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April 4, 2023 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
44:40
Donald Trump's New York Criminal Charges Explained

Nick Hauselman hosts today's LIVE show with Paul Wasserman, a former prosecutor, criminal defense attorney, and adjunct professor of criminal law at Cal St University-Fullerton. They break down all 32 charges of Trump's indictment and dissect the case Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has brought against the former president. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everybody, it is Nick Hauselman here and we are doing a very special live broadcast of the Muckrake Podcast and it's going across everywhere on Twitter, on Patreon, on YouTube.
Thank you all for being part of this and I'm really excited because we have Paul Wasserman here who is, among other things, a former prosecutor, a criminal defense attorney, and now is an adjunct professor of criminal law at Cal State University Fullerton.
So Paul, thanks for jumping on here.
We have a lot to unpack because we just got the indictment unsealed.
Yeah, interesting stuff.
I mean, may you live in interesting times.
This is clearly interesting times.
Well, I hope we can make this interesting, only because it does seem a little bit like there's missing something in there.
I mean, we're not getting the real juicy stuff here, but I actually wrote it all out because I kind of was curious as far as the dates go.
But a brief overview, if I got this correct, is they really just listed a whole bunch of the same crime over and over and over again.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, correct.
That's what it appears to be.
I mean, they're each different actions, right?
They're each related to individual actions that he did entering entries into different business records.
Things as mundane as literally onto the check stuff, entering that into the record.
But I think it's important to know that this is something common that my understanding is, now I'm a California attorney, but my understanding in the reading is that This is something common that New York charges to business organizations and people involved in business organizations.
So this is not a, I know the former president likes to view this as witch hunt, but this just seems to be pretty block and tackle stuff.
And it seems to also be right down the center of the plate for what DA Bragg does.
This is his wheelhouse for crimes.
And he's, as you know, the DA is a former federal prosecutor.
Um, and I think his specialty is white collar crime, not kind of, you know, what we would call more blood and gut stuff.
So, if I'm Donald Trump and his team, it's the last DA that I want taking on a case like this.
That's how I would be thinking.
Fair enough because you know they were trying to smear him a little bit saying he's really soft on crime and all these kind of things when it certainly sounds like with this crime he ain't gonna be soft and we've seen plenty of think pieces like think tweets perhaps we'll call them on the how often they do prosecute these in New York this is not something that doesn't ever get prosecuted and
It's funny because I was kind of getting pulled apart on on thinking about how how severe is a like a finance election finance charge or like how why should you have to go to prison for that?
And that said, we haven't even seen a charge on that.
They didn't discuss anything about federal election laws in New York.
They've really only focused on the ledgers here and how they entered these numbers.
And I wrote it all out.
I was kind of curious, because at the very least, I didn't see anyone else looking at this, is the dates, because they make them clear.
There's a lot of checks.
There are basically there's 35 checks, right, that they have issues with that were not correctly entered into the ledger for the Trump, you know, Trump business.
By the way, he had a pretty eventful Valentine's Day in 2017.
I saw that.
The first four are on Valentine's Day, and then you can go from there to the 16th of March, 1717.
Then, you know, every month, at least, it will go two or three of these checks.
What's interesting to me, though, is that these checks would have to amount to a lot more than just simply $103,000 to Stormy Daniels, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, I mean, that's going to be the question.
I mean, the factual dive into this, it's difficult for this document, right?
So I haven't seen the statement of facts.
I know some news organizations are reporting that they actually filed a statement of fact along with this indictment.
I haven't seen that yet.
And the one thing that I've learned in criminal law in my years and years of doing this is wait for the facts, right?
The facts are, and as I tell my students, the facts are everything.
Uh, in this case, of course, and it sounds pretty obvious, it lives and dies on facts.
So, it's difficult to know exactly all the theories of the case, but it seems generally from reading this, as you've heard a lot in the last several days, is that it's usually this type of crime in New York they call Penal Law 175.10.
A 175.10 crime appears to elevate what would normally be a misdemeanor case into a felony.
New York's got a different way of doing it than we do in California, but it looks like they have first degree, second degree, and so forth, and this will elevate it to be a felony.
And in order to do that you in you enter into in their air introducing the idea of criminal intent or specific intent as we would call it.
So just by way of background so you just kind of and I don't want to go too in the weeds on legal theory because you'll start losing the losers quickly but just so you know that every crime requires an act right.
So in this case you have the act of going into the ledger.
Now if you do that act In a way that you do it voluntarily, but you don't do it for any criminal, real deep bad intent.
That would be a general intent crime.
And that is the one that's usually a misdemeanor.
