Opening statements expected Monday in Trump's criminal trial in New York

Opening arguments will begin Monday in Donald Trump's trial in New York, the first criminal case ever brought against a former US president.

Prosecutors are expected to allege that Trump planned in 2016, just before winning the election, to conceal money payments to two women to cover up her claims of alleged extramarital affairs with him.

Trump's lawyers are likely to deny the affairs occurred and tell jurors that payments made to Michael Cohen were reimbursements for legal work, not hush money. Cohen claims he paid porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Cohen, a convicted perjurer, was once Trump's political fixer and personal lawyer, and is expected to be a key prosecution witness.

“I was paying a lawyer and I wrote it down as a legal expense,” Trump told reporters last week. “That's exactly what it was,” he stated.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. If convicted, he could receive a prison sentence of up to four years.

Trump was president from 2017 to 2021 and is the favorite to be the Republican presidential candidate in the November elections of this year. Since he is due to appear in court, the case will almost certainly limit his time on the campaign trail.

Seven men and five women sat on the jury last Thursday to hear evidence in the trial that could last six weeks. The jury is made up of two lawyers, six people who work in companies, two who work in the field of education, a health worker and an engineer.

Some of the jurors acknowledged during the selection process that they had expressed negative opinions about the former president in recent years, but all said they could put those opinions aside and judge the case fairly.

Trump has frequently attacked New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchán in his social media posts and called the case “election interference.”

Trump could take the witness stand to defend himself, depending on how he and his lawyers view prosecutors' evidence.

Charges explained

Trump is accused of hiding a $130,000 payment to Daniels in the month before the 2016 election to prevent her from speaking publicly about her claim that she had a one-night date with him at a celebrity golf tournament a decade earlier. .

In a second case, the prosecution cites Karen McDougal's claim that she had a month-long affair with Trump and that a tabloid publisher paid her $150,000 to buy the rights to her story and then, at Trump's behest, removed the article. .

Trump has denied both matters, including that he directed Cohen to make the payment to Daniels and then reimbursed her during the first year of his presidency in 2017.

Altering his company's accounting books would be a misdemeanor, but to convict Trump of a more serious crime, prosecutors will have to convince jurors that he went further, such as trying to influence the outcome of the election. 2016 hiding information about the alleged affairs from voters.

It is not illegal to pay hush money, and Trump can claim that the payments were made simply to prevent disclosure of personally compromising moments in his life, not to try to influence the election.

If jurors fail to reach unanimous agreement among themselves on a guilty verdict or an acquittal, a so-called hung jury would occur, leaving prosecutors to decide whether to seek a new trial.

The New York case is one of four unprecedented criminal indictments Trump faces, spanning 88 charges, all of which he has denied. The secret payments trial, however, could be the only one to take place before the November elections.

Two of the other indictments, one state and one federal, accuse him of illegally attempting to reverse his 2020 loss, while the third alleges that he irregularly took hundreds of highly classified national security documents to his property in Florida when he ended his presidential mandate, and then rejected investigators' requests to return them.

No firm trial dates have been set in any of those three cases, and Trump has sought to push back the start dates until after the election.

If he wins the election, he could ask to have the federal charges dismissed. In any case, if he returns to office, he would not be tried during his presidency.

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