Given the magnitude of Donald Trump’s conviction—the first time a former president has ever been convicted of a felony, let alone 34 of them—it’s amazing how little money was involved in the underlying crimes. All the charges emanate from a $130,000 payment that Trump hesitated to hand over, then had his lawyer cover.
It wasn’t that Trump, who is worth an estimated $7.5 billion, did not have money. It’s that he was, as he has always been, remarkably cheap. Prosecutors benefited from that trait, beginning their case with testimony from a guy who had to pick up Trump’s expenses, David Pecker. The tabloid executive agreed in an August 2015 meeting to work with Trump and his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, suppress negative stories about the real-estate mogul as he ran for president.
Initially, the deal worked out well for Trump. Pecker shelled out $30,000 to buy a story, later determined to be false, that Trump had fathered a child with a maid at Trump Tower. Expecting Trump to pay him back, Pecker spent another $150,000 of company money to silence Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate who said she had an affair with Trump. But election laws can be thorny affairs, and after a last-minute conversation with his company’s general counsel, Pecker decided to tear up a reimbursem*nt deal. He never got the money back.
When p*rnstar Stormy Daniels came forward with an allegation that she had sex with Trump, Pecker told Cohen he was done paying. “I am not a bank,” Pecker recalled saying. Trump had his own reservations about handing over funds. Cohen had a deal with an attorney for Daniels, but Trump hesitated to cough up the cash. Daniels’ attorney then walked away, predicting a news frenzy in a text exchange with the editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer. “I think it will be a full-on blitz,” he wrote. “I bet,” the editor responded, “All because Trump is tight.”
Meanwhile, two of Trump’s employees, Cohen and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg, were trying to conjure up money to keep the deal alive. They decided one of them would have to make the initial payment. According to Cohen, Weisselberg balked, citing the costs of sending his grandchildren to prep school and summer camp. Cohen stepped up and used a loan against his home to wire $130,000 to Daniels’ attorney on Oct. 27, 2016, 12 days before the presidential election.
Cohen ran into complications getting Trump to reimburse him, too. At the end of the year, when he was still waiting to get his money back from the Daniels payment, Cohen learned that Trump cut his bonus from $150,000 to $50,000. “It was insulting,” said Cohen, who stormed into Weisselberg’s office and sounded off. “Take it easy,” Cohen recalled Weisselberg saying. “You know that Mr. Trump loves you. We are going to do right by you. We will make sure that—we are going to make sure that you are taken care of.”
Exactly how Cohen would be taken care of became clear in January 2017, days before Trump became president. According to Cohen, the plan was that Trump would repay him $130,000 for the Daniels payment and $50,000 for an additional outlay, then double that sum to $360,000 to account for taxes, before tacking on $60,000 as something of an apology bonus. The total would come to $420,000, paid out—upon Trump’s suggestion—in monthly installments of $35,000. To hide the true nature of the payment, Cohen would submit invoices suggesting he was being paid a retainer. Those invoices led to the ledger entries and checks, several of which Trump personally signed, that became the basis for charging the former president with falsifying business records.
There was one more perk Trump offered around this time. He named Cohen his personal attorney as president, a position Cohen understood would come with a salary of exactly zero dollars. Cohen also knew, however, that he could cash in on his new title by selling consulting and advisory services to various clients. Cohen testified that he eventually translated his unpaid position into about $4 million of deals at no additional cost to his boss.
In 2018, that arrangement began to fall apart when the FBI raided Cohen’s apartment and office. Cohen placed a call to Trump. “He said to me, ‘Don’t worry,’” Cohen testified. “‘I am the president of the United States. There is no—there is nothing here. Everything is going to be okay. Stay tough. You’re going to be okay.” It was the last time Cohen ever spoke directly with Trump.
Pecker did not have such a dramatic fallout with the former president, but he nonetheless provided damning testimony at Trump’s trial, speaking both fondly and knowingly of the real estate developer. “His approach to money, he was very cautious and very frugal,” Pecker said.
Prosecutors weaved that idea into their case. “[Trump] believed in pinching pennies,” Matthew Colangelo of the district attorney’s office said in his opening statement. “He believed in watching every dollar. He believed in negotiating every bill. It’s all over all of the books he has written. He ran the Trump Organization with total control. You will hear testimony about his relentless focus on the bottom line.”
“But when it came time to pay Michael Cohen back for the catch-and-kill deal,” Colangelo added, “you will see that he didn’t negotiate the price down; he doubled it. And he doubled it so they could disguise it as income. And you will hear evidence that the Trump Organization was not in the practice of paying people twice what they owed for anything. This might be the only time that ever happened. And Donald Trump’s willingness to do so here shows just how important it was to him to hide the true nature of Cohen’s illegal payment to Ms. Daniels and the overall election conspiracy.”
Apparently, the jury found that argument persuasive.
Follow me onTwitterorLinkedIn.Check outsome of my other workhere.Send me a securetip.