What is elevating this to the next level is getting to what we call a specific intent crime, which is you do the act with a bad outcome in mind.
In this case, it is to defraud the population during an election.
I think that is what they're relying upon in this case is basically election fraud and lying to the electorate.
So I think that's the theory.
Again, we'll have to hear more from the DA when they do it.
But in that case, now you've got to get inside his head.
Right.
And that makes it more difficult.
Prosecutors, anyone will tell you who does this.
I did the job for a long time.
When you have to do specific intent crimes, when you have to prove mental intent, it's difficult unless the defendants admitted something.
But that's a whole other story we can talk, we can delve more into.
But just by way of background, so it looks like it's 34 counts of this type of conduct.
With the intent to either defraud or to cover up another crime or so forth.
Sure.
And I mean, we've all talked about this.
It seems people have already, you know, sort of said it in public that it seems like obviously, if you are going to be in furtherance of another crime, which would then be the federal election crimes, because they it was way too much money for a to benefit a campaign.
You know, it's interesting that it was not included in this.
And I think that when we look at the John Edwards case that happened, ultimately, I'm old enough to remember that.
Yes, we all are, right?
It was a hung jury, as far as I recall, and I think it centered around him.
I think there was one acquittal.
They acquitted him of one count, and I believe the rest were hangs.
Okay, and I think it all centered around intent.
They really had a hard time sort of proving that.
And here's my question.
Knowing what is at stake here for Alvin Bragg and what the pressure is that bared upon him for this case, and with your experience in this realm, would you think that they would even get close to this point of the process if they didn't have intent hammered down completely 100%?
I mean, you'd like to think yes, right?
So, I'll put on a prosecutor hat here for a second, then I'll put on a defense attorney hat.
So, from the prosecutor perspective, absolutely.
First off, you have an ethical obligation to only pursue a crime where you believe you can convince a jury behind a reasonable doubt of the crime and all the elements of the crime.
And the elements of the crime are just the action and the intent is probably an easy way to do it.
I just lost my train of thought as I was doing that.
I'm sorry, somebody texted me and said, lower your camera, you can't see it.
And I just lost my train of thought as I was doing that.
Ask me your question again, I'm sorry.
Oh, the two hats, so the prosecution, I apologize.
So in the situation where you are deciding once you pass that ethical barrier, right, you want to make sure that you have enough evidence to do it.
But a jury can view that differently, right?
I mean, you might have a very, very strong case, what you think shows intent.
And intent is generally proved circumstantially.
The only general direct evidence of intent would be a defendant's statement, whether that's written or oral.
We would call that direct evidence.
Circumstantial evidence would be documentation showing it or the circumstances around it, all those type of things.
Equally as important as direct evidence and has as much weight in the courtroom So I think from the perspective, I think your question, you're right.
I think that he's, Bragg is a smart guy, definitely a smart guy.
I might disagree with some of his policies, but hey, God love America, right?
That's the way it is.
But I think that this is a smart enough guy that he's only going to go in with a very strong case that he thinks he can prove.
The flip side to that is that, you know what?
The government charges cases all the time and sometimes they overcharge them.
And sometimes their view of what they think they can prove to intent is something that a jury might not actually agree with.
So I don't know.
This is not a slam-dunk case.
Let's be clear about that.
These are not slam-dunk cases.
And I think that it's going to be hard fought.
And he's going to, of course, delay this as long as humanly possible.
So we'll see about that and we can talk about it.
But yeah, I ultimately agree with you that I think that it has to be a strong case circumstantially.
Otherwise, for all the political perils involved as well, I don't think he would have brought the case, but we'll see.
Fair enough.
Well, you know, as you're monitoring or as I'm monitoring Twitter and Discord and all different areas, it seems like different people have different information.
We were able to find the charges, the counts unsealed, and that was clear, the 32 counts of the writing the checks, the legal entry.
However, Hekatron over on our Discord was sharing a tweet from Greg Sargent, who I think would be reputable on this.
He has some screenshots.
Let me read these to you, because there's a little bit more interesting stuff here.
And I'm not sure where he's getting this from.
There's a fraud piece in this, and it's part of a list of things.
This is number 25.
The TOCFO, I think Trump Organization CFO and Lawyer A, which we know is Michael Cohen, agreed to a total repayment amount of $420,000.
They reached that figure by adding the $130,000 payment to a $50,000 payment for another expense, for which Lawyer A also claimed reimbursement for a total of $180,000.
Then the Trump Organization CFO doubled that amount to $360,000 so that Michael Cohen could characterize the payment as income on his tax returns instead of a reimbursement.
Right.
So that's not good.
This is a part that I'm a little surprised about, to be honest with you.
