The court did not issue a temporary order to stop the work.
On Tuesday, in a court in New York City, Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of first-degree crime forging business documents.
After looking into hush money moves made during the 2016 presidential campaign for years, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg finally filed the charges.
Bragg says that during his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to hide criminal behavior that hid damaging information from the voting public.”
Federal officials in New York’s Southern District looked into Trump’s payments to Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, but they decided not to bring charges against the president this year. The probe by the Federal Election Commission also came to an end in 2021.
The Manhattan grand jury charged Trump last week, so he turned himself in to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office on Tuesday afternoon.
The claim became public on Tuesday, when Trump appeared before Judge Juan Merchan. Trump was charged with 34 counts of first-degree falsifying business records by the New York Supreme Court.
The claim says that Trump “falsified New York business records” to “hide damaging information and illegal activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election,” to quote Bragg.
Bragg said, “DUMB TRUMP and others used a plan called “catch and kill” to find, buy, and hide negative information about him during the election.” The claim says that Trump “went to great lengths to hide this behavior,” including making “dozens of false entries in business records” to hide the fact that he tried to get around state and federal election rules.
In New York, if you are charged with first-degree forgery of company records, the lawyer must prove that you did something dishonest. People put lying in the group of “intent to commit another crime.”
In court, Trump said he wasn’t guilty. A brief protection order was not given by the judge.
The judge has said that he wants to finish this case as soon as possible. The case will be back in the same Lower Manhattan court on December 4, 2023.
The government wants the hearing to start in January 2024, which is right in the middle of the primary season for Republicans. The lawyers for Trump are doing everything they can to put off that day.
In the charge, Bragg said that between August 2015 and December 2017, Trump “organized a “catch and kill” scheme by making a number of payments that he then hid by making a number of false business entries over a period of months.”
Bragg said that American Media Inc. paid a former doorman at Trump Tower $30,000 to keep quiet about what he knew about Trump’s child with a different woman.
Bragg says that American Media Inc. gave a woman $150,000 to keep quiet about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump. Karen McDougal, who used to be a Playboy model, might be the person Bragg is referring to.
Trump seems to be referring to Michael Cohen when he says that he “explicitly told a lawyer to reimburse” American Media Inc. in cash. What happened at Bragg
“Cohen sent $130,000 to a lawyer for an adult film star 12 days before the general election for president,” he says. It looks like this is about Stormy Daniels.
Cohen broke federal campaign finance rules by making the payments, and after pleading guilty to many charges, he was given three years in jail. Cohen has accepted that he did wrong, but he says that the payments were made because of Trump.
After the election, Trump paid Cohen back every month. At first, the money came from the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which was set up in New York to hold the assets of the Trump Organization while TRUMP was in office. Later, the money came straight from Trump’s bank account. Eleven checks that shouldn’t have been made were.
Bragg says that Trump wrote nine of the checks in question himself. Each check was illegally cashed by the Trump Organization, which said that the money was payment for legal services that were supposedly done under a fake retainer agreement.
To hide the first secret move of $130,000, “a total of 34 fake entries in New York company documents” were needed. People who took part in the scam also did things to hide what the tax-deductible returns were really for.
After a long investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office that began in 2019, a grand jury in Manhattan charged the former President of the United States and top Republican presidential candidate for 2024 on Thursday.
Trump and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had already made plans for him not to have to go to court while he was in handcuffs. Investigators from the company caught the ex-president and put him in jail.
The payments to Daniels and McDougal were looked into by both the Federal Election Commission and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Federal officials in New York’s Southern District cleared Trump of any wrongdoing in connection with the Daniels payment earlier this year. This is what led to the claims against the ex-president.
The Federal Election Commission was looking into whether Trump broke election law by paying Stormy Daniels $130,000. In 2021, they dropped the case because they “failed by a vote of 2-2 to find reason to believe that Donald J. Trump knowingly and willfully violated” federal election law.
Bragg said in a statement after Trump’s arrest that the people of New York have “allegations that Donald J. Trump repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to hide crimes that kept damaging information from voters during the 2016 presidential election.”
Bragg said that the “money and lies trail” in the Statement of Facts broke New York’s “basic and fundamental business law.” This group has been making sure that all citizens are treated fairly by the government for a long time, and that still happens today.
Trump said that the probe and charges made by the special counsel amount to “the highest level of political persecution and election interference in history.”