Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before his speech on the annual Conservative Political Motion Conference (CPAC) at Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center on March 4, 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland.Â
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
The Recent York City grand jury that’s weighing whether to criminally charge former President Donald Trump is about to resume work at noon on Thursday after an unexpected break day.
The grand jury has been hearing testimony from witnesses since January on a hush money payment porn star Stormy Daniels received shortly before the 2016 presidential election from Michael Cohen, who was Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer at the moment.
Cohen and Daniels each have said that the $130,000 he gave her was to maintain her from talking to journalists about her claim of getting sex with Trump once in 2016.
Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, used the term “legal expenses” in business documents to record payments he made to Cohen to cover the fee of paying off Daniels in addition to taxes he owed on that cash.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is understood to be considering whether to ask the grand jury to indict Trump for violating Recent York state law by allegedly misclassifying the reimbursement to Cohen as a legal expense.
That is often a misdemeanor. But it could possibly be elevated to a felony if a business record is falsified to cover up one other crime.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal crimes that included breaking campaign finance law by facilitating the Daniels payment to maintain her from harming Trump’s possibilities of winning the 2016 election.
Trump denies having sex with Daniels or with one other woman, Karen McDougal, who received a $150,000 payment from the publisher of The National Enquirer that very same yr to purchase her silence about an alleged affair with him that she says began in 2006.
