Donald Trump tried to 'corrupt' the 2016 election, prosecutor alleges as hush money trial gets underway

Prosecutor accuses Donald Trump of election fraud through hush money payments; defence claims innocence in historic trial

Donald Trump tried to illegally influence the 2016 Presidential election by preventing damaging stories about his personal life from becoming public, a prosecutor told jurors on April 22 at the start of the former President’s historic hush money trial.

“This was a planned, coordinated, 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 behaviour, using doctored corporate records and bank forms to conceal those payments along the way,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said. “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”

A defence lawyer countered by assailing the case as baseless and attacking the integrity of the onetime Trump confidant who’s now the government’s star witness.

“President Trump is innocent. President Trump did not commit any crimes. The Manhattan district attorney’s office should never have brought this case,” attorney Todd Blanche said.

The opening statements offered the 12-person jury — and the voting public — radically divergent roadmaps for a case that will unfold against the backdrop of a closely contested White House race in which Mr. Trump is not only the presumptive Republican nominee but also a criminal defendant facing the prospect of a felony conviction and prison.

It is the first criminal trial of a former American President and the first of four prosecutions of Mr. Trump to reach a jury. Befitting that history, prosecutors sought from the outset to elevate the gravity of the case, which they said was chiefly about election interference as reflected by the hush money payments to a porn actor who said she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump.

“The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 Presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again,” Mr. Colangelo said.