Trump could avoid trial this year on 2020 election charges. Is the hush money case a worthy proxy?

WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump is facing serious charges in two separate cases over whether he tried to undermine the Constitution by overturning the results of a fair election and clinging to power illegally.

Yet it’s a New York case centering on payments to silence an adult film actress that could yield the only legal reckoning this year on whether he tried to undermine a pillar of American democracy.

Trump is charged in the so-called hush money case with attempting to falsify company records, but that was difficult to tell when the trial began Monday.

Lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo wasted little time during opening statements linking the case to Trump’s campaign during his first bid for president. He said the payments to Stormy Daniels amounted to “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”

Whether the jury accepts that connection will be crucial to Trump’s fate. The suspected nominee faces charges related to falsifying company records, which would generally be a criminal offense unless the alleged act could be related to another crime. Prosecutors could charge them with felonies because they claim the false data was part of an effort to cover up violations of state and federal election laws — though that’s still not the kind of direct election interference Trump has been accused of elsewhere.

Trump himself has called the New York trial and the three other criminal cases against him a form of election interference, suggesting without evidence that they are part of a Democratic plan to undermine his campaign to return to the White House.

“I’m here instead of being able to campaign in Pennsylvania, Georgia and a lot of other places, and it’s very unfair,” he told reporters before Monday’s court hearing.

Although the charges are felonies, the case is seen in New York as the least consequential against the former president. The two election cases accuse Trump of more direct involvement in efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.

He faces a four-count federal indictment in Washington, D.C., in connection with his actions leading up to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021. He and others were charged in Georgia with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law by plotting to illegally overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him in those cases and a fourth accuses him of mishandling classified documents.

All other cases are tied up in appeals that are expected to delay any trials until after the November election. If that happens, the New York case will be the campaign’s only legal test to determine whether Trump tried to illegally rig an election — and the case isn’t even about the election results he tried to overturn.

On Monday, Trump’s attorney moved quickly to undermine the idea that a case in which the allegations involve record keeping could seriously be considered an attempt to illegally undermine an election.

“I have a spoiler alert: There is nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy,” said his attorney, Todd Blanche. ‘They have given something sinister to this idea, as if it were a crime. You will learn that it is not so.”

Some legal experts monitoring the cases against Trump said they were skeptical about linking the payments to any form of “election interference.” Doing so also risks diminishing the seriousness of the other allegations in the public’s mind.

Richard Painter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and a former White House adviser during the George W. Bush administration, said he believed the facts of the case met the evidence needed to determine whether there was a crime had been committed that violated the campaign law. added: “As for the election interference part, I’m having a little bit of trouble with this.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, said the New York case is unlike the other election-related charges Trump faces.

“We can draw a pretty bright line between trying to change vote totals to overturn a presidential election and not disclosing embarrassing information on a government form,” he wrote in a recent column in the Los Angeles Times.

In an email, Hasen said New York prosecutors called the case election interference “because that adds momentum to what may be the only case heard before the election.”

Some said prosecutors’ decision to characterize the New York case as election interference appeared to be a strategy designed to increase its visibility.

“For Alvin Bragg (the Manhattan district attorney) to call it a case of election interference is more of a public relations strategy,” said Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown University and a former federal prosecutor. “I think there was concern that people were looking at the other prosecutions and not talking about the Manhattan case.”

Declaring the case a hush-money trial made it seem less important than the others and “so they framed it… as an election interference case. But again, what he is accused of is falsifying company documents.”

Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels and his lawyers claim the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal fees.

The key question in the prosecutor’s argument is why the company records were falsified, said Chris Edelson, an assistant professor at American University. Their claim is that “Trump prevented voters from making an informed decision during the election.”

It’s an argument he believes prosecutors can make. “I think the prosecutors will have to explain this to the jury. I don’t think it’s impossible to do this,” he said.

The New York trial centers on allegations of a $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, made to Daniels to prevent her claims about a sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in recent days of the 2016 race.

“Candidates want to suppress bad news about them. But there’s a difference between trying to limit people’s knowledge of that information and breaking the law to prevent them from finding out,” said Andrew Warren, a former Florida prosecutor suspended by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and is running for office. as his trial continues.

Warren said he believes the case was always about more than just the payments. If it’s accepted as a hush-money case, “Trump wins,” he said. “If the intent was to deceive voters, the plaintiff wins.”