Former president Donald Trump was convicted on Thursday by a New York jury on 34 felony charges for falsifying business records, making him the first president in U.S. history to become a convicted felon, reports National Review which explains of the trial:
Over the past six weeks at the state courthouse in lower Manhattan, the prosecution sought to demonstrate that Trump, his former fixer and attorney Michael Cohen, and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker participated in a conspiracy to defraud voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election by paying off women to conceal embarrassing stories about the then-presidential candidate’s sexual history without properly recording those payments as campaign-finance expenses.
Trump’s defense team, meanwhile, countered that the hush-money payment to Daniels and the catch-and-kill scheme, which Trump funded, did not qualify as campaign expenses and were unrelated to Trump’s political ambitions.
The jury began deliberating on Wednesday after receiving instructions from Judge Juan Merchan about the relevant legal definitions and considerations. The case is complicated by the fact that the prosecution was tasked with proving that Trump falsified business records in order to conceal an underlying crime, which they argue was a conspiracy to defraud the American people…
…Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg and his team of prosecutors pursued the case against Trump in front of Judge Merchan. The prosecution relied on an expansive legal theory to expand the business-records charges to felonies, arguing the falsifications were used to cover up alleged campaign-finance crimes, namely hush-money payments designed to help Trump’s electoral prospects. However, those federal campaign finance crimes are not being pursued by federal prosecutors, and the prosecution did not discuss the underlying crimes until the closing argument took place on Tuesday.
Bragg is an elected Democrat and Merchan previously donated to the Biden campaign. One of Bragg’s prosecutors previously received payments from the Democratic National Committee and another donated to the Biden campaign. Similarly, Merchan’s daughter is a Democratic strategist whose clients have fundraised off the Trump prosecution.
