On day one of Donald Trump's hush money criminal trial last week, prosecutor Michael Colangelo told jurors that the former president unlawfully influenced his election eight years ago.
"This was a planned, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior," Colangelo said, according to PBS News. "It was election fraud, pure and simple."
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged the ex-president last year with 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in efforts to cover up potentially damaging information to his campaign.
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Following the April 2023 indictment, the district attorney's office published a press release that read: "During the election, Trump and others employed a 'catch and kill' scheme to identify, purchase, and bury negative information about him and boost his electoral prospects. Trump then went to great lengths to hide this conduct, causing dozens of false entries in business records to conceal criminal activity, including attempts to violate state and federal election laws."
In a New York Times op-ed published Monday, former Manhattan District Attorney's Office Assistant District Attorney Rebecca Roiphe insists the case is about something else.
"This case is not really about election interference, nor is it a politically motivated attempt to criminalize a benign personal deal," she writes, but it's a case "about preventing wealthy people from using their businesses to commit crimes and hide from accountability."
Roiphe suggests, "Taking this case on its own terms as a business records case offers a different and arguably more convincing way to defend its legitimacy. It is a simple case that is similar to hundreds of other cases brought in New York."
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The New York University law professor notes:
Lawmakers in New York, the financial capital of the world, consider access to markets and industry in New York a privilege for businesspeople. It is a felony to abuse that privilege by doctoring records to commit or conceal crimes, even if the businessman never accomplishes the goal and even if the false records never see the light of day.
The idea is that an organization’s records should reflect an honest accounting. It is not a crime to make a mistake, but lying is a different story. It is easy to evade accountability by turning a business into a cover, providing a false trail for whichever regulator might care to look. The law (falsification of business records) deprives wealthy, powerful businessmen of the ability to do so with impunity, at least when they’re conducting business in the city.
"The real elements" of the case "do not require a finding that Mr. Trump interfered with the 2016 election," she adds, but "the real elements concern the way Mr. Trump used his business for a cover-up."
While Trump lawyers claim "this is a case about hush money as a legitimate tool in democratic elections," and prosecutors insist the case is about "a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election," Roiphe suggests, "Boring as it may sound, it is a case about business integrity."
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__Roiphe's full op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).__
