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What would be the legally acceptable way to quietly pay off a mistress like this? If a Pro-Trump Super PAC had paid Daniels instead of Cohen/Trump personally, would that be unambiguously legal? If the National Enquirer had caught-and-killed the story with David Pecker’s personal funds instead of merely informing Cohen, would that be unambiguously legal? What if it was simply a friend of Trump who paid, with no business relationship to the president? A surface level reading would suggest not, because by these trial standards that would technically involve more than $2700 or whatever going to something that could possibly benefit the campaign.
A personal payment from Donald Trump to Stormy Daniels would not be an issue under campaign finance law (spending your own money on your own campaign is 1st-amendment protected activity) and would not generate any business records that could become the basis of a "falsifying business records" charge.
Why didn't Trump do it that way? Partly because his personal lawyer was a lying crooked sack of shit who couldn't give him decent legal advice. Mostly because he doesn't think that laws apply to him in the way they do to little people.
They don't, actually, because these charges have never been used against anybody before in the history of the world.
Err wot? Falsifying business records is charged in almost every white-collar criminal indictment in New York.
See here or here for surveys on the issue, or here for an example of a criminal defence firm which holds out this kind of charge as an important practice area.
I agree that there is a bit of a reach to get to felony falsification in this case - the point I was making was that Donald Trump clearly committed a misdemeanour completely unnecessarily (and may have committed a felony depending on a legal technicality he didn't feel the need to ask a competent lawyer about) because he didn't care.
There is a real question of whether the record was in fact false. If my contractor builds my deck and pays out of pocket for materials, would it be a false record if I label my payment to him as construction expense even if it reimbursed in large part those expenses?
I think the Trump defense mangled this argument a bit but we don’t have to.
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Trump has been doing business in New York for 40 years and the only crime they can charge him on is something nobody has ever been charged for before -- "falsifying records" is one thing, this is falsifying records used totally for internal purposes, as though he committed fraud upon himself (this has been discussed to death in other comments in this thread by now).
There is no one who has ever been charged with anything similar to this. You want to make it sound as though Trump is contemptuous of law because he described money paid to his lawyer as legal expenses, for arranging an NDA, which is legal, with a porn star, which is legal. If Trump was as contemptuous of law as you suggest, maybe there would be other bookkeeping crimes to charge him with that don't involve felony upcharges on underlying crimes that are not specified.
The business-related crimes Trump has been successfully bought to justice as a result of the NY AG-led investiagtion include:
I am not including the stuff that is plausibly "three felonies a day bullshit" like housing discrimination, SEC penalties for improper disclosures when one of Trump's companies was publically traded, antitrust litigation, or ordinary commercial litigation of the type any sufficiently large company gets involved in regularly.
The Trump University scam probably isn't a crime, and it looks like Letitia James brought the loan fraud allegations in civil fraud because she couldn't prove mens rea against individual Trump org executives beyond reasonable doubt. But that is 3 and a half serious crimes of which someone in the Trump organisation is factually guilty, and the evidence points to it being the boss.
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((It's not clear that the underlying crime was actually the federal campaign finance matter; the jury instructions just reference 17-152, which itself requires "unlawful means", and the judge verbally instructed the jury to pick any combination of FECA, other paperwork record violations, or state tax laws.))
Those surveys tend to back this up: the lightest or attempted theft in this page is still 300 USD in Ramirez, Murray in the multiple thousands, Kirkland for 350k USD(!). I can't find exact numbers for Freeland or Holley, but napkin math puts even a short duration puts it around 200 USD/month and Freeland covering multiple months, and Holley's insurance fraud claims are almost certainly closer to Murray than Ramirez. In this case, the erroneous classification probably increased, rather than decreased, Trump's final tax payment.
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