Prosecutors launched the hush-money trial of Donald Trump by revealing new details Monday about how they seek to prove the former president corrupted the 2016 election to bury a sex scandal, while a defence lawyer countered the payment was meant only to protect his reputation.

The trial in lower Manhattan, the first of a former president, involves 34 felony counts alleging Trump falsified business records to cover up a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to stifle her claims of a sexual liaison. Prosecutors say he falsified records by claiming the reimbursements to his former attorney, Michael Cohen, who paid Daniels, were for legal fees.

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo used his opening statement Monday to sketch out a criminal conspiracy involving Trump, Cohen and David Pecker, who ran the company that owned the National Enquirer and agreed to buy and bury negative news about the former president. The plot, he said, began in a May 2015 meeting in Trump Tower.

“The evidence will show this was not spin or strategy but a plan to influence the election to help Donald Trump get elected,” he said. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”

The trial takes place as Trump, 77, seeks to return to the White House in a rematch with President Joe Biden. It’s one of four prosecutions hanging over the presumptive Republican nominee, who calls the case election interference and a witch hunt by Democrats.

Trump attorney Todd Blanche had a different spin on the events.

“Spoiler alert: there’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election,” Blanche said. “It’s called democracy.”

Trump’s Reputation

He assailed the prosecution case and their witnesses. Daniels had threatened to go public with her account of having sex with Trump in 2006, which was “almost an attempt to extort” him, Blanche said. Cohen, the DA’s star witness, is “obsessed” with Trump and will lie to see him convicted, he said.

“It was sinister, it was an attempt to embarrass President Trump,” the defence lawyer said. Trump bought the silence of Daniels, he said, to protect “his family, his reputation and his brand.”

Blanche said his “larger than life” client is a victim of overreaching prosecutors who put their faith in Daniels and Cohen, the former Trump fixer who went to prison for perjury and other crimes.

The basic events of the trial have been known since 2018, and more specifically since Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted Trump last year. But Colangelo revealed that the evidence includes insider accounts by Cohen and Pecker, emails, text messages, and recordings of Trump discussing the repayment, he said.

The crimes center around business records that Trump allegedly covered up in reimbursing $420,000 to Cohen, or more than twice what he paid Daniels to buy her silence, Colangelo said. After he was elected, Colangelo said, Trump falsely claimed the payments were for legal fees, he said.

Porn Star Payment

“They couldn’t say ‘reimbursement for porn star payment’ so they had to cook the books,” Colangelo said.

Jurors will hear Trump “working out the terms of the deal” on tape with Cohen, Colangelo said. “You will hear the defendant’s own voice in a recorded conversation.”

Their goal was to conceal damaging information ahead of the election and trash Trump’s opponents like Ted Cruz and Ben Carson with scurrilous stories. The Enquirer would “catch and kill” damaging stories, or buy unflattering articles with no intention of publishing them.

Pecker was called briefly as the prosecution’s first witness Monday, giving some basics about his role, and will return Tuesday. He said he had the final say over which stories were published in the Enquirer and which didn’t see the light of day.

“We used chequebook journalism and paid for the story,” he said.

Access Hollywood

Colangelo said the revelation in October 2016 of the so-called Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about his conquest of women, had an “immediate and explosive” effect on the campaign. That meant he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with Daniels, to prevent any further election surprises.

“The campaign was concerned,” the prosecutor said. “They knew it was damaging, not only because Trump bragged about sexual assault” but it was “in his own words, in his own voice.”

Bragg filed the first of four criminal indictments of the former president. What was unclear until Monday was how the former president would defend Bragg’s specific charges beyond attacking the DA and calling it an unfair witch hunt.

Trump, who wore a navy suit, white shirt and blue tie, seemed subdued and often jotted notes as Blanche took aim at Cohen, the witness who can most directly tie the payments to the election. Blanche recounted Cohen’s criminal record since leaving Trump, including his prison term for tax fraud and lying under oath to Congress.

“He raised his hand, swore to tell the truth and then lied, under oath,” Blanche said. As a podcaster and book author, Cohen is now obsessed with Trump, saying “his entire livelihood depends on this Trump obsession.”

Trusting such a man is a mistake, the defence lawyer said.

“You cannot make a decision on President Trump based on Michael Cohen,” Blanche said.

He also took shots at Daniels, whom he said profited greatly from her account of having sex with Trump in 2006 and still owes him $600,000 in legal judgments. He told jurors that her story doesn’t relate to the financial transactions made by Cohen that are at the heart of the case.

