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
4 million. Filing false statements to a bank in order to obtain a loan, and the real stunner, two counts of Campaign Finance violations. The reasons those were such a stunner, because Michael Cohen detailed in a little bit exactly what those Campaign Finance violations were. One, 150,000 payment to the ceo of a Media Company for a contract which we know from our previous reporting has to do with karen mcdougal, who accuses President Trump of an affair, which he, of course, has denied. And then the second, 130,000 payment, which he facilitated, which we know again from previous reporting has to do with Stormy Daniels, a porn star that alleges an affair with the president. Again, their names not mentioned in court, but we know who they were talking about, and then we got a little bit more detail when the u. S. Deputy attorney came out of court after these guilty pleas and talked about all of the charges in general. Take a listen real quickly. A look at breaking news, politics and reports
told david pecker not to publish stories until the election was over there s a lot of election related activity, a lot of election related testimony that michael cohen and david pecker will be star witnesses in the trial because of what they know and the conversations they had about holding stuff until the election was over. there s testimony from michael cohen that he goes into the white house and meets with trump in the oval to confirm that he s going to get paid back then i want to ask you, katie, specifically about this. this is a statement of fact about cohen in a pressure campaign to your point, something that doesn t seem to be charged the fbi executed a search warrant on cohen s residents and office in the months that followed, the defendants and others engaged in a pressure campaign to make sure lawyer a did not cooperate with law enforcement. on the day of the searches, lawyer a called to speak with the defendant to let him know what occurred. in a return call, he told lawy
prove to a judge there s probable cause that a crime was committed by michael cohen. so they are already getting to this sort of higher legal standard than we often think about when the police just stop and talk to someone, for example. so they had a fair amount of evidence going in to get that kind of search warrant on cohen. what we now know from a lot of reporting is that they got a considerable amount of evidence, including tapes cohen had made of conversations with trump and with others. and so they were already pretty far down the road when they got into those rooms and got that evidence. it s clear that what they found as part of those search warrants let them really make a case against cohen and ultimately convince him to plead guilty, meaning he didn t want to test their evidence in court. he just decided to acknowledge in court at this very, very early point in time that he was guilty. jeffrey toobin, what should president trump be most concerned about right now? whether
high principle, this more than anything that s happened i think all year, crossed a clear line of the doj mission and life blood. would you think about the advice that you would be giving to rosenstein and wray right now. if they called you up and said what s the move here. i think i m sympathetic to the position they re in and i also sense that rosenstein, there s two things that make me think rosenstein is committed to protecting this investigation. one, he said that the justice department won t be extorted a word associated with organized crime and made it sound like he was talking about a mafioso group trying the extort them. and b the fact that he signed off on the search warrant on cohen. i don t know what he saw that he signed off, but that makes me think he has seen stuff that indicates that yeah, there s some real probable cause of criminal