Former Manhattan Prosecutor’s Office Says Trump Faces Up to 4 Years in Prison on Charges of ‘Hushing Up Money’

  • Trump’s “silence money” Stormy Daniels is the subject of a grand jury in Manhattan, according to The NY Times.
  • Ex-Manhattan’s Financial Crime Attorney’s Office says Trump risks felony-level charges of fraud with government documents.
  • Such charges range from no jail time to 4 years in prison, but high sentences are rare, they say.

Former President Donald Trump could face charges ranging from no jail time to 4 years in prison if he is charged in the Stormy Daniels New York “hush money” case, a criminal case currently being heard by a grand jury.

Former Manhattan prosecutors who specialize in complex financial crimes, this potential zero to four-year sentence would be linked to a possible capital falsification of business records in the first degree, a low-level crime under state criminal law, according to former Manhattan prosecutors.

Proving a first-degree charge can be complex, requiring multiple levels of evidence, the former prosecutors said, commenting on Monday’s New York Times revelation that a grand jury is hearing evidence in a “silencing money” case.

“These are always complex cases,” said Adam Kaufmann, former head of the District Attorney’s Office of Investigations and now a criminal defense partner at Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss.

“I think it’s going to be a dogfight from start to finish,” Kaufmann said of the tension he expects prosecutors and Trump’s defense will fight over the case.

The first requirement for proving the highest level of falsification of business records would be to demonstrate that the records were indeed falsified in the enterprise’s business records.

In Trump’s case, these lies will be recorded in the records of the Trump Organization, where “hush” payments were recorded – allegedly falsely – as legal fees to Michael Cohen, Trump’s former closest lawyer.

“You’re falsifying your records to show that it’s a business expense, as if you were paying a lawyer for legal work, which was not the case at all,” explained John Moscow, a former senior prosecutor for financial crimes. Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

“It was a channel payment.”

Cohen admitted to being a swindler who handed over $130,000 of “silence” ahead of the 2016 election. The money was meant to refute claims by adult film actor Daniels of an affair with Trump.

In 2018, a mediator turned critic was sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to numerous crimes he admittedly committed while working for Trump, including silence payments and lies to Congress on Trump’s behalf. .

Cohen told federal prosecutors that Trump later reimbursed him for the costs of the hush with a series of $35,000 checks disguised as the legal fees of Cohen’s legal practice. Each check could be a separate charge of “falsifying business records,” Moscow said.

“From what we know publicly, the ‘false entry’ is Cohen’s legal accounts” in Trump Organization records, said Daniel R. Alonso, a former chief assistant district attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and now a partner at Buckley LLP.

The next level of evidence for a first-degree business fraud charge?

According to Alonso, this would indicate an intention to either commit another crime or help cover up another crime.

That other crime, Alonso said, could be violating federal campaign finance by failing to report what may have been campaign spending — suppressing Daniels’ explosive story that was supposed to go public days before the election.

Prosecutors could also allege that Trump disguised the silence money to commit a different, separate crime, state tax fraud, by claiming that Cohen’s fictitious legal fees are business expenses.

Whether Trump is seeking a refund of Cohen’s “silence money” from his personal taxes or the Trump Organization as company expenses, “he intends to deceive the IRS one way or another,” Moscow said.

The next hurdle will be tying Trump to this scheme.

According to ex-prosecutors, this link can appear in two places. One of them will be from Trump, who personally signed some of Cohen’s reimbursement checks, Cohen claims.

“Trump apparently signed at least one of those checks in the Oval Office,” Alonso said, referring to the revelation in Cohen’s 2019 testimony to Congress.

A second potential connection between Trump and the money-hushing scheme is more subtle, Cohen’s secret entry on Trump from September 2016.

On the tape, Trump can be heard asking Cohen, “So how much should we pay for this? One hundred fifty?” in regards to the payoff to another woman who claimed to have an affair with Trump, Playboy model Karen McDougal.

“I think it matters,” Alonso said. “It’s pretty compromising. Unfortunately, this is a fragment, so we don’t know the whole context.”

Trump’s lawyers and a spokesman for the district attorney’s office declined to comment on possible charges or a grand jury.

Prosecutors noted that falsifying business documents, even in the first degree, is a low-level non-violent criminal offense for which people are rarely sentenced to prison.

However, people are being prosecuted all the time for these minor crimes, Alonso noted. Even former Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg was sentenced to five months in prison in a payroll tax fraud scheme that included falsifying his business documents.

“A prosecutor shouldn’t overlook one of these cases just because it’s Donald Trump,” Alsonso said.

“It has always seemed to me incredibly unfair that Michael Cohen is the only person charged with this crime,” he added.

“The idea that the salesperson is the only one who loses and the director walks away unpunished is simply not consistent with fairness.”

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