Trump indictment - what is the problem?

Politics & Elections
1

Ok maybe am a bit stupid but I’ve read several articles about the recent indictment
of ex-president Trump and I don’t quite understand the problem. Yes, he paid $130,000 to some porn star but this doesn’t seem illegal to me.

  • If he paid porn star Stormy Daniels out of his own pocket, so what? While this
    doesn’t look good I see nothing illegal about that.
  • Did he use money from one of his companies and cover it up by recording it as
    something else (“$130,000 for paperclips” for example)? I can see that as being
    possibly against the law.
  • Did he use campaign funds meant for the 2016 election and then altered the
    books so the money would look like it was going to some legitimate purpose? This
    would definitely be breaking some rule or law.

For this discussion let’s ignore the other problems that Trump may be soon facing -
interfering with the 2020 election Georgia results, the lawsuit with Dominion Voting
Systems etc.

2

Guess what? It’s the third one.

3

The investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office began when Trump was still in the White House and relates to a $130,000 payment made by Trump’s then-personal attorney Michael Cohen to Daniels in late October 2016, days before the presidential election, to silence her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the affair.
{…}
According to court filings when Cohen faced federal criminal charges, Trump Organization executives authorized payments to him totaling $420,000 to cover his original $130,000 payment and tax liabilities and reward him with a bonus. The company noted the reimbursements as a legal expense in its internal books. Trump has denied knowledge of the payment.
Hush money payments aren’t illegal. Ahead of the indictment, prosecutors were weighing whether to charge Trump with falsifying the business records of the Trump Organization for how it reflected the reimbursement of the payment to Cohen, who said he advanced the money to Daniels. Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor in New York.

Prosecutors were also weighing whether to charge Trump with falsifying business records in the first degree for allegedly falsifying a record with the intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal another crime, which in this case could be a violation of campaign finance laws. That is a Class E felony and carries a sentence of a minimum of one year and as much as four years. To prove the case, prosecutors would need to show Trump intended to commit a crime.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/31/politics/trump-indictment-what-to-know/index.html

4

Third one. His lawyer already served time for it.

If justice is blind and all can be convicted, regardless of whether they’re a salami salesman or a billionaire politician, it would be very strange to have someone already go to jail for the crime and other participants not.

I’ll also note that the campaign issue is just one of thirty violations. Most of the information that we get about Trump’s legal problems probably come as leaks from his own crew, to get ahead of the story. That’s why everyone’s talking about the payment, rather than the other 29 crimes that the grand jury approved (e.g. not paying taxes). It’s the only felony among the bunch that they thought they could spin as a DA going rogue. But those other ones also do all exist.

5

The indictedment is still sealed. We don’t know the charges and neither does Trump. That’s why nobody is talking about non-Stormy charges.