Manhattan DA outlines charges against Trump

At a press conference on Tuesday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg explained the criminal charges against former President Donald Trump, who was arraigned earlier in the day. Trump, the first former president ever charged with a crime, pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.

Video Transcript

ALVIN BRAGG: Earlier this afternoon, Donald Trump was arraigned on a New York Supreme Court indictment returned by a Manhattan grand jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. Under New York State law, it is a felony to falsify business records with intent to defraud and an intent to conceal another crime. That is exactly what this case is about, 34 false statements made to cover up other crimes.

These are felony crimes in New York State, no matter who you are. We cannot and will not normalize serious criminal conduct. The defendant repeatedly made false statements on New York business records. He also caused others to make false statements.

The defendant claimed that he was paying Michael Cohen for legal services performed in 2017. This simply was not true. And it was a false statement that the defendant made month after month in 2017. April, May, June, and so on, through the rest of the year.

For nine straight months, the defendant held documents in his hand containing this key lie, that he was paying Michael Cohen for legal services performed in 2017. And he personally signed checks for payments to Michael Cohen for each of these nine months. In total, the grand jury found there were 34 documents with this critical false statement.

Why did Donald Trump repeatedly make these false statements? The evidence will show that he did so to cover up crimes relating to the 2016 election. Donald Trump, executives at the publishing company American Media Inc., Mr. Cohen, and others, agreed in 2015 to a catch and kill scheme.

That is, a scheme to buy and suppress negative information to help Mr. Trump's chance of winning the election. As part of this scheme, Donald Trump and others made three payments to people who claim to have negative information about Mr. Trump.

To make these payments, they set up shell companies and they made yet more false statements, including, for example, in AMI, American Media Incorporated's business records. One of the three people that they paid to keep quiet was a woman named Stormy Daniels. Less than two weeks before the presidential election, Michael Cohen wired $130,000 to Stormy Daniels' lawyer. That payment was to hide damaging information from the voting public.

The participant scheme was illegal. The scheme violated New York election law, which makes it a crime to conspire to promote a candidacy by unlawful means. The $130,000 wire payment exceeded the federal campaign contribution cap, and the false statements in AMIs books violated New York law. That is why Mr. Trump made false statements about his payments to Mr. Cohen.

He could not simply say that the payments were a reimbursement for Mr. Cohen's payments to Stormy Daniels. To do so, to make that true statement, would have been to admit a crime. So instead, Mr. Trump said that he was paying Mr. Cohen for fictitious legal services in 2017 to cover up actual crime committed the prior year.

And in order to get Michael Cohen his money back, they planned one last false statement. In order to complete the scheme, they planned to mischaracterize the repayments to Mr. Cohen as income to the New York State tax authorities. The conduct I just described, and that which was charged by the grand jury, is felony criminal conduct in New York State.