Stormy Daniels, the pornography actor who became a household name in 2018 recently talked about former President Donald Trump. In 2018, it was revealed that Trump had paid her to keep quiet about a 2006 affair. Trump could be in huge trouble.
Donald Trump could face charges
It has been noted that Trump could face charges carrying anywhere from no jail to 4 years in prison if indicted in the Stormy Daniels “hush money” matter in New York, a criminal case now being weighed by a grand jury.
That zero-to-four-years potential sentence would be for a possible top charge of first-degree falsifying business records, a low-level felony under state criminal law, according to former Manhattan prosecutors with expertise in complex financial crimes.
Proving a first-degree charge can be complicated, requiring several layers of proof, the ex-prosecutors said, commenting on the revelation by the New York Times on Monday that grand jurors are hearing evidence in the “hush money” matter.
“These are always tough cases,” said Adam Kaufmann, a former investigations chief for the district attorney’s office, now a partner specializing in white-collar criminal defense at Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss.
“I think it’s going to be a dog’s fight from beginning to end,” Kaufmann said of the intensity with which he expects prosecutors and Trump’s defense to battle over the case.
The first requirement to proving the highest level of falsifying business records would be showing that records were indeed falsified in the business records of an enterprise. In Trump’s case, that falsehood would sit in the records of the Trump Organization, where ”hush money” payments were recorded — allegedly falsely — as legal fees to Michael Cohen, Trump’s one-time closest attorney.
“You’re falsifying your records to show that it is a business expense, as if you’re paying a lawyer to do legal work, and this wasn’t that at all,” explained John Moscow, a former senior financial crimes prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
“This was a conduit payment.”
Cohen has admitted that being the bag man who delivered $130,000 in “hush money” on the brink of the 2016 election. The money was to quash claims by Daniels of having an affair with Trump.