This is not a conspiracy charge in here.
So in order to, in order, assuming that's all true, right?
Let's say you make that allegation.
A conspiracy is basically an agreement between two people to commit some crime, some public offense, right?
So it seems to me here that You have a lot of parties colluding, making up an agreement, either explicit or implicit, it doesn't have to be an explicit agreement, it can be implicit as well, to have an illegal outcome, right, which is either tax fraud, defrauding the public, so forth, which could be the basis of a conspiracy.
Now again, I always hated as a prosecutor when talking heads would start second-guessing my charging decisions because I, as a prosecutor, had infinitely more facts than the general public has.
And so, please take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but just on the stuff that I heard just from him reading what you just read that he's saying, which I think was in the Statement of Facts, which I still haven't been able to see yet.
I heard the news reporting that we're doing this live and with not much prep time, which is fun, but I wish I had that because I'm very surprised that there was not a conspiracy charge filed.
Because a conspiracy gives you a lot of, especially as a prosecutor, it's an incredibly effective cudgel in some ways.
Because you really can, you can hammer people with conspiracies.
Conspiracy to commit fraud, tax fraud?
It basically is what, is that what it is?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, because New York, and it would be, and especially because you have New York state tax fraud, right?
Obviously federal, and there'll be some issues about whether you can make the object of a federal, which I think you still could, but I have to do the legal research on it.
But yeah, and so I was a little surprised by that.
Well, there's more.
Let me fill this in a little bit because number 26, it says, the defendants, the CFO of the Trump Organization and Lawyer A, Michael Cohen.
So the CFO is not Trump.
- No, no, that'd be the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. - By Weisselberg, I'm thinking, but then they agreed that Lawyer A would be paid the $420,000 through 12 monthly payments of 35 grand each over the course of 2017, which is what all these checks are listed in.
Each month, Lawyer A was to send an invoice to the defendant through Trump Organization employees falsely requesting payment of $35,000 for legal services rendered in a given month of 2017 pursuant to retainer agreement.
At no point did Lawyer A have a retainer agreement with the defendant of the Trump Organization.
There's another one here.
Let me get one more screen.
There's a couple more.
That sounds like a conspiracy to me.
Right.
Well, here's the thing.
Did I miss one here?
No, I think that was the three.
Now there's more.
This is intense, right?
This is clearly recognizing that they can't account for this properly or else they would realize that it's illegal.
And so they are going through a lot of hoops here, which I think definitely gets above a level of like John Edwards issue.
And you could definitely, maybe it's even by the sheer number of counts, the 34 checks really seem to accentuate the intent.
As you know, as Stalin once said, right?
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
So I think he was talking about throwing bodies at people at that point, a little bit of a different context.
But here, this is exactly the same thing, right?
There is a certain, as a prosecutor, you sometimes charge everything you can.
Right.
From the defense side, that's one of the things you do as a defense lawyer, is make sure things aren't overcharged.
And there's a, it's a precarious issue, it's somewhat precarious strategically, especially when you're arguing to a jury, right?
Is the, you have, you can go over and over and overthrow as many counts as you want at somebody, But you leave yourself open to a defense attorney, a skilled defense attorney, getting up there and making a little bit of hay with that and saying, you know what?
Did it really?
Is it the check stub?
Is that something they needed to do?
They're doing this, ladies and gentlemen, because they want to prejudice you against the client to show you that he did all these things.
But we're really talking something that only took one second to write down.
So, I mean, again, I think they're all serious, but you do leave yourself open a little bit when you potentially overcharge.
Sure.
I don't know everything they're privy to, so I'll say that with a grain of salt.
As I try and picture a campaign with thousands of people working on it and all sorts of people doing everything for you, it seems easy that Trump could then say, I had no idea this is what they decided to do.
But I think when Cohen got involved, he obviously recorded Trump.
We have, we know he reported him about the Karen McDougal payment.
Maybe he's got recording of the Stormy Daniels payment.
So it seemed to me that like, obviously Cohen knew this was illegal and he needed some protection at this point for something.
Right.
And the Cohen part is fascinating.
So when I, the right wing media has been trying to make a meal out of the fact that Cohen is a lying Piece of crap, right?
And the reality is, yes, he is, right?
He's an embarrassment to attorneys, right?
People like this, I despise, right?
It is, we have enough of a PR problem as lawyers, and then you have these type of people who come out and do the things that they do.
And he was a hired gun, and he was Trump's, for 10 years, he was his confidant.
So he is a lying piece of garbage who is convicted of lying to Congress.
So, they're trying to make a big deal out of this.
