IANAL, but I was a business owner.
I would hazard a guess that falsification of business records is almost always done in furtherance of another crime, and that other crime is tax related the large majority of the time. People don’t deliberately falsify records for the fun of it, there’s always an underlying reason.
And even in the rare cases where the intent of the falsification isn’t a crime……say the owner of a family business is misclassifying expenses to hide an affair from his wife who also works in the business, if that falsification results in a tax benefit, you still have your second crime.
In this case it’s clear that the falsification of the records provided the Trump Organization with a tax deduction that they were not entitled to, even if that was not their primary purpose of falsifying the records. And it’s probably going to be pretty easy to prove that they took those deductions.
But here’s the catch……I believe, based on my own experience as a New York City business owner and something I read recently with regards to this case…the statute of limitations has already tolled on the tax avoidance stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s only 3 years on tax-related offenses, although there may be other circumstances that extend it. I know when our businesses were getting state sales tax audits, they only went back three years.
Which means the statute of limitations was up while Trump was still in office.
Which is why the tax offenses weren’t charged, I think. But they still should be easy to prove. No need to even go to campaign finance violations.
I’m going to make a prediction. Trump, at some point between now and December, is going to plead this out, maybe even getting it bumped down to a misdemeanor, and pay a hefty fine. He will claim he did it because he needs to devote his energies to his campaign instead of fighting this persecution.
ETA - I also believe that Trump’s lame attempts at intimidating the grand jury and prosecutors were the final nail in his indictment coffin. I think that even if the grand jury had been considering not indicting, they might have felt it would look like they’d been intimidated into backing down….and they are New Yorkers, after all.