The 16-page indictment against Donald Trump accuses him of 34 felonies for allegedly falsifying business records in a bid to violate campaign finance laws – a bevy of charges setting in motion the first criminal prosecution of a former president in American history.
Manhattan prosecutors allege that Trump concealed hush money payments by falsely labeling related transactions as legal expenses and by arranging for a tabloid publisher to bottle up the story of a woman who said she had a sexual relationship with Trump.
In doing so, the prosecutors say, Trump repeatedly violated a New York corporate record-keeping law and agreed to break campaign finance laws.
All 34 felony charges against Trump are identical, with each carrying the possibility of up to four years in prison, although judges rarely sentence defendants to jail for such offenses.
The indictment is a bare-bones document that simply recites the alleged offenses in boiler-plate language. However, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office also released a 14-page statement of facts laying out the case in greater detail.
Here are details from the groundbreaking court filings that could make or break the case of People v. Donald J. Trump.
The aggravating factor
Going into Tuesday’s historic and much-previewed arraignment, a key mystery was exactly how Bragg planned to bring the charges as felonies. The charge at the heart of the case – falsifying business records – is typically a misdemeanor, but it becomes a felony if the defendant falsified the records to obscure a separate crime.
The most obvious candidate for that aggravating element is the admission from Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, that he arranged a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in consultation with Trump and to aid Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“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 statement of facts says.
“The participants [in the scheme] violated election laws,” the statement continues, though it does not explicitly cite which ones. The statement also mentions Cohen’s guilty plea in 2018 to two federal campaign finance crimes. And in a press release, Bragg said Trump and others sought to conceal “attempts to violate state and federal election laws.”
The references to federal election violations is virtually certain to be the focus of pre-trial motions from Trump’s attorneys, who have contended publicly that this state-law offense cannot be piggybacked on a federal-law crime.
Knocking it down, but not out?
If defense attorneys prevail on such motions, it would not necessarily wipe out the criminal case against Trump. Instead, the case could remain as 34 misdemeanor charges. That would amount to a legal, public relations and political victory for Trump.
Such a result would further diminish the chances of Trump being jailed if found guilty. The maximum sentence on a second-degree falsifying business records charge is up to one year in prison on each count. A downgrading of the case to a misdemeanor might also aid Trump’s efforts to delay a trial.