| Donald Trump: Enemy of the State By John Eastman
Donald Trump was a celebrity long before he descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency in 2015. It is a common fact of life that hucksters of various stripes will try to cash in on their dealings with a celebrity—either going public with private interactions that would remain private with normal folk, or distorting such private interactions into something they were not in order to get paid off for the mere nuisance value.
Such appears to be the case with Stephanie Clifford, the porn star best known by her stage name of Stormy Daniels. She claims that she and Donald Trump had a one-night sexual encounter at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada back in 2006, when Trump was host of the television series The Apprentice. Trump denies that the sexual encounter ever occurred. I don't have any basis to know whether or not it did, but it turns out, in Alvin Bragg's mind, it doesn't matter.
Bragg is, of course, the New York district attorney who prosecuted Trump for filing business records claiming that reimbursement to Trump's lawyer for payments he made to Ms. Clifford to keep the story quiet were "legal expenses." In Bragg's version, if Clifford's story was true, then Cohen's payment, reimbursed by Trump according, apparently, to the jury's findings (though that fact, too, was hotly contested by Trump), was designed to prevent a negative story from coming out during the presidential campaign, and therefore to influence the election. Even if it was false, the payment, a nuisance settlement, was designed to prevent negative publicity and therefore influence the election. In either case, it was not a "legal expense," according to Bragg, but a campaign expense. For Bragg, that turned the normal business records misstatement (if it even was a misstatement; payment to settle a threatened nuisance suit is often treated as a "legal expense") from a misdemeanor under New York law into a felony because the misdemeanor offense was used to hide another supposed crime. | 
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