, citing a retainer agreement. Prosecutors say there were no such expenses, and that the retainer was nonexistent. The felony counts related to invoices Cohen submitted, checks Trump wrote to reimburse Cohen and Trump Organization ledger entries that recorded the reimbursements.
Prosecutors also raised the account of another woman, Karen McDougal, who says she had an affair with Trump, which he denies as well. McDougal, a former Playboy playmate of the year, had similarly tried to sell her story during the campaign and reached a $150,000 agreement with The National Enquirer. Rather than publish her account, the tabloid suppressed it in cooperation with Trump and Cohen, prosecutors say.
Finally, prosecutors invoked a payment to a former Trump Tower doorman. He claimed that Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock. The National Enquirer paid $30,000 for the rights to his story, although it eventually concluded that his claim was false.
The charges
The charges against Trump are all counts of falsifying business records. Typically, those charges are misdemeanors in New York; prosecutors elevated them to felonies by alleging they were linked to violations of election and tax laws. They suggested that the Daniels payment amounted to an illegal campaign contribution, as covering up Trump’s affairs might have benefited his 2016 campaign. And by disguising the payments as legal expenses, Trump also tried to misrepresent the payments to the tax authorities, Bragg said.