defendant trump in photos that will live in infamy. the first american president to be charged with a crime. defendant donald j. trump, is seen here surrounded by his legal team a photo trump most certainly did not want you to see. it s nothing short of a remarkable image of the new reality for the man who raged in all caps on social media ahead of his day in court before surrendering for arrest and processing in manhattan criminal court. trump was uncharacteristically grim and silent, ignoring questions from reporters before pleading not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. the now unsealed indictment lays out the 34 counts. in the form of numerous entries made with, quote, intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof the indictment isn t explicit about the other crimes trump tried to conceal but it s laid out clearly in the prosecutor statement of fact as a scheme involving trump a
here s my problem with that. everything michael cohen has said has turned out to be accurate he pleaded guilty to crimes all of which except for one were related to doing something at the behest of one perp, donald trump. he s the only person who benefitted from it, the person michael cohen did it for in this indictment, it says they created a shell company to pay at his behest, michael cohen doing that for donald trump. michael cohen pleaded guilty to it ami admitted to the feds it was a crime, admitted it was for the campaign if three people commit a crime and two people admit that it s a crime and woun goes to prison for it, the third person also committed a crime. i see an issue with donald trump. the credibility issue is one. katie and i have this conversation we re no strangers to trying cases with witnesses whose testimony is vital to our case, and who have credibility issues. what you do with that as a prosecutor and basically say,
this person was so close to the action he was the one doing it who else would know? that s how you overcome that. i will say that michael cohen is not doing alvin bragg any favors with the amount of talking he s doing. that came up from the defense in the hearing today where they were talking about the fact that as the judge was talking about donald trump being on social media and talking and saying what he was saying, they brought up the fact that michael cohen had been on the steps of the court talking about what was going on with the case and with the grand jury, and that is something that as a prosecutor would make me nervous. one thing really quickly, the discovery in this case, the defense is going to get the grand jury testimony there s no depos, no depositions. so they re going to get all the grand jury testimony, the witness list, and they have to figure it out. the second thing is if they file a motion to dismiss and they lose, no appeal, meaning they re not going to st
defensible i want to go to hugo for one moment take us back for just a moment that is sort of an important piece of this, what was the mindset of the trump campaign at the time that all of these shoes were dropping? there s also a controversy about him calling a former miss universe a pig, and there was all this question about whether women voters and that s mentioned in the indictment, there was a concern that women voters would walk away what was the state of the campaign at that point right, and this is going to be crucial to the trial, because the trump campaign has the trump legal team has long said look, trump was always going to be killing these stories because he was a public figure, and he had a history of trying to kill these stories since he became famous but there are certain points in this indictment that we hadn t necessarily anticipated, which i think makes it very clear that a lot of these specific payments to stormy daniels, for instance in particular, were tied
agreement not to speak out about the alleged sexual relationship. prosecutors say, quote, the defendant did not want this information to become public because he was concerned about the effect it could have on his candidacy. in other words, it was clearly intended to influence the 2016 election then there s a third part, the hush money payment to buy stormy daniels silence after the release of the access hollywood tape in october 2016. quote, with pressure mounting and the election approaching, the defendant agreed to the payoff and directed cohen to proceed. cohen discussed the deal with the defendant and trump organization cfo allen weisselberg. the defendant trump did not want to make the $130,000 payment himself. and asked cohen and weisselberg to find a way to make the payment. the final part of the scheme, prosecutors say trump arranged to reimburse cohen for the payoff he made on trump s behalf saying cohen submitted ten