Now, the reality is, in almost every business case especially, like this is, whether it's a conspiracy or not, where you're dealing with other people, an informant is always part of it, almost exclusively.
But the important part I think people should realize, when you do use an informant or somebody with an incredibly sketchy background, like Michael Cohen, is you're going to have a ton of corroboration you're going to as a prosecutor you're going to want to corroborate every word that comes out of his mouth on the stand because you know a good defense attorney is going to get up and and destroy him or work to destroy his credibility and so everything that he says I feel confident
They will have a physical document that is not subject to bias, that is not subject to the catcalls of the right, that is going to be very clearly corroborative of the things that Michael Cohen says.
And that's not good news for Trump.
It's not good news for Trump.
Right.
And there's a lot, there's more.
We can go into a little bit more here.
I just got the link actually from Hegatron of the entire statement that Greg Sargent, who's a Washington Post reporter, is factually reporting.
One thing that he pointed out, and we can let him do some of our work for us because he's culling through this a little bit.
was I guess Donald Trump Jr. was the one who wrote these checks.
And so it says here on number 29, Lawyer A submitted 10 similar monthly invoices by email to the Trump organization for the remaining months.
Each invoice falsely stated that it was being submitted pursuant to the retainer agreement and falsely requested payment for services rendered for a month of 2017.
Let's see, where does Trump's son come in?
There's another one of these things.
That's wild for me.
The first check was paid from the defendant's trust and signed by the Trump organization CFO and the defendant's son as trustees.
So, So, you know, and I wouldn't put it past Trump to throw his son under the bus, too, and say, hey, I know what he's doing.
Yeah, that's his best defense.
I agree.
His best defense.
Well, anytime you have a specific intent crime, especially a financial crime like this, is, hey, I wasn't doing it to defraud anybody.
He only has a couple ways to go, right?
One is, I never knew what I was doing, right?
Somebody just put something in front of me and I signed it.
My accountant told me, whatever it is, you can try your best to convince a jury that you didn't know.
You can try to blame somebody else.
We call those Saudi defenses, right?
Some other dude did it, S-O-D-D-I.
So in a Saudi defense, you're trying to put it on somebody else.
It's this guy that did it, not me.
He's going to do everything he can to first either, I think it's going to be more difficult to take himself out of the, hey, I didn't actually, my physical actions weren't involved in this.
It was somebody else.
Good luck because they're doing it your direction.
In any type of crime where a specific intent is alleged, you go after basically an innocent intent.
Is it if you're the defense?
That's what you're going to say.
You're going to say, look, he didn't do it for that reason.
He was being extorted.
And he was being extorted.
And he was, let's be clear.
He was being extorted.
Like, I have no love for this man, but he was being extorted by two people.
I assume McDougal, I don't know as much about her story.
I know they were doing a catch and kill with the Inquirer.
Yes.
And, and Stormy Daniels, we're clearly trying to get money out of the guy, right?
I mean that, or at least Stormy Daniels was 100%.
Yeah, this is interesting because they titled the scheme, the catch and kill scheme is, is right at number one, how we start this whole thing.
Um, so they go into McDougal, they go into the doorman story, which remember a lot of this was sort of a innuendo and no one wanted to sort of, you know, confirm it on any of these things really happened.
But, uh, it seems like, yes, these did happen.
They did pay David Pecker of the inquirer to kill these things.
And you don't generally do that unless, you know, they're probably true.
We know Stormy Daniels had a picture of him and her.
Like there seems enough evidence that that actually happened as well.
But I think that the interesting thing that people have talked a little bit about, though, is the timing of the Stormy Daniels payment is right after the Access Hollywood tape comes out.
And obviously at that moment, they thought that the campaign was completely done.
Trump was getting lost.
There was no way he was going to win.
Certainly, there was no way to recover if, all of a sudden, at that point, a porn star says that they slept together while his wife was just giving birth, all that kind of... That would have really just been, you know, the... How many times do you get a headshot from the mafia?
Like, that would have been, like, the fifth one, whatever that was?
Yeah, stop your crazy talk, though, right?
That was in the days where things made sense.
Well, we actually talked about that in the sense that, well, maybe it wouldn't have mattered anyway.
But I don't know, in the timing of those things, in October, right after the Hollywood X Hollywood, maybe, maybe it would have really ended up being enough.
But I find this fascinating that they go into the whole scheme there and fold all these things in, which again, you're right.
Here's the thing about prosecution and the defense.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the defense have to, or doesn't the prosecution have to pull all their cards from the table?
Well, especially New York apparently had some crazy discovery reforms recently, which is a whole other conversation.
But yes, the prosecution is required to give over all material relevant evidence to the defense.
