Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

World Press Freedom Day, 2024

Democrats hope move to reschedule marijuana will help them in November

Biden’s internet-for-all program needs Musk’s help

The tech billionaires who helped ban TikTok want to write AI rules for Trump

Microsoft’s “responsible AI” chief worries about the open web

Adaptive adventures are making national parks more inclusive

Southwest passengers now get a $75 voucher for big flight disruptions

Man arrested at Yellowstone for allegedly kicking bison while drunk

Blinded in battle, these Ukrainian soldiers will never see their new babies 

Chinese EVs are good for the world. Biden says they’re bad for America. 

Middle East conflict live updates: Blinken urges Hamas to accept deal, says pier for aid close to completion

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Local sports networks go dark mid-game amid dispute with Comcast 

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

A murder plot that cannot be ignored: India must come clean at last

How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

How to make the most of Passport DC’s free embassy tours

Dose of adversity gives Dylan Crews a new perspective in Class AA

What makes a great Met Gala outfit

Police march toward Columbia University gate

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Miss Manners: Offering my bedroom to guests

Carolyn Hax: Will request for a postnup offend much younger wife?

Ask Amy: My wife’s sister confessed her feelings for me

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Trump hush money trial live updates: Stormy Daniels’s lawyer testifies

See more coverage in your recommendations

Get the weekly Campaign Moment newsletter

Set alerts for major election developments

Election 2024

The Campaign Moment newsletter

Politics alerts

Jabin Botsford

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan didn’t spend long dismissing former president Donald Trump’s request that his Manhattan trial should be postponed until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on Trump’s claim that he had broad immunity for actions taken as president. Merchan <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/03/donald-trump-hush-money-criminal-trial-immunity/238332ee-f1fb-11ee-a4c9-88e569a98b58_story.html" target=_blank>sidestepped the question</a> of whether Trump had any such immunity, instead determining that the request was untimely, that Trump could have made the request months<b> </b>ago but failed to do so. The trial will move forward — for now anyway.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/newsletters/how-to-read-this-chart/?method=SURL&location=ART&initiative=CONTEXT" target=_blank>Subscribe to How to Read This Chart</a>, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.

In a sense, though, it’s too bad that Merchan didn’t or wouldn’t engage with the argument that Trump was immune from prosecution for his actions in this matter. Unlike the other indictments leveled against Trump, the one in Manhattan deals centrally with how he became president in the first place. It is rooted in actions he took to become president and, according to him and his lawyers (if <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/29/democrats-legal-experts-supreme-court-trump-immunity/" target=_blank>not many other people</a>), earned the ability to take any official action without worrying about indictment.

In other words, the Manhattan case could offer an admittedly imperfect test of a scenario that sits near the bottom of the slippery slope: A candidate takes actions to become president that would warrant criminal charges which he then claims are covered by the immunity he attained.

The 34-count indictment obtained by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg last year centers on an alleged violation of a fairly arcane statute: that Trump falsified business documents. But that was just the purported coverup, an effort to keep people from knowing that he and his then-attorney Michael Cohen had paid an adult-film star a six-figure sum so she wouldn’t reveal their (alleged but <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/19/in-touch-stormy-daniels-interview-trump-lawyer-cohen" target="_blank">repeatedly</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/20/trump-just-validated-key-stormy-daniels-affair-allegation-by-complaining-about-sharks/" target="_blank">bolstered</a>) sexual encounter several years before.

That payment was made only days before the 2016 election, as established by the district attorney’s office in its <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/84fba797-216a-490c-b75d-d77bca6d10f3.pdf" target="_blank">statement of facts</a>, and by the Justice Department in its articulation of the federal criminal offenses to which Cohen <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/michael-cohen-pleads-guilty-manhattan-federal-court-eight-counts-including-criminal-tax" target="_blank">later pleaded guilty</a>.

The Justice Department narrative begins soon after Trump’s June 2015 announcement of his candidacy. David Pecker, then chairman and chief executive of the parent company of the National Enquirer, spoke with Cohen and members of Trump’s campaign. He “offered to help deal with negative stories about [Trump’s] relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”

There were several such stories, as a former National Enquirer staffer <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/magazine/national-enquirer-trump-lachlan-cartwright.html" target=_blank>detailed</a> in the New York Times just this week. One centered on the relationship with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, which came to Pecker’s attention a month before the election. Cohen spoke with Daniels’s attorney and agreed to pay her $130,000 to remain quiet about it. He didn’t pay until Daniels, in late October, began shopping the story elsewhere. On Nov. 1, 2016, one week before the election, the deal was closed.

