How prosecutors’ 'monotonous' strategy during Trump trial serves a 'potentially crucial purpose': report

06 May 2024

In a New York Times op-ed last week, former Manhattan District Attorney's Office Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Roiphe revealed what she called "the real elements" of Donald Trump's hush money trial.

While the former president's lawyers claim "this is a case about hush money as a legitimate tool in democratic elections," as prosecutors argue the case is about "a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election," Roiphe insisted, "Boring as it may sound, it is a case about business integrity."

In a Monday, May 6 article by Politico's Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, the political reporters also highlight the "boring" nature of Trump's first criminal trial so far.

"For hour after hour, jurors at Trump’s hush money trial were treated to a monotonous display of checks, accounting ledgers and bank statements," Politico reports, but "the documentary grunt work, however, was for a potentially crucial purpose. Prosecutors appear to be trying to check all the boxes that constitute the elements of the 34 felony charges Trump is facing, all of which turn on technical intricacies of New York’s business recordkeeping laws."

Gerstein and Cheney report, "the salacious details were entirely absent Monday as attorneys grilled a former Trump Organization financial controller [Jeffrey McConney] and a current bookkeeper [Deborah Tarasoff] about 'accounts payable' and the nuts and bolts of how money moved through the massive company. In many of the instances at issue in the case, these witnesses said, the money ultimately moved at the direction of Trump himself."

Furthermore, Politico reports:

As prosecutors plodded through the documents Monday, they did draw out some subtext and nuances, suggesting to jurors that there was an unusual air of secrecy and irregularity around the payments to [former Trump lawyer and star witness Michael] Cohen. The documents associated with those payments — including the checks that prosecutors laboriously displayed — are the very business records that Trump is accused of falsifying in violation of a New York law on corporate fraud.

McConney testified that he was instructed to make the payments to Cohen at a brief meeting in 2016 with Trump’s then-CFO Allen Weisselberg. The controller said that while the payments were recorded as legal expenses pursuant to a 'retainer agreement,' they did not go through the Trump Organization’s legal department as such payments typically did.

Politico also notes while jurors on Monday saw "Trump’s Sharpie-crafted signature on several $35,000 checks that were drawn from Trump’s personal bank account and sent to Michael Cohen in 2017," several "emails suggested Cohen was slow to understand that Trump’s accountants wanted invoices to support the monthly $35,000 payments Cohen received."

"A lot of people ask for money. I need an invoice," McConney said.

Gerstein and Cheney emphasize:

When McConney reiterated that requirement to Cohen, Cohen offered a somewhat puzzling reply: 'Jeff Please remind me of the monthly amount.'

Cohen also at first simply typed in a few lines under the word 'Invoice' in an email. He later sent monthly invoices to Weisselberg — but often curiously continued to omit the amount.

Politico's full report is here.

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