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Last year, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed in New York state court the so-called hush money case against Donald J. Trump. In brief, Trump was found "guilty" of making a $130,000 payment in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential race—via his former lawyer Michael Cohen (who himself pleaded guilty in 2018 to what the judge overseeing his case described as a "veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct")—to buy the silence of porn actress "Stormy Daniels," who claimed that she and Trump had sex, all in an effort to interfere in the election, according to the prosecution.
For those who are understandably confused about the exact nature of Trump's wrongdoing given that, in civil litigation, settlements paired with nondisclosure agreements are quite common, the supposed illegality is that when Cohen was reimbursed, the payments were recorded as legal expenses, which prosecutors contended was an unlawful attempt to mask the true purpose of the Trump-Daniels transaction—to influence the 2016 election.
In any event, on Thursday, May 30, 2024, a mere five months from the 2024 election, a jury, after a little more than nine hours of deliberations, found Trump guilty of every single one of the 34 charges DA Bragg brought against him. Consequently, the Associated Press reports that Trump "became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes." As Kenin M. Spivak has noted in The American Mind, the proceedings are riddled with more than a dozen reversible errors. Nonetheless, Trump is set to be sentenced on July 11, by the judge who oversaw the trial, Juan Merchan—just four days before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. | 
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