Another analysis of the New York state election fraud trial: It is boring and about business integrity

A NYT opinion (not paywalled) by a New York City attorney, former Manhattan assistant district attorney Rebecca Roiphe, discusses the election fraud/hush money trial from the point of view of a person who has actually enforced the laws Trump is being charged with violating:

Now that the lawyers are laying out their respective theories of the case in the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump in New York, it would be understandable if people’s heads are spinning. The defense lawyers claimed this is a case about hush money as a legitimate tool in democratic elections, while the prosecutors insisted it is about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.”

Yet this case is not really about election interference, nor is it a politically motivated attempt to criminalize a benign personal deal. Boring as it may sound, it is a case about business integrity.

It’s not surprising that the lawyers on both sides are trying to make this about something sexier. This is a narrative device used to make the jurors and the public side with them, but it has also created confusion. On the one hand, some legal experts claim that the conduct charged in New York was the original election interference. On the other hand, some critics think the criminal case is a witch hunt, and others claim it is trivial at best and at worst the product of selective prosecution.

As someone who worked in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and enforced the laws that Mr. Trump is accused of violating, I stand firmly in neither camp. It is an important and straightforward case, albeit workmanlike and unglamorous. In time, after the smoke created by lawyers has cleared, it will be easy to see why the prosecution is both solid and legitimate.

It would hardly make for a dramatic opening statement or cable news sound bite, but the case is about preventing wealthy people from using their businesses to commit crimes and hide from accountability. Manhattan prosecutors have long considered it their province to ensure the integrity of the financial markets. As Robert Morgenthau, a former Manhattan district attorney, liked to say, “You cannot prosecute crime in the streets without prosecuting crime in the suites.”

Lawmakers in New York, the financial capital of the world, consider access to markets and industry in New York a privilege for businesspeople. It is a felony to abuse that privilege by doctoring records to commit or conceal crimes, even if the businessman never accomplishes the goal and even if the false records never see the light of day. The idea is that an organization’s records should reflect an honest accounting. It is not a crime to make a mistake, but lying is a different story. It is easy to evade accountability by turning a business into a cover, providing a false trail for whichever regulator might care to look. The law (falsification of business records) deprives wealthy, powerful businessmen of the ability to do so with impunity, at least when they’re conducting business in the city.

Roiphe's opinion goes on to point out that prosecutors and New York courts have interpreted this law with its general purpose in mind. Because of that, the element of intent to defraud has a broad meaning. It is not limited to the intent of cheating someone out of money or property. And, as common with white collar crime cases, circumstantial evidence is often used to prove criminal intent. 

Prosecutors will ask jurors to use their common sense to infer what Trump’s intent might be for filing lots of false documents. Roiphe says that in similar trials, New York jurors often conclude that a defendant must have created a false paper trail for a reason. She asserts that jurors can conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump’s lies were intended to seek to commit a crime(s) or to cover one(s) up because as she puts it, “documents don’t lie.” In this lawsuit, Trump is accused of filing 11 false invoices, 12 false ledger entries and 11 false checks and check stubs, allegedly with intent to violate federal election laws, state election laws and/or state tax laws (34 separate felonies).

From Roiphe’s experienced insider point of view description of the case, it seems that Trump probably will be found to have committed fraud by most neutral jurors. At present, Trump’s main defense is that he was merely trying to avoid embarrassing his family, not trying to violate any law. The wild card here is one or more MAGA jurors who will probably vote to acquit Trump regardless of the evidence or “common sense.”

Trump is not even trying to deny the 34 documents were false. He did that. Period. He is arguing that the false documents were filed to protect his family. Nearly all MAGA people would probably accept his lie as truth and vote to acquit him.