https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-trial-jury-stormy-daniels-alvin-bragg-juan-merchan-campaign-finance-fa2d1596?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
Former U.S. President Donald Trump talks to the press while standing with his attorney Todd Blanche at the end of the day at his criminal trial at New York State Supreme Court in New York City on Tuesday Photo: justin lane/Reuters
New York prosecutors rested their hush-money case against Donald Trump this week, but after 20 days in court and a trial transcript of 4,000 pages, the missing piece is still missing. The question is whether Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg presented the evidence necessary for a conviction, and if we were in the jury room, we’d say no.
Ignore the drama of Stormy Daniels on the witness stand, recalling her alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump in 2006. Focus on the law. To get a guilty verdict on the 34 bookkeeping felonies, Mr. Bragg must prove both that Mr. Trump falsified business records, and also that he did it with intent to commit or conceal a second crime. Yet there was essentially no direct evidence that Mr. Trump conceived of this all as a scheme to break the law.
The only real witness to Mr. Trump’s state of mind was his former fixer, Michael Cohen. When Ms. Daniels threatened to go public in the days before the 2016 election, Mr. Cohen testified that Mr. Trump authorized him to buy her silence for $130,000. “He expressed to me: Just do it,” Mr. Cohen said. “Go meet up with Allen Weisselberg and figure this whole thing out.” Mr. Weisselberg was Mr. Trump’s longtime CFO.
Mr. Bragg’s main argument for the second crime is that because the Stormy payoff was primarily meant to influence the 2016 election, it was in effect an illegal donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign. This interpretation of the law is dubious, though put a pin in that for a moment. Did it cross Mr. Trump’s mind that the transaction might be criminal? A nondisclosure agreement on its own is perfectly legal.