Trump’s Lead-Off Trial Will Determine If He Illegally Cheated To Win In 2016

WASHINGTON ― Would Donald Trump ever have become president if he hadn’t paid off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet in the days before the 2016 election?

The answer is impossible to know, but the premise of the question forms the basis of the very first criminal trial of a former president in American history: whether Trump’s scheme to keep Daniels’ claim of a 2006 affair with him under wraps was, in fact, a crime for which the coup-attempting former president should be punished.

While “hush money case” has become the shorthand to describe the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial, particularly among Trump defenders who wish to diminish it, that is not how it will be described to prospective jurors Monday at the scheduled start of jury selection. Judge Juan Merchan’s first sentence of a 223-word summary describing the case to jurors reads: “The allegations are, in substance, that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.”

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the 34-count indictment against Trump just over a year ago, will argue that the ledger entries and other business documents Trump created claiming that he was paying lawyer Michael Cohen for “legal services” when in reality he was repaying him for the $130,000 check he delivered to Daniels, were felonies under New York law.

“The core is not money for sex,” Bragg told New York’s public radio affiliate last year. “We would say it’s about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.”

Trump’s campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s queries for this report. He has primarily argued on