“Her testimony, while salacious, does not matter,” Blanche said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

A jury of 12 people was seated Thursday in former U.S. President Donald Trump’s hush money trial, propelling the proceedings closer to opening statements and the start of weeks of dramatic testimony.

The jury includes a sales professional, a software engineer, a security engineer, an English teacher, a speech therapist, multiple lawyers, an investment banker and a retired wealth manager.

The first-ever trial of a former American president will unfold in the middle of this year’s race for the White House, ensuring that the legal troubles of the presumptive Republican nominee will be a dominant issue in the contest against Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.

The trial will almost certainly feature unflattering testimony about the Trump’s personal life before he became president, with allegations that he falsifying business records to suppress stories in the final days of the 2016 election about his sexual relationships.

The jury selection process appeared wobbly earlier in the day when two jurors were dismissed, one after expressing doubt about her ability to be fair following disclosure of details about her identity and the other over concerns that some of his answers in court may have been inaccurate.

But lawyers who began the day with only five jurors settled on the remaining seven for the panel in quick succession, along with one alternate. Judge Juan Merchan has said his goal is to have six alternates.

In other developments, prosecutors asked for Trump to be held in contempt over a series of social media posts this week, and the judge barred reporters from identifying jurors’ employers after expressing privacy concerns.

The trial centers on a $130,000 payment that Cohen made shortly before the 2016 election to porn actor Stormy Daniels to prevent her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the race’s final days.

Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of the payments in internal records when his company reimbursed Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2018 and is expected to be a star witness for the prosecution.

Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, and his lawyers argue that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He could get up to four years in prison if convicted, though it’s not clear that the judge would opt to put him behind bars. Trump would almost certainly appeal any conviction.

Appeals and legal wrangling have caused delays in the other three cases charging Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election results and with illegally hoarding classified documents.

The jury selection process picked up momentum Tuesday with the selection of seven jurors. But on Thursday, Merchan revealed in court that one of the seven, a cancer nurse, had “conveyed that after sleeping on it overnight she had concerns about her ability to be fair and impartial in this case.”

And though jurors’ names are being kept confidential, the woman told the judge and the lawyers that she had doubts after she said aspects of her identity had been made public.

“Yesterday alone I had friends, colleagues and family push things to my phone regarding questioning my identity as a juror,” she said. “I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision making in the courtroom.”

A second seated juror was dismissed after prosecutors raised concerns that he may not have been honest in answering a jury selection question by saying that he had never been accused or convicted of a crime.

The IT professional was summoned to court to answer questions after prosecutors said they found an article about a person with the same name who had been arrested in the 1990s for tearing down political posters pertaining to the political right in suburban Westchester County.

A prosecutor also disclosed that a relative of the man may have been involved in a deferred prosecution agreement in the 1990s with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting Trump’s case.

Because the juror was questioned Thursday at the judge’s bench, off-microphone and out of earshot of reporters, it was not known whether the man confirmed or denied either instance was connected to him.

The process of picking a jury is a critical phase of any criminal trial but especially so when the defendant is a former president and the presumptive Republican nominee. Prospective jurors have been grilled on their social media posts, personal lives and political views as the lawyers and judge search for biases that would prevent them from being impartial.

Inside the court, there’s broad acknowledgment of the futility in trying to find jurors without knowledge of Trump. A prosecutor this week said that lawyers were not looking for people who had been “living under a rock for the past eight years.”

After dismissing from the jury the nurse who had already been selected, Merchan ordered journalists in court not to report prospective jurors’ answers to questions about their current and former employers.

“We just lost, probably, what probably would have been a very good juror for this case, and the first thing that she said was she was afraid and intimidated by the press, all the press, and everything that had happened,” Merchan said after dismissing the juror.

Prosecutors had asked that the employer inquiries be axed from the jury questionnaire. Defense lawyer Todd Blanche responded that “depriving us of the information because of what the press is doing isn’t the answer.”

The district attorney’s office on Monday sought a $3,000 fine for Trump for three Truth Social posts they said violated the order. Since then, prosecutors said he made seven additional posts that they believe violate the order.

Several of the posts involved an article that referred to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen as a “serial perjurer,” and one from Wednesday repeated a claim by a Fox News host that liberal activists were lying to get on the jury, said prosecutor Christopher Conroy.

Trump lawyer Emil Bove said Cohen “has been attacking President Trump in public statements,” and Trump was just replying.

The judge had already scheduled a hearing for next week on the prosecution’s request for contempt sanctions over Trump’s posts.