And most prosecutor's offices, I think, at least I was fortunate enough, I was a DA in San Mateo County and we had an incredibly ethical A DA, who was a former defense attorney, and his thing was, hey, we're here to do justice, so you have evidence, you give it to the other side.
That's what you do.
You don't even think about it.
You basically give them everything.
And they are required to do that.
Some offices play cagey with that, I'm sure.
I don't think Bragg's that guy.
Bragg, I think, is as somebody who they're basically calling a progressive prosecutor.
Again, there are things I fundamentally disagree with him on.
But I think there's no indication this guy is anything but an upright, ethical individual.
And so if that's the case, they're going to be handing over everything to the defense in this scenario, which they're required to by law basically anyway.
But I don't think they're going to play any hide-the-ball games.
Right.
So, I mean, it's weird because, again, with this statement, it does indicate that they're weaving a story here that has everything, that we've always thought had happened that, you know, seems to be clear that they have the evidence for, which would have to be some sort of conspiracy when you're trying to suppress information in the, in the, in the, which would have to be some sort of conspiracy when In the furtherance of a campaign, which again goes to the campaign's finance laws, which could rise to the level of a felony, which we saw Michael Cohen be sentenced for three years for.
What's interesting, though, is do you have any insight or any takes on the fact that the right's big argument would have been that the feds had a chance to pursue this and drop the case?
Do you have any feelings for why that happened?
Well, so a couple things.
So the first thing is you got to back up on the Michael Cohen stuff and actually look what the primary stuff that he was charged and convicted of.
And the reality is most of those crimes that he was convicted of had nothing to do with Trump.
He was convicted of bank fraud.
and tax evasion.
Those are the main ones and those related directly to his taxi medallion business.
You talk about a 20th century business, I think as you probably know, taxi medallions, their value is like a million dollars in New York City, right?
Because you cannot drive a cab unless you have a taxi medallion.
This is before Uber and Lyft and ride sharing existed, right?
So he was in that business and he made all these false statements to banks about the value of his medallions and he's a fraudulent He's a piece of garbage, right?
I mean, he really is.
And so those type of crimes, those are all the things he was convicted of.
Now, he was also convicted of lying to Congress because of the investigation with Trump and the campaign finance form thing, which was basically what the Fed said was, hey, look, the most you can contribute is $2,700 as an individual to a campaign.
You contributed $140,000.
And even though it was a direction of somebody else, it's coming out of your, he took like a home equity loan or something, I don't know what his finances are.
But he basically did that.
So I can tell you, so then you have the situation to answer your question.
One is, It's irrelevant that the feds don't go after Trump on state charges.
Has nothing to do, they're completely two separate systems.
The federal system is its own animal and then you have the 50 state systems around the United States.
So anything that happens with very rare exceptions, I mean this happened in the Manafort case, it was a weird double jeopardy thing after when Trump pardoned him and then the state and then I think it was Cyrus Vance went after him and blah blah blah, but generally has no impact on the state charges whatsoever.
And from the feds, you know, it's like, hey, what they had slam dunk stuff on him on the other stuff.
And that, you know, why not go after those.
So I don't really think it has much bearing on it.
I mean, for talking heads, I guess it does.
In the legal world, zero.
You wouldn't pay any attention as a prosecutor in a state case, what's going on on the Fed.
Oh, they didn't charge him.
So we shouldn't as well.
Right.
Well, I mean, don't say that I didn't give you a chance to shit on Bill Barr because I thought there was an opening there if you want to.
But at the very least, he could hide behind the fact that there was the LLC opinion that said you can't prosecute a sitting president anyway, so we can't do this case now.
Yeah, I mean, that was all who knows if that's even true.
It's just never been tested.
And yeah, please don't start me on Bill Barr.
Again, an embarrassment to the profession.
But yeah, so as far as the state goes, the Fed's irrelevant for the most part.
Yeah.
Now, what's interesting about this is that obviously there's probably a lot of people who might not get a good night's sleep tonight knowing how they do their books.
Right.
And they're like, we all do this.
And, you know, thank God we didn't run for president.
We weren't president that this is the kind of scrutiny we now have.
And I guess my take on that would be just as an aside would be just simply, OK, fine.
If that's how you want to do business, you simply need to understand that if you get caught, then you are going down and there isn't anything you're going to do to complain about it because you knew what the case was like.
That was that's what they do.
They know that there's a real big risk here.
And I suppose that the price of doing business The way they do it is they just pay the fine, they get their lawyers, they get them off and, you know, nothing ever happens to them here.
Do you think that this is going to end up with any kind of, you know, prison sentence for Trump or just a fine?
