Trump’s legal team reveals hush money strategy: Prosecutors find no illegal actions
Attorneys representing Donald Trump in his hush money case in New York unveiled their defense strategy, focusing on challenging the legality of the charges rather than the specific allegations. Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, emphasized Trump’s unawareness of the hush money details, stating that many aspects of the indictment aim to criminalize non-illegal actions. The defense asserts that the transactions do not constitute a crime, emphasizing that even if the allegations are true, they don’t amount to criminal acts.
NEW YORK — Attorneys for Donald Trump unveiled their defense strategy during opening arguments in his hush money case on Monday, largely choosing to dispute the laws under which prosecutors have charged Trump rather than the allegations themselves.
For the defense’s opening statement, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche told the jury that Trump was not involved in nor aware of the specifics of hush money payments because Trump left it up to his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to manage. Blanche said his client had “nothing to do with” creating 34 checks, the hush money along with other compensation to Cohen, or the allegedly falsified entries on the ledger.
But he said many elements of the indictment against Trump seek to criminalize actions that are not actually illegal.
“Entering into a nondisclosure agreement is perfectly legal; companies do that all the time,” Blanche said. “There’s nothing illegal about that.”
Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo objected after Blanche said that Stormy Daniels’s allegations that she and Trump had an affair were almost an “attempt to extort President Trump.” Justice Juan Merchan sustained the objection on Blanche’s comment, and the attorney continued.
During opening statements for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, Colangelo said Cohen used his own money to scrounge up $130,000 in 2016 to pay adult film star Daniels for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. The indictment alleged that marked an act of deceit against voters in the final days of the 2016 campaign.
But at the beginning of his opening arguments, Blanche minimized the 34-count indictment against his client as “really just 34 pieces of paper.”
The indictment alleges that Trump caused the Trump Organization and his personal trust to record $420,000 in payments made to Cohen in 2017 as retainer fees rather than as reimbursements for the $130,000 that Cohen paid to Daniels before the 2016 election. Blanche posited that Trump was ignorant of the money Cohen had given to Daniels and that the $420,000 was what Trump believed he owed Cohen for his work as his lawyer.
“President Trump did not pay Mr. Cohen back $130,000. President Trump paid Michael Cohen $420,000,” Blanche said, asking the jury if a “frugal businessman” such as Trump would repay a $130,000 debt “to the tune of $420,000.”
“None of this was a crime,” Blanche added.
Attorney Philip Holloway told the Washington Examiner that what the defense is attempting to explain to the jury is that “even if all the factual allegations are true, they don’t amount to a crime.”
Even “if these transactions occur, it doesn’t necessarily mean that anything is a crime,” Holloway said of Blanche’s strategy.
William Trachman, an attorney who served in the Office of Civil Rights under the Trump administration, noted that the argument laid out by Blanche covered elements that typically “go into a motion to dismiss, where they say, ‘take all the allegations together, and they don’t actually add up to anything illegal.’”
“I don’t know how effective it’ll be with the jury, when the prosecutors themselves are saying, ‘here are the laws,’” Trachman said, adding, “they’re going to, of course, have their burden to establish the elements of all the laws.”
After the court proceedings wrapped up for the day, Trump exited the court and spoke to the media in the hallway.
“I’m the leading candidate … and this is what they’re trying to take me off the trail for. Checks being paid to a lawyer,” he told the press gathered outside the courtroom. “It’s a case as to bookkeeping, which is a very minor thing.”
Blanche’s statements on Monday showcased how Trump’s defense will largely seek to convince jurors that the former president is on the right side of the law, and lay out the argument that prosecutors are the ones seeking to bend the rules by taking misdemeanor counts for falsifying records and elevating them to Class E felonies by asserting Trump did it in the furtherance of a separate crime.
An attorney for the former president, Will Scharf, signaled this defense on Sunday in an interview with Fox and Friends Weekend, saying, “We believe the facts are absolutely on our side, that they are absolutely exonerative.”
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The trial will resume on Tuesday at 9:30 a.m., with Merchan first hearing prosecutors’ motion to hold Trump in contempt for several alleged violations of his gag order in the case.
Testimony by David Pecker, a media mogul who prosecutors say was a “co-conspirator” to the hush money scheme, will continue at around 11 a.m. local time.
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