The Boring Documents That May Be Devastating to Trump

In Donald Trump’s felony trial last week, we heard about Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, and we watched Hope Hicks cry.

So far this week, we heard all about ledgers, invoices and accounts payable stamps. We watched as a loyal Trump accountant authenticated Allen Weisselberg’s handwriting. The same documents with different dates popped up not once or twice but over and over again.

It’s deadly boring. But it’s deadly to Trump’s defense if the jurors can stay awake for it.

With one or two drowsy exceptions, they are. They seem to understand that Trump was indicted on 34 counts — one for each falsified business record — and that they must carefully study Trump’s $35,000 monthly checks to Michael Cohen in order to grasp the heart of the prosecution’s case.

The documents were validated today by a former senior vice president of the Trump Organization, Jeffrey McConney, and an accounts payable supervisor, Deborah Tarasoff, both of whose legal fees are being paid by the company. Stormy Daniels’s sexy testimony, expected as soon as Tuesday, is not nearly as significant to the basic charges as that of these mundane gray-haired bean counters.

Of all the stultifying numbers we heard in the courtroom today, the one that stands out is the $130,000 that Weisselberg, a former chief financial officer of the company, scrawled on a bank document before “grossing it up” (his handwritten description) to $420,000. That was to cover up the fact that $130,000 is the exact amount of money that Cohen wired to Keith Davidson, Daniels’s lawyer, to keep his client quiet. As in Watergate, the crime is mostly in the cover-up.

We’re awaiting Cohen’s testimony that Trump knew that he was reimbursing Cohen $35,000 a month for hush money, not for vague legal services, and thus broke the law. But the circumstantial and documentary evidence precorroborating Cohen — and lessening the impact of his multiple lies — is now piled as high as Trump Tower.

At the end of the day, the judge asked Josh Steinglass of the prosecution team how much longer he expected the D.A.’s case to take. When Steinglass said “very roughly” two weeks — to May 21 — I saw Trump raise and lower his arms in exasperation, like a 6-year-old told to clean up his Legos. Then he went into the hallway and whined to reporters, “I thought they were finished today.”

Trump never thought anything of the kind. He’s a caged animal (to use his word for immigrants) and wants out ASAP. Good luck with that.

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