No, I'd be stunned.
So a couple of things, let's unpack what you were just saying, right?
So the first question is the issue of charging, right?
And if I'm like a, this is, you're seeing this on the right a lot, is the, oh, look, they're coming for you next.
So the reality is, first off, they already come for a ton of people on these cases.
This is not, they dusted off some old statute just to stick it to poor Donald Trump.
This is something that happens to businesses all the time in New York.
And if you have raised it to the level of being a felony, then yeah, that's what you're going to face.
And he's not above the law.
This is the part that I'm having such a difficult time getting my head around with a certain part of our population in America here on this whole feeling of suddenly, suddenly law enforcement is the enemy of the Republican Party.
I don't know when this happened.
This was that I grew up in a world where it was the Republicans were like the crazy law and order people.
And so now you have a scenario where this man, if he did these crimes, why don't you charge him?
These are not ticky-tack crimes.
This is serious stuff, especially when it comes to the underlying reason of why you did it.
We're talking about electing officials, for God's sakes!
Shouldn't we, as an American public, expect people that are running for office to be honest about the things they're doing?
And if they're actually committing crimes, For the reason of doing that, I honestly can't get my head around how people don't think this is something that should be charged.
I really don't.
Fair enough.
I mean, I agree.
I'm behind you.
And I think that there's a lot of elements now coming to bear on him that will lead to overlapping charges.
I find it hilarious that the Secret Service, I read something about it where it's like, well, they're really concerned because how are they supposed to protect him if he's in prison?
That was very strange.
He's not going to jail.
I mean, let's also be clear.
First off, most white collar crimes People don't go to jail.
I don't know how many people even who I don't know New York as well.
So who've been charged and convicted of these types of crimes actually did custody time.
I'm going to opine probably not that many.
So hard to say now.
Personally disagree with that.
I think that people should serve jail time for crimes like this.
If I'm going to send somebody to the joint for, you know, holding up a liquor store and taking $20, now granted it's different, it's violence and all those type of things, which should get serious time.
On the flip side though, this is still serious crime and we're talking about at the highest levels of government.
How is it that we as an American population are not mortified and frightened by The people pulling the levers of power doing crimes like this.
I don't get it.
Sure.
Now, what's interesting is, as I'm going through this statement here, you know, as they lay out all the catch-and-kill stuff, that gets sexier.
This gets more interesting and more intriguing in a way that this would definitely be something that's a lot more serious than, oh, a bunch of ledgers were misappropriated, you know, the way they wrote them down over a course of a few months.
Even if that doesn't even matter, right?
The law is the law.
It's clear that they violated this and they certainly were, I guess, dumb enough to write it all down.
I mean, you know, this is, they didn't have two different books.
I used to hear about Trump having two separate books and this one, they just decided to do it above board.
By the way, is there a way, let's just pretend that, and I have one, we'll wrap this up in a minute, but like, would there have been a way for Trump to have given Stormy Daniels this money without it ever have being of crime?
Wow, that's a really good question.
I mean, well, yeah, like, so if he had just written a check to her, right?
I myself am going to write a check to you because I don't want you to go ahead and, you know, release his personal stuff.
And if his intent was, I don't want my wife to find out about this, right?
That's not a criminal intent.
I want to, I don't want you out there because I don't want you ruining my marriage because my wife just had my, My son, when I had to go see a porn star, okay, whatever.
So in that situation, had he just written a check under his own account, didn't try to triangulate and try to hide it, and then amazingly write it off on your taxes as a business legal expense, as attorney fees, which again, that's why I don't understand why they haven't gone after tax stuff on this.
But again, they have more information than I do.
Yeah, that wouldn't be illegal, I don't believe.
I can't think of why that would be illegal in that scenario.
And even if you say, well, what if he was doing it to undermine the election?
Okay, sure, prove that.
That's going to be the hard part here too, right?
Because if he goes through this whole thing of saying, look, fine, I wrote this stuff, fine, I committed 34 misdemeanors, By incorrectly writing in there, my intent in my head had nothing to do with the election.
I thought I was going to lose.
Everybody thought I was going to lose.
I did it because I'm married to this woman that I love, allegedly, and I didn't want her to find out about it.
Not criminal in that scenario, had he done it that way.
So this is once again, you know, again, Here's the one thing that I've learned in my career, Nick, for what it's worth.
And besides a legal career, I had a high-tech career as a CEO of a pretty prominent company that sold for a lot of money.
And I was fortunate enough to meet some really, really wealthy people in my time.
Here's what I found about, oftentimes with many wealthy people, they think they're a lot smarter than they are.
And people have this view that if I have a ton of money, I must be smart.
