--:-- Noel King: Jury selection continues for a second day in a Manhattan courtroom where former President Donald Trump is on trial for falsifying business records.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Prospective jurors were asked 42 questions aimed at determining whether they can be fair and impartial, such as, can you be fair and impartial? Have you ever been a Boogaloo Boy or in Antifa? And what podcast do you listen to?
--:-- Noel King: Trump is required to be present in court for this trial that could last until June. And he talked to reporters today before entering the courtroom.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I should be right now in Pennsylvania, in Florida, in many other states, North Carolina, Georgia, campaigning. This is all coming from the White House because the guy can't put two sentences together. He can't campaign. They're using this in order to try and win an election.
--:-- Noel King: Trump in court, coming up on Today Explained.
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--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's Today Explained with Vox's Andrew Prokop.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: President Trump is in court again today. Remind us which trial this is. What is this about?
--:-- Noel King: This is the New York trial against Trump brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, and it relates to hush money payments that were made back during the 2016 campaign.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So if we turn the clock back to October 2016, in that time, there were many allegations coming forth of Donald Trump acting inappropriately with women, harassing women, sexually assaulting women.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Tonight, a growing list of women are accusing Donald Trump of inappropriate conduct, including sexual assault. I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p***.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He was grabbing my breasts and kissing me, and I was wearing a skirt. And his hands started going towards my knee and up my skirt.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Stormy Daniels, an adult film actress, said that she was going to go forward alleging that she had a consensual sexual encounter with Trump about a decade prior.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This was in the final days of the campaign. It would have been a big story. It would have been highly embarrassing to Trump.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So instead, Trump's loyal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid her $130,000 to keep quiet.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And after the election, the Trump Organization essentially paid Cohen back by saying that they were just paying Cohen's legal fees because he was their lawyer.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But that wasn't really what they were doing.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The startling admission by Rudy Giuliani leaves President Trump facing new legal questions this morning.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The president's new lawyer says that Mr. Trump actually repaid the $130,000 that attorney Michael Cohen gave to the adult film star.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A specific charge against Donald Trump is 34 counts of falsifying business records for improperly logging these hush money payments as legal expenses in his corporate records.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There is a theory that the original payments to Stormy Daniels were also illegal, that they violated federal campaign finance law.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: In fact, Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to this charge, but Trump himself was never charged.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Cohen admitted to multiple crimes, including more than $4 million in tax evasion, as well as campaign finance violations for paying off women at the direction of the president to keep quiet about affairs.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: When the federal prosecutors, which had investigated this, abandoned the case, that's when the Manhattan District Attorney, who at the time was Cyrus Vance Jr., took over.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That office started a big investigation of Trump's business, relying on allegations made by Cohen.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Eventually, that resulted in charges against the CFO of the Trump organization, Allen Weisselberg, but no criminal charges against Trump himself.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But as the investigation continued, there was a return to this element of the hush money case, which had come up initially back in 2016.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And eventually, Vance's successor, Alvin Bragg, decided to charge Trump with this last year.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Donald Trump says these charges are politically motivated, that Alvin Bragg has overstepped.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: You've done some analysis of this. How abnormal are these charges?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They are definitely abnormal. It's strange for so many resources to be sunk into an investigation like this for charges that were just falsifying internal business records that didn't really have a victim, per se.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The real controversy over this, though, is that Bragg decided to charge these as felonies rather than misdemeanors.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This could have been charged as a misdemeanor offense, but that wouldn't have involved the risk of prison time, and it wouldn't have involved making Donald Trump a convicted felon.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So in the end, he charged these 34 counts of falsifying business records as felony counts.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: His justification for doing that he says is that the business records were falsified with the aim of committing or concealing another crime of some kind.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And this was a controversial claim that Bragg made in the legal community.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There was a lot of debate about whether this was called for, this was appropriate, especially because he wasn't 100% clear about what other crime Donald Trump was being charged with trying to commit or conceal.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: His team eventually laid out different theories of what that crime could be, but they argued that, you know, by New York state law, they don't actually have to say it was the specific crime.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: All right. So Trump says it's politically motivated. Some analysts say, huh, you know, interesting. This is a little bit unusual.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And yet Donald Trump yesterday did go on trial. Before he got into the courtroom, he did give a little bit of a speech.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This is an assault on a medical. Nothing like this has ever happened before. There's never been anything like it.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Every legal scholar said this case is nonsense. It should never have been brought.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And then he walks inside the courtroom.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And what happens? Basically, the judge dealt with some issues early on in the morning.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: He denied a request from Trump for the judge, Juan Murchan, to recuse himself.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Judge Murchan said he was not going to recuse himself. He had no reason to recuse himself.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Trump has complained that the judge's daughter is in the political consulting field and works for Democrats and argued that that was a conflict of interest, but he said it wasn't.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They discussed various matters involving what type of evidence would be permitted to be argued at trial.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: One of the big rulings here was that the judge would not allow the Access Hollywood tape, the infamous tape when Trump talked about sexually assaulting women, to be played at the trial.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The comments could be quoted, but the tape itself could not be played at the trial.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So, you know, Judge Murchon has not been too sympathetic to Trump and his legal arguments in general in the lead up to this case turned down a lot of motions from Trump's legal team.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But he did rule against prosecutors on a few evidentiary matters.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I wouldn't say these are major tea leaves for how the case would go, but, you know, they are significant.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The prosecutors wanted to introduce the other sexual assault allegations that had been made by various women against Trump during this period.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The prosecutors argued that this provides important context for why Trump may have wanted to hush up Stormy Daniels.