Prosecutors say Trump tried to 'hoodwink the American voter,' which is not a crime

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% : That strategy makes sense given Cohen's role in establishing that Trump "caused" the falsification of the business records at the center of the case.
55% : But Trump personally signed nine of the 11 checks to Cohen, and the prosecution credibly portrayed him as a proud penny-pincher who never would have paid Cohen a total of $420,000 -- which, according to Weisselberg's handwritten notes, included an adjustment for income taxes, a bonus, and reimbursement for an unrelated expense -- without knowing exactly what it was for.
48% : Trump had designated Cohen as his personal lawyer, and the checks were described as "retainer" payments.
48% : It defies belief to suppose that Cohen, who was eager to please Trump and conferred with him frequently, would have hatched this scheme on his own, or that he would have fronted $130,000 of his own money without the promise of reimbursement.
45% : If so, Trump would have violated it even he had merely asked Daniels to keep quiet, perhaps by appealing to her sympathy for his wife.
44% : Trump supposedly understood all that, which is why he agreed to disguise his reimbursement of Cohen.
42% : [of] any crime beyond a reasonable doubt on the words of Michael Cohen."Even without Cohen's testimony, however, there is strong circumstantial evidence that Trump "knew about this payment."
38% : There is a glaring mismatch between the charges against Trump and what prosecutors describe as the essence of his crime, which is not a crime at all.
37% : "There is no way that you can find that President Trump knew about this payment at the time it was made without believing the words of Michael Cohen," Blanche told the jurors.
37% : He said the same was true of the leaked Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, which prosecutors brought up repeatedly.
35% : But Cohen said Trump knew that characterization was false and went along with the charade after Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg (who did not testify) described it during a meeting at Trump Tower in January 2017.
33% : Steinglass "knows that many of these jurors, who have promised to be fair and unbiased, may hold opinions about Trump that they are not supposed to take into account at this trial," Times reporter Jonah Bromwich writes.
32% : "He argue[d] that the American people in 2016 had the right to determine whether they cared that Trump had slept with a porn star or not, and that the conspiracy prevented them from doing so."Did the American people have such a right?
32% : "But he is linking the case against Trump to what his political opponents say about him more generally -- and he is trying to play on the jurors' potential political sympathies while still talking about the evidence that entered the courtroom.
29% : Steinglass defended the prosecution's decision to walk Daniels through the salacious and unflattering details of her story about sex with Trump, saying they were relevant in establishing his motivation in trying to silence her.
29% : The legal logic here is that Trump was mainly worried about the election and therefore should have recognized the Daniels payoff as a campaign expenditure, which made it an excessive campaign contribution by Cohen.
28% : If Trump thought the NDA was perfectly legal, as his lawyers maintain, he could not have intentionally conspired with Cohen to unlawfully influence the election.
27% : Although prosecutors are still hedging on exactly what that crime was, they have said their main theory is that Cohen and Trump conspired to promote his election by "unlawful means," in violation of an obscure New York law that apparently has never been invoked before.
24% : "This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures, to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior," lead prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told the jury in his opening statement.
16% : But even if the jury believes Cohen's testimony, it does not prove that Trump falsified those records with the intent of facilitating or concealing "another crime," the justification for charging Trump with 34 felonies rather than 34 misdemeanors.
15% : "During his summation, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass tried to use Blanche's scathing description of Cohen against Trump.
13% : But it is plausible that Trump did not think the Daniels payment was illegal, which helps explain why he was never prosecuted for soliciting Cohen's "contribution": To convict Trump, federal prosecutors would have had to prove that he "knowingly and willfully" violated FECA.
13% : The prosecution has tried to obscure these issues by averring that Trump committed "election fraud" when he directed Cohen to pay Daniels for her silence, thereby concealing information that voters might have deemed relevant in choosing between him and Hillary Clinton.
12% : Cohen, a convicted felon, disbarred lawyer, and admitted liar with a powerful grudge against his former boss, was the only witness who testified that Trump approved a plan to reimburse Cohen for the $130,000 he paid porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election to keep her from talking about her alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump.
7% : Given Cohen's history of dishonesty and his animus against Trump, Blanche said, the jury "cannot convict President Trump
4% : But like much of the testimony -- including Cohen's claim that Trump "wasn't thinking about Melania" at all when he decided to pay Daniels -- that evidence certainly reinforced the impression that Trump is an awful person.

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