And the reality is that's not really true.
And it's definitely not true with him.
I don't, I mean, you know, we've lived through him.
I don't find him to be a particularly insightful individual or smart.
So this whole thing about, well, he would never do this because only an idiot would do it this way.
Well, okay.
But that happens often in crime.
I'll point out one other thing, just one last point on the whole thing with Trump, specifically on this crime and his team.
And this was true as a prosecutor.
Anytime you had a high profile case, and I had my share, and the defense Is screaming about the DA's office, you know, not the case itself.
It's about the prosecutor.
I got accused of this, right?
I'm a Nazi.
I'm doing this.
I'm blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's because they have nothing else to argue, right?
The facts are against them and the law is against them.
So what do you do?
You go after the prosecutor.
And that's exactly what you're seeing here, which to me indicates even more obviously, this is probably a pretty strong case.
Yeah, no, I really, really well said.
And I do think that the corruption is so rife in the Trump organization that, of course, they're going to write this off on their taxes and expense.
Like, you know, we need to save, you know, they are as tight with their money as they can possibly be in trying to, you know, rip off as many people as they can.
I suppose it was probably so prevalent the way they did it and so commonplace that it wasn't even a thought to them, dumb or not dumb, to write this off.
Now that said, you're supposed to have accountants that are supposed to advise you and tell you not to do this.
And of course, it's another way they can defend themselves by saying, well, we have these people who are supposed to do all this stuff.
I don't know.
I just signed off on whatever they told me.
Absolutely, that's what he's gonna, that's what I would do as a defense attorney, right, is that I want to make it clear to a jury that this is a very, that the business records are very complex and, you know, your accountant says, yeah, you can do that and it's legal or whatever it is that they're going to try to spin.
What else are you going to argue, right?
The law is not on your side and the facts aren't on your side, so you're kind of in trouble.
Again, I think their best defense on here When it gets down to it is what his intent was.
And I would totally, if I was him, make the argument that it was, uh, this was no, there was no nefarious intent here.
It was literally so my wife didn't find out.
By the way, you, you sound like, uh, you'd be, you were a terrific defense attorney because I'm sold.
I would have, I I'll acquit him right now.
If that's what you've been standing up in front of me and I was sitting in a journey.
Well, you know, it's such a fascinating part.
And that's why I love teaching criminal law to undergrads, because I love to teach them about the system.
And one of the things that I always talk to them about is this concept of justice.
And I make it clear to them, look, there are two types of justice in America.
People say there's two justices.
Well, there's two types of justice.
Justice, what I would call justice with a capital J and justice with a lowercase J.
Capital J is the system.
Is it fair?
Does he have the right to defense?
Is the process fair?
All these type of things.
Is the jury impaneled fairly?
We're going to get justice with a capital J in this case, without a doubt, in my opinion.
This is what the American system of laws decided to do.
The question of little J justice is really a jury verdict.
When a jury comes out with a verdict, that's little J justice.
And that's going to be, is it justice for the defendant or the victims or so forth?
It's 12 people.
Who the hell knows what they're going to do, right?
You don't know because they're going to hear two relatively reasonable explanations.
They're going to have to go back there and they're going to have to decide who they believe factually and then they have to apply the law to it.
Will they convict?
Will they acquit?
Who knows?
Any defense attorney or a prosecutor worth their salt will tell you that after they are done with their closing argument and the jury goes out to deliberate, You're like, I'm going to lunch.
Because who the hell knows what these people are going to do?
I don't know.
So I'm confident that you will see capital J justice in this case.
And you're already seeing it.
That's what I love about the American criminal justice system.
For all people complain about it.
I think it's the best in the world.
Yes, it has problems that need to be addressed.
Absolutely.
But it's generally very fair as a process goes.
Can it be misused?
Of course, that's all the conversation.
But whether or not they ultimately acquit him, yeah, I think a good defense attorney can... Hey, I would love to cross-examine Michael Cohen.
What could be more fun than cross-examining Michael Cohen?
I mean, that's a defense attorney wintry.
Well, for what it's worth, it does feel like at this point, having been Michael Cohen for so long, it does feel like, what else does he have left to lose?
He might as well just tell the truth at this point, but I hear you, it'd be easy disappearing.
And he doesn't come off, although he does come off as contrite now, right?
I mean, for a guy who I wouldn't have felt that way.
I have so much disgust for him as a human being.
You know, look, did he have a redemption story?
Okay, maybe.
I don't know.
I'm not in his head.
I don't know if it's true.
I don't know if he's got a PR team telling him what to say.
I don't care.
All I know is that he was a convicted liar from lying to Congress.