Cohen was out $130,000. According to the Justice Department, he sent an invoice to the Trump Organization for his costs in January 2017 and began receiving reimbursements for the payments — plus an add-on to offset his tax liability — the following month.

Here’s where the Manhattan charges arise.

“Each check was processed by the Trump Organization, and each check was disguised as a payment for legal services rendered in a given month of 2017 pursuant to a retainer agreement,” the statement of facts in that case alleges. “The payment records, kept and maintained by the Trump Organization, were false New York business records. In truth, there was no retainer agreement, and [Cohen] was not being paid for legal services rendered in 2017.”

The resulting charges <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/04/trump-arraignment-takeaways/" target=_blank>could have been misdemeanors</a>, except that they were in service of another alleged crime: the avoidance of federal campaign contribution laws.

Had Cohen gotten $130,000 from the Trump campaign to pay Daniels, he would not have been culpable of one of the federal laws to which he pleaded guilty — the one focused on “making an excessive campaign contribution.” See, it’s perfectly legal for Trump’s campaign (or any campaign) to spend legally raised campaign money to pay off people alleging an affair. But Cohen spent $130,000 to aid the campaign (as he admitted), meaning he donated more than the federal limit on what can be contributed. And Trump allegedly helped him cover that up by claiming that he was being paid as a retained attorney.

“In early February 2017, the Defendant and [Cohen] met in the Oval Office at the White House and confirmed this repayment arrangement,” the statement of facts in the New York case alleges. In other words, Trump was president, and it was at this point that he engaged in the alleged crime.

The request from Trump’s attorneys to postpone the trial centered heavily on evidence Bragg plans to offer that’s focused on the former president’s public statements about Cohen after the Daniels payment came to light. But their March 7 request for delay also suggests that maybe the whole thing counts as an “official act” that is covered by this purported immunity.

“[W]hile it is clear that the People” — that is, Bragg — “intend to offer documents and testimony relating to the period in 2017 when President Trump was in office,” that filing argues, “they have not provided sufficiently specific notice of the nature and extent of that evidence to allow President Trump or the Court to distinguish between personal and official acts.”

It seems unlikely that a claim of immunity for official actions would apply to Trump’s alleged conversation with Cohen, but it would not be without precedent. You might recall that, in the Senate trial following Trump’s first impeachment, one of his attorneys <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/01/30/alan-dershowitz-controversial-trump-impeachment-argument/4618461002/" target=_blank>argued</a> that his efforts to be reelected could be viewed as serving the public interest and were therefore not impeachable. One could see a similar argument about, say, preserving confidence in the chief executive being an official action.

Merchan’s rejection of the request to delay means that this argument will probably not emerge in the New York case. The immunity argument being considered by the Supreme Court, though, will move forward as scheduled.

In February, a <a href="https://brightlinewatch.org/courts-campaigns-and-confidence-in-american-democracy/" target=_blank>survey of nearly 700 political scientists</a> suggested that this question is unusually fraught. More than 90 percent of those surveyed said they thought a Supreme Court finding that Trump (or any president) has blanket immunity would be a threat to American democracy; nearly two-thirds said the threat posed was “extraordinary.”

The New York case offers a glimpse of why that view was prevalent. Trump’s narrow win in 2016 might (might!) have been sidelined had the Stormy Daniels story emerged in the last days of the campaign. The payoff was potentially determinative. But the effort to hide that payment from the public, likely to be illegal in the eyes of a Manhattan grand jury, might presumably be presented by the president’s attorneys as an official action for which he can’t be prosecuted.

A presidency obtained through actions that the presidency protects from sanction.

The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America

Ohio State University

Philip Bump is a Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter <a href="https://wapo.st/3m3QTiy">How To Read This Chart</a> and is the author of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/696653/the-aftermath-by-philip-bump/">The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America</a>.

Philip Bump

the-washington-post

The Washington Post

Biden administration

The Fix

The 202s

Polling

Democracy in America

Balance of Power Pair

U.S. House Aggregate

U.S. Senate Aggregate

Politics

washpost

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/politics&limit=20

Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

Post Politics from The Washington Post is the source for political news headlines, in-depth politics coverage and political opinion, plus breaking news on the biden administration and White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, elections and more.

prism://prism.query/site,/politics/the-fix&limit=6