For weeks in a Lower Manhattan courthouse, prosecutors brought one witness after another who testified about various aspects of a broad scheme to help Donald J. Trump get elected president by buying damaging stories about him and concealing them from the American public.
On Thursday, the jury agreed with the prosecution’s case, finding Mr. Trump guilty on all charges that he faced: 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with that effort. Mr. Trump is now the first person who has served as commander in chief to be convicted of a crime.
Central to the case was a $130,000 payment made days before the election to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who said she had had sex with Mr. Trump a decade earlier, and his reimbursements to his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who had paid her off. Mr. Trump was convicted of falsifying business records to try to hide his payments to Mr. Cohen.
Here are the highlights of the criminal trial, which spanned seven weeks, featured 22 witnesses and detailed trysts, celebrity gossip, financial documents and hush-money deals.
A Scheme to Influence the 2016 Election
In the first weeks of the trial, witnesses called by the prosecution portrayed a clandestine scheme involving Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen and the supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer, who worked to bury damaging allegations about Mr. Trump while promoting positive coverage of him and negative coverage of his rivals.
That testimony began with David Pecker, the tabloid’s former publisher and the first witness who took the stand. Mr. Pecker described a mutually beneficial relationship with Mr. Trump that dated to when Mr. Trump hosted the popular reality television show “The Apprentice.”
But there was a shift in that relationship that started shortly after Mr. Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015. On the stand, Mr. Pecker detailed a pivotal meeting in August 2015 at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan. There, he said, Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen asked him how he could “help the campaign.”
“I said what I would do is I would run, or publish, positive stories about Mr. Trump, and I would publish negative stories about his opponents,” Mr. Pecker testified.
Mr. Pecker detailed three specific deals reached to help Mr. Trump before the election.
One involved a doorman at a Trump Organization property who shared an apparently false rumor that Mr. Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock. The Enquirer reached a deal in 2016 to pay the man $30,000 for the tip, effectively burying the story.
The next deal involved Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who said she had a monthslong affair with Mr. Trump that started in 2006. Mr. Pecker said he spoke with Mr. Trump about her and with Mr. Cohen about how to handle her claim. Mr. Trump called her a “nice girl,” Mr. Pecker testified.
The Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., ended up paying $150,000 to buy the rights to her story and then bury it, a tactic known as “catch and kill.” Mr. Pecker said on the stand that the The Enquirer had no intention of printing Ms. McDougal’s account and that the deal was intended to help Mr. Trump’s campaign.
The Silenced Porn Star
The heart of the case, as well as the criminal scheme to influence the election, was the silencing of Ms. Daniels.
Around the same time Ms. McDougal’s hush-money deal was made, Mr. Pecker said, The Enquirer had been discussing buying the silence of Ms. Daniels to assist Mr. Trump.
When Ms. Daniels testified during the trial, she said under oath what she has been saying for years: that she met Mr. Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nev., in 2006 and had sex with him in his hotel room.
Ms. Daniels said that she had considered going public about her account, which Mr. Pecker heard about in 2016 and flagged to Mr. Cohen. But Mr. Pecker declined to pay Ms. Daniels after making the two other deals on Mr. Trump’s behalf. “I am not a bank,” Mr. Pecker recalled saying.
Mr. Pecker and the tabloid’s editor, Dylan Howard, connected Mr. Cohen with Ms. Daniels’s lawyer, Keith Davidson, to negotiate a hush-money deal. Near the end of October 2016, and just days before the election, Mr. Cohen wired Ms. Daniels $130,000 from a newly formed entity he had created at First Republic Bank, funded with a home equity line of credit.
Lawyers for Mr. Trump accused Ms. Daniels of being motivated by money and seeking to profit from the alleged encounter. “Not unlike Mr. Trump,” she responded on the stand.
The Damaging Testimony of White House Aides
Among the 20 witnesses called by the prosecution were two close aides to Mr. Trump when he was president: Hope Hicks, a campaign aide who became the White House communications director, and Madeleine Westerhout, who served as the director of Oval Office operations.
Ms. Hicks testified about concerns within Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign about potentially damaging headlines surfacing before the 2016 election. Most memorably, she described the seismic impact the release of the so-called “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump was recorded bragging about grabbing women’s genitals, had on his campaign.
As soon as the tape was disclosed in October 2016, Ms. Hicks said, she knew it would be “a massive story.” A few weeks later, Mr. Cohen, particularly concerned about the effect the revelations would have on female voters, negotiated a hush-money deal with Ms. Daniels.
Ms. Hicks described Mr. Trump as a micromanager and acknowledged that it seemed unbelievable that Mr. Cohen would pay hush money to Ms. Daniels on his own accord, and without Mr. Trump’s buy-in.
Ms. Westerhout described her involvement in setting up a key meeting between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in February 2017. It was after that meeting that Mr. Trump started to reimburse Mr. Cohen for his payoff to Ms. Daniels. The associated checks, invoices and ledger entries, which were disguised as routine legal expenses, are the documents that spurred the charges.
Once Mr. Trump’s Lawyer, Now the Prosecution’s Star Witness
Mr. Cohen took the stand as the final witness called by the prosecution. He confirmed many details provided by Mr. Pecker and others about the broad scheme to help Mr. Trump’s campaign and hurt his political rivals. And he spoke about the rush to silence Ms. Daniels just before voters went to the polls.
Mr. Cohen said that Mr. Trump made it clear to him in late October 2016, just before the election, that he wanted Ms. Daniels to be paid off. “He expressed to me, ‘Just do it,’” Mr. Cohen said.
He also described a conversation with Mr. Trump and Allen Weisselberg, then the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, in which he said Mr. Trump was apprised of the plan for Mr. Cohen to pay Ms. Daniels and then be repaid.
The checks started to flow to Mr. Cohen in early 2017 and continued throughout the year, eventually totaling $420,000. The total accounted for reimbursement of the hush money, other debts and tax concerns.
“Once I received the money back from Mr. Trump, I would deposit it and no one would be the wiser,” Mr. Cohen testified.
Lawyers for Mr. Trump focused their defense on attacking Mr. Cohen’s credibility, portraying him as a serial liar bent on taking down the former president. But the 12 jurors found his testimony credible and convicted Mr. Trump after 10 hours of deliberations.
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