5 things to know about the charges against Donald Trump

Donald Trump has become the first ex-president to have been charged with felonies.

The Manhattan district attorney announced Trump has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in an alleged scheme to make payments to his legal fixer to suppress negative information about himself and benefit his 2016 presidential campaign. Those payments then allegedly were falsely reported as legal expenses.

But the allegations aren’t just about possible violations of campaign-finance laws, as some predicted. They also are about an old-fashioned white-collar crime district attorneys regularly prosecute: falsifying business records to commit a tax crime.

Here are five things to know about the legal case against Trump:

The basic outline

Broadly, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accused Trump of engaging in a scheme to suppress information about payments he made to keep quiet allegations that he had an affairs with former porn star Stormy Daniels and a Playboy model, and fathered a child out of wedlock.

To carry out the scheme, Trump allegedly made a serious of “hush money” payments that were falsely reported as legal expenses and that he did so to benefit his presidential campaign.

And in a wrinkle, Bragg also accused Trump of falsifying business records to commit a tax crime.

The charges are serious

The charges brought in Manhattan might not be as eye-popping as the probes about the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection and alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia by asking a state official to “find” 11,000 more Trump votes.

But the New York charges are serious.

“Is it Jan. 6? No. Is it ‘Find me 11,000 votes’? No,” said Diane Peress, a John Jay College law professor and former Nassau County prosecutor specializing in white-collar crime.

Rather, falsification of business records is a “simple, straightforward crime” that “white-collar prosecutors bring all the time,” she said.

The tax crime implication might bolster Bragg’s case, some said.

“The unknown thing going in was whether there would be anything other than federal campaign-finance violations. If there only was a campaign-finance violation, the case would be plausible but shaky,” said James Sample, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra Law School. “But there is also this intent to promote a candidate and conceal payments for the purposes of evading New York State tax law,” which bolsters Bragg’s case.

Felonies instead of misdemeanors

Falsifying business records normally is a misdemeanor. Instead, the grand jury brought felony charges. How?

“The thing that raises ... (such a charge) to felony level is it is done in furtherance of the commission of a crime or to conceal the commission of a crime,” Peress said.

In short, Trump allegedly falsified records to conceal violations of federal election law, state election law and state tax law.

Experts have raised questions about the difficulty of using election laws to elevate the falsification charges — asking whether Trump could claim the payments were for personal rather than political reasons, among other issues.

Using the state tax law to elevate the bookkeeping fraud charges from misdemeanors to felonies might be simpler and easier.

Bragg has said prosecutors didn’t need, at this point, to spell out what crimes Trump intended to commit. But they will eventually.

Trump’s defense

Prosecutors will be armed with plenty of evidence: Emails, signed checks and even Cohen’s previous testimony in his own case. So bet on Trump’s defense to be more focused on politics and intent, rather than denial, experts said.

“One thing you don’t hear from Trump loyalists is a denial — (prosecutors) have his signature on the checks,” Sample said. “They are not going to succeed with an ‘I didn’t do it’ defense. Their defense is going to be these are misdemeanors and there is no proof of an effort to conceal.”

Trump’s lawyers likely are to argue this is “selective prosecution” and make statute-of-limitations claims — meaning it is too late to bring charges for something that happened in 2017.

Beyond legalities, Sample said Bragg will face two other practical hurdles for winning a conviction: The challenge of convicting an ex-president, which is unprecedented, and getting a unanimous jury verdict.

“Even in New York, where Donald Trump is very unpopular, it takes only one” holdout juror to stop a conviction, Sample said.

Next steps

The next court date in the matter isn’t until December. Expect the prosecutor’s office to go silent for the next few months — and expect the opposite from Trump’s defense teams.

Experts said there is likely to be a slew of defense motions, to dismiss or reduce the charges, to claim grand jury irregularities, to challenge the admissibility of evidence, to claim Bragg used uncorroborated testimony from accomplices, etc.

Those are all standard motions trying to find some defect in the indictment, Peress said.

Perhaps the most intriguing next step will be when defense attorneys request and receive a “bill of particulars” from prosecutors. That’s when prosecutors would say what underlying crime that are talking about in each of the 34 fraud counts they alleged Tuesday, Peress said.

That will not happen for at least another two months.

By Yancey Roy

yancey.roy@newsday.com@yanceyroy