By Jack Queen, Luc Cohen and Andy Sullivan
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Prosecutors in donald trumpDavid’s criminal trial is expected to call more witnesses on Tuesday as they develop their argument that he was responsible for illegally covering up a secret payment to a porn star in the run-up to the 2016 election.
Prosecutors showed that the former president’s signature was on the payments, at the heart of the case. Over the next two weeks, they intend to demonstrate that Trump, running again for president, was responsible for an illegal cover-up.
On Monday, jurors were shown 34 business records that prosecutors say were falsified by Trump to hide his reimbursement to his then-lawyer. michael cohenwho made a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about a 2006 sexual encounter she says she had with Trump.
The first former US president to face a criminal trial, Trump has pleaded not guilty and denies having sex with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
A former Trump official testified that Trump’s top finance director told him that the reimbursements to Cohen were for expenses incurred during the campaign. That could undermine the argument made by Trump’s lawyers that the payments were for legal work.
However, neither that official nor another who testified Monday were able to say whether Trump himself ordered documentation to be falsified to hide the payments to Cohen — a gap prosecutors will try to fill with additional testimony.
Jurors have not yet heard from Cohen or Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
They also haven’t heard from Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who was paid $150,000 during the National Enquirer campaign for her story of an alleged affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007.
The tabloid’s former editor, David Pecker, testified that the paper never published McDougal’s account, due to a “catch and kill” deal with Trump to bury stories that could have harmed his 2016 presidential bid.
Pecker was the target of a “swatting” incident, intended to trigger a potentially dangerous response by authorities, on the same day he gave his statement, according to police records seen by Reuters.
Trump says the trial is a politically motivated attempt to undermine his campaign to win back the White House from Democratic President Joe Biden in the upcoming Nov. 5 election.
Judge Juan Merchan fined Trump a total of $10,000 and warned Trump that he could be arrested for violating a gag order that prohibits him from making public statements about jurors, witnesses and family members of prosecutors or the judge himself, if intend to interfere in the situation. The case.
The case is widely seen as less important than three other criminal trials Trump faces, but it is the only one that is certain to be tried before the election.
The other cases accuse Trump of trying to overturn his 2020 presidential defeat and mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all three.
(Reporting by Jack Queen and Luc Cohen in New York and Andy Sullivan in Washington; Editing by Howard Goller)