And generally, I don't believe anything the guy says.
However, From a legal perspective, that's a snitch case.
That's nothing new.
It's been happening for years and years and years.
And that's why you always want corroboration.
Because you know a good DA knows what their exposure is.
And that's the exposure here.
A guy who's a convicted felonious liar.
And you just hammer that over and over.
Yeah, a guy, a convicted felonious liar who has tapes.
Yeah, right, but that's what helps, right?
It's the corroboration that helps.
And that's ultimately, so all you're going to hear over the next, you know, several months is the right screaming about Michael Cohen, Michael Cohn, Michael Cohn, but you're 100% right, Nick.
I don't care.
Who cares?
I'll put Pol Pot on the stand as long as I've got corroborating evidence, right?
That's all that matters, right?
Yes, he's a lying, merciless individual, but hey, here's an email that he wrote not knowing all this.
Corroborates everything he's telling you.
Juries usually don't have a problem with that, in my experience.
Well, Paul, I can't thank you enough for jumping on here.
I know this is a little bit crazy, last day and a half trying to make this all happen.
I'm so happy that you could do this and help us because, certainly, the way you broke it down was really, really helpful.
I think everyone here is going to benefit from understanding a little bit more about what's going on.
And, you know, these things are going to take months and months and months, right?
It might be fast-tracked, but it's still going to take six months, right?
No way is this going to be fast-tracked!
There's zero chance.
So just real quick, I know you want to go, but as far as timing goes, Uh, so first off, I haven't heard whether he waived time, right?
So just so you know, the U.S.
Constitution gives you the right to a speedy trial.
Each state kind of interprets that a little different.
California, if you don't waive your right to a jury trial, because you can waive any constitutional right you want, you can get in there and say, look, I don't want to, I don't, I'm not demanding the government takes me to trial in a specific period of time.
California, that's generally 60 days, right?
From the time of arraignment, if the DA doesn't bring you to trial in 60 days and you haven't waived time, case dismissed.
All right, you get one more shot to refile it, but case dismissed.
New York is six months.
So, New York is six months from the time of arraignment if you don't waive time.
If you waive your time, It could be longer than that.
It could be however long it goes on.
And usually what will happen is, if you're in defense, look, the general rule for defense is delay, delay, delay.
Because anything can happen, right?
Witnesses die, witnesses move, whatever it is.
People forget.
So you always want to delay.
I have zero doubt that they're going to delay it.
Not only just from a legal perspective, then you have the interesting part of this, which is the political aspect of it.
Right?
Do I want a trial around the time when the primaries are going?
Maybe that helps me in fundraising.
Who knows with Donald Trump what he's thinking here, right?
But from a legal perspective, I would be, as a defense attorney, I want to delay the case as long as possible.
Yeah, well, in the comments, you see Erica is telling us that apparently the next court date is in December, which is not.
I'm not sure where that's true, but I guess we'll take your word for it.
And and they'll probably keep pushing that back.
I suppose there's going to be a problem as well, because Georgia is going to come up.
The Jack Smith is going to come up.
And I don't know if he I mean, even a billionaire will have trouble financing three separate legal teams at the same time.
I would imagine that would be an interesting challenge for him.
Billionaire, but yeah, that's true.
The Georgia one is the one I'm most fascinated.
Out of all of them, I think the Georgia one is the one that I, if I were his lawyers, I'd be fearing the most.
Even the January 6th ones, right?
It's very difficult to show that you were the one inciting, that all the, I mean, there's a lot of, as much as we all know what went on there, there are, legally to prove it, very difficult, very difficult.
The Georgia one, to me, is the thing that if I'm him, I'm quaking the most about.
That's the one that I would be most frightened of.
And I suppose primarily because they have the tape of the call.
Yes!
The tape of, hey, just find me 14,000 votes!
I would, as a defense attorney, you get that and you're like, oh my God.
You're giving him too much credit.
He didn't even want 14,000 votes.
I think he needed the 11, 10,000, whatever it was.
But that'll be, that'll be one of the most, that'll be the fascinating one for me.
All right.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that one.
But none of this helps.
This is going to be a lot of pressure on him.
And he seems to not understand that he shouldn't be going on Hannity and talking about all these different things.
So either way, Paul, thank you so much for breaking this down.
And, you know, if we need you again, hopefully we can put the bat signal up and you can come back on and help us understand more of the criminal enterprise that is the Trump Organization.
My pleasure, Nick.
It was fun to do and I appreciate it.
You take care.
Got it.
Take care.
Thanks, everybody, for being here, and we'll see you, I guess, on Friday with the next Buck Break podcast on our Patreon.
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