In Donald Trump’s felony trial final week, we heard about Hulk Hogan’s intercourse tape, and we watched Hope Hicks cry.
To date this week, we heard all about ledgers, invoices and accounts payable stamps. We watched as a loyal Trump accountant authenticated Allen Weisselberg’s handwriting. The identical paperwork with totally different dates popped up not a few times however again and again.
It’s lethal boring. Nevertheless it’s lethal to Trump’s protection if the jurors can keep awake for it.
With one or two drowsy exceptions, they’re. They appear to grasp that Trump was indicted on 34 counts — one for every falsified enterprise file — and that they have to fastidiously research Trump’s $35,000 month-to-month checks to Michael Cohen as a way to grasp the center of the prosecution’s case.
The paperwork had been validated as we speak by a former senior vp of the Trump Group, Jeffrey McConney, and an accounts payable supervisor, Deborah Tarasoff, each of whose authorized charges are being paid by the corporate. Stormy Daniels’s attractive testimony, anticipated as quickly as Tuesday, will not be almost as vital to the fundamental fees as that of those mundane gray-haired bean counters.
Of all of the stultifying numbers we heard within the courtroom as we speak, the one which stands out is the $130,000 that Weisselberg, a former chief monetary officer of the corporate, scrawled on a financial institution doc earlier than “grossing it up” (his handwritten description) to $420,000. That was to cowl up the truth that $130,000 is the precise sum of money that Cohen wired to Keith Davidson, Daniels’s lawyer, to maintain his shopper quiet. As in Watergate, the crime is usually within the cover-up.
We’re awaiting Cohen’s testimony that Trump knew that he was reimbursing Cohen $35,000 a month for hush cash, not for imprecise authorized providers, and thus broke the legislation. However the circumstantial and documentary proof precorroborating Cohen — and lessening the affect of his a number of lies — is now piled as excessive as Trump Tower.
On the finish of the day, the choose requested Josh Steinglass of the prosecution crew how for much longer he anticipated the D.A.’s case to take. When Steinglass mentioned “very roughly” two weeks — to Might 21 — I noticed Trump elevate and decrease his arms in exasperation, like a 6-year-old instructed to wash up his Legos. Then he went into the hallway and whined to reporters, “I assumed they had been completed as we speak.”
Trump by no means thought something of the type. He’s a caged animal (to make use of his phrase for immigrants) and needs out ASAP. Good luck with that.
