New York State Criminal Case Against Trump (71543-23)

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      Away From the Confines of a Courtroom, Trump Rallies Beachside at the Jersey Shore

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      After a long and often tense week in his criminal trial in Manhattan, former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday took part in a time-honored ritual enjoyed by countless New Yorkers in need of a break: He went to the shore.Sandwiched between the boardwalk and the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Trump stood in front of tens of thousands of people at a rally on the beach in Wildwood, N.J., where he largely repeated the same criticisms of President Biden that have characterized his stump speech in recent months.Fresh from court, Mr. Trump insisted that his case in Manhattan, on charges that he falsified business records related to a hush-money payment, was a “Biden show trial,” even though there is no evidence to suggest that Mr. Biden has been involved in the case.Mr. Trump railed against pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, vowed to crack down on immigration and repeated his false claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election from him.But if Mr. Trump’s speech largely consisted of what has become his standard fare, the setting stood out. Though New Jersey has voted for Democratic presidential candidates in every election since 1992, and Mr. Trump lost the state by double-digit margins in both 2016 and 2020, he insisted that he could win there in November.“We’re expanding the electoral map, because we are going to officially play in the state of New Jersey,” Mr. Trump said to a packed crowd on the beach. “We’re going to win the state of New Jersey.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Trump After Dark

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      Stormy was working blue, and the judge was seeing red.Justice Juan Merchan chided Donald Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles, saying he didn’t understand why she hadn’t objected to seamy details about the President and the Porn Star spilling out.“Why on earth she wouldn’t object to the mention of a condom I don’t understand,” Merchan complained about Necheles.But I wanted to hear about the condom — or lack thereof. The New York trial involves an abstruse legal strategy and illusory crime. It’s the weakest of the cases against Trump. It’s certainly not putting him on trial for the attempted coup d’état he incited or for treating top secret documents as dinner conversation fodder at his golf clubs. But it now seems almost certain that none of the other cases will be resolved before the election.So we’re left with a two-bit case that has devolved into dirty bits, filled with salacious details — a spanking, a missionary position and ping-ponging insults like “horse face” and “orange turd.”Yet, even if it plays like a cheesy old Cinemax “After Dark” show, it’s still illuminating. The case doesn’t hinge on Stormy Daniels’s story about her liaison with Trump, or even if the former president is lying when he says they didn’t have sex. (He would say that, wouldn’t he?)It’s instructive about the moral values — or lack thereof — of our once and perhaps future president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Custodial Witnesses Affirm Basic Facts in Trump’s Hush-Money Trial

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      They have provided some of the more quotidian testimony in a trial populated by porn stars and presidents: a series of witnesses who have discussed such matters as FedEx labels, Sharpie usage and stapling protocol.But each of those witnesses has provided a link in the chain of custody of the 34 business documents at the heart of the case against Donald J. Trump, whose trial is completing its fourth week on Friday.Mr. Trump is accused of disguising those records as payments for legal services to cover up a reimbursement to Michael Cohen, his former lawyer and fixer. Mr. Cohen in 2016 had paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress, to bury her allegation of a sexual encounter with the former president.Such witnesses, known as custodial witnesses, are used to authenticate documents and events that have not otherwise previously been agreed to — stipulated, in legalese — by prosecutors and defense lawyers.Witnesses this week have included Madeleine Westerhout, a former executive assistant to Mr. Trump during his time in the White House. Ms. Westerhout, who spoke affectionately of Mr. Trump and broke into tears on the stand on Thursday speaking about her 2019 firing, testified about having received checks for Mr. Trump to sign, which he sometimes did in the Oval Office.Jeffrey S. McConney, the Trump Organization’s former corporate controller, also described in painstaking detail how Mr. Cohen requested the checks by invoice. They were then cut by Deborah Tarasoff, an accounts supervisor at the organization, and sent via FedEx to the White House by Rebecca Manochio, a junior bookkeeper at the company.Those checks left Mr. Trump’s headquarters in New York stapled to Mr. Cohen’s invoices and arrived in Washington, making their way to the White House through two of Mr. Trump’s aides, including Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s personal bodyguard, at their home addresses.A defense attorney, Susan Necheles, sought to downplay the sending of checks to an outside address, suggesting in questioning Ms. Westerhout that such an arrangement was simply “a workaround” to avoid things getting delayed in a crush of mail being received at the White House. Ms. Westerhout agreed.Once the checks were signed by Mr. Trump — often in Sharpie, according to testimony — they were sent back to New York, and eventually to Mr. Cohen, who is expected to be a key witness for prosecutors, beginning on Monday. More

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      Stormy Daniels Tells of Her Encounter With Trump in Tahoe

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      Stormy Daniels on Tuesday told jurors her account of a sexual encounter with Donald J. Trump in 2006, an episode that ultimately resulted in the former president’s criminal trial.Despite the objections of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Justice Juan M. Merchan ruled that it would be up to jurors to decide on the credibility of the porn actress, whose $130,000 hush-money agreement with Mr. Trump before the 2016 election is at the heart of the charges against him. Prosecutors said she would not, however, describe his genitalia, as she did in her book “Full Disclosure.”Mr. Trump denies they ever had sex.The fateful meeting of Mr. Trump and Ms. Daniels nearly 18 years ago took place at a celebrity golf tournament on the banks of Lake Tahoe in Nevada. Mr. Trump was competing there, and Ms. Daniels was working at the event to promote a porn studio, Wicked Pictures.This account is drawn from versions of her story that Ms. Daniels has told in the past. She first described her interactions with Mr. Trump in a 2011 magazine interview. The magazine, Life & Style, agreed to pay her $15,000 for her story, but she never collected because Mr. Trump’s then fixer, Michael D. Cohen — who is now expected to be one of the prosecution’s primary witnesses — had the story killed before publication.The interview was eventually published in a related publication, In Touch Weekly, in early 2018 after The Wall Street Journal revealed her hush-money deal. She described the episode again in her book, which was published later that year.Ms. Daniels has said that at the tournament she rode with Mr. Trump in a golf court while he was playing, and he later asked for her phone number and invited her to dinner.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More