Donald Trump appears to be under the impression that many Americans could, like him, find themselves being convicted of felonies for attempting to hide a hush-money payment to a porn star to stop her going public with salacious claims of an extramarital one-night stand ultimately as a means of protecting their presidential campaigns.
At least, that’s the implication of a furious Truth Social post from Trump on Friday morning following his conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records relating to his scheme to silence Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election. “IF THIS CAN HAPPEN TO ME,” Trump wrote, “IT CAN HAPPEN TO ANYONE!”
His claim of having been convicted in a prosecution which anybody could face was actually the bizarre conclusion of a rant in which the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee continued to deflect responsibility for his actions—despite a jury finding him guilty.
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At the heart of the case was the prosecution’s claim that the Trump Organization recorded payments to Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen as legal fees when they were in fact reimbursements for the $130,000 hush money payment Cohen made to Daniels. Cohen testified during the trial that Trump directed him to pay Daniels and discussed the reimbursement plan with him at the White House.
“My bookkeeper called a ‘Legal Expense,’ on the ‘tiny’ description line of the Ledger, a ‘Legal Expense,’ openly paid to my lawyer, at that time a fully accredited one,” Trump wrote in his post. “I was not involved in that designation, but what else would you have called it? It was, in fact, a LEGAL EXPENSE. That is the so-called ‘CRIME.’”
“On top of that, I wasn’t allowed by the judge to use, in any form, the standard RELIANCE ON COUNSEL DEFENSE (ADVICE OF COUNSEL!),” Trump continued. “My lawyer, at the time, did virtually everything on the NDA (NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT), and I assumed that what he did was correct. I did nothing wrong, and frankly, there was nothing done wrong - NDA’s are standard, commonly used, and LEGAL.”
He signed off his post with “MAGA2024!” and “WITCH HUNT!” as well as the wild claim about the supposed universality of his experience.
