It is going to be very difficult for Donald Trump to convince a jury that he was hiding payments to Stormy Daniels from his wife, and not the public, a trial attorney has told Newsweek.
Eric Anderson, counsel at Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae in California, said that it is going to be hard to convince the jury that the elaborate money trail from Trump to Daniels was designed to hide the transaction from Melania Trump.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is the first former president in United States history to stand trial in a criminal case. He has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is seeking to prove that before the 2016 presidential election, Trump paid, or discussed paying, adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal not to disclose his alleged affairs with them, thereby influencing voters as to his character, then falsified records.
He denies affairs with either woman.
Newsweek sought email comment from Trump's attorney on Wednesday.
Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, will give evidence that he signed a nondisclosure agreement [NDA] with Daniels, an adult film star, and then paid her $130,000, which Trump reimbursed to him as legal fees.
"The defense's problem is the subterfuge regarding the payments. The odds that Melania was going to go through the Trump bank records are [from] none to none," Anderson said.
"Arguably, there was no reason for such an intricate manner of making payments to Daniels and then hiding them as income for Cohen," Anderson said.
In their opening statement, Trump's lawyers stressed to the jury that the nondisclosure agreement that Cohen signed with Daniels was perfectly legal.
"The NDA, legal or otherwise, is not the problem. It is just one part of a larger series of events designed to mislead," Anderson said. "The question is, who were they trying to mislead and why?"
Prosecutors claim that Trump was trying to mislead the public about his morality and character and the payments are therefore a campaign financial violation. That's because voters in the 2016 presidential election might have made a different decision had they known about Trump's alleged affair with Daniels.
"Remember that the actual charge here is not giving hush money to a porn star," Anderson said. "There is nothing illegal about that. The charge is that these payments and the cover-up were unreported campaign expenses constituting business fraud among other offenses.
"This is a tricky and very technical case, and it may be hard for the average person to care about the allegations. The prosecution's job is to make the jury care about the crime. Part of the job of the defense is to get a jury to think: 'So what?' regarding the alleged acts and to agree that the actions do not constitute a crime."
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Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law. ... Read more
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