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But the judge ruled that, you know, this was complete rumors, complete gossip, complete hearsay and would be too prejudicial to introduce this type of information.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: How did Donald Trump behave in the courtroom yesterday?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Well, apparently he fell asleep at one point.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Maggie Haverman, who was in the courtroom reports for The New York Times, Mr. Trump appeared to nod off a few times, his mouth going slack and his head drooping onto his chest.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: At other points, he kind of sort of scoffed.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: As I said before, he gets bored easily. He fidgets a lot. He has to sit there. He can't be on his phone. He can't look at Truth Social.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: After those initial matters that the judge ruled on regarding evidence and so forth, then we started the process of jury selection.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that is a really big deal. The decisions made during jury selection may determine the outcome of this trial, considering how so many people have preconceptions about Donald Trump.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Considering that it takes a unanimous jury to convict Trump or anyone. That really what Trump is looking for is just one sympathetic juror who he hopes would side with him, give him the benefit of the doubt, would hold strong and vote against conviction.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So it's quite possible that the decisions in jury selection are more important than anything that will happen at the trial itself.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: afterward. And there is a very lengthy questionnaire designed to sort out who might find it impossible to be impartial.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Close to 100 prospective jurors were called into the courtroom on Monday, and more than half of them told the judge they could not be impartial and they were excused.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: In fact, one of the excused jurors was overheard saying in the hallway, I just couldn't do it.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What's at stake here? What should people be keeping an eye out for as this trial proceeds?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This trial is going to be a tough go for Trump, I would expect.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The actual evidentiary and factual issues in the case, I'm not even sure how disputed they will be.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: If Trump is convicted, he could go to prison. This is not a violent crime. So there is a question about whether he would actually be sentenced to prison for it.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Now, as far as the stakes for the campaign, it was widely expected that if Trump was charged, it would hurt his campaign in the Republican primary.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Instead, the opposite happened. And he saw a boost in the polls after this particular indictment back in the spring of last year.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And now he is the nominee in waiting.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There's still a question though if a jury finds Trump guilty if he is a convicted felon on election day will there be a voter backlash.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A lot of polls have suggested that there might be a lot of people currently say in polls that if Trump was actually convicted they might have to rethink supporting him.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Not most of Trump supporters, but a significant chunk, more than enough to swing the election to Biden if these people are truly serious about this claim.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: This is the Biden team big hope for turning things around that Trump will be convicted that they can make it central to their message that Trump is actually a convicted felon.
--:-- Noel King: Candidate Trump planned to pay for his legal bills by taking his social media company public.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Coming up how that's been going.
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--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
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--:-- Noel King: All these finds are all on eBay, along with millions of more main character pieces backed by authenticity guarantee.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: eBay is the place for pre-loved and vintage fashion.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: eBay. Things people love.
--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Upwork.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: If you run a business, you know that scaling your business requires the right expertise at the right time.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I sometimes wonder how many of you are running businesses out there.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I would love to know. Please email me noelle at king.com.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: With Upwork, you can find specialized freelancers in IT, web development, AI, design, admin support, marketing, and more experts who they say are ready to help you take your business to the next level.
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--:-- Noel King: Explained. 2024 Explained.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We're back with Abdullah Fayyad, a policy editor at Vox who's been covering, among other things, Donald Trump's many financial debts.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: So Donald Trump is still in a lot of debt.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: In just the two recent civil lawsuits alone, the New York fraud case and the E. Jean Carroll case for defamation, he owes nearly half a billion dollars in civil damages.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And that hasn't changed.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But what Trump has done just a few weeks ago is take his social media company, Truth Social Public, which means that it's now a publicly traded company.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Anybody can become a shareholder in that company.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And that company was valued at some $8 billion when it was initially put public.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Since then, the value of the stock has plummeted and the overall value of the company has really plummeted.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Tonight, Truth Social tanking. Donald Trump's shares today plunging more than 18 percent.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And the share price has already fallen by half.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Trump himself has actually lost almost three billion since Truth Social went public less than three weeks ago, all on paper.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: It's still worth billions of dollars, but the value of it now is moving much more toward reality than its initial offering.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But that could always change.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: If investors have a change of heart about how they feel about the company, you know, this is probably going to be a very volatile stock in the near term, especially before the election.
--:-- Noel King: Do you have a Truth Social account?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: I don't have a Truth Social account.
--:-- Noel King: I do. I do.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And I'll tell you, it's just like Twitter.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But it does make me wonder, seriously, because I do love a good valuation.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: I do love a good IPO.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: What would make this company worth billions of dollars?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: That's one of the shocking things since the company went public is just how overvalued it is.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: So, you know, for context here, Truth Social had reported that it made a whopping total of $4 million in revenue last year, in the whole year.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And it had lost $58 million.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: It's not uncommon that a company worth billions of dollars doesn't actually make profit.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But usually when that's the case, they're still making a whole lot more than $4 million in revenue.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And they at least are a promising good.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Investors are interested in where it's going.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: The thing with Truth Social is when in the span of a year you only make four million dollars and yet you're, you know, valued at something in the ballpark of Reddit, you know, which, yes, might lose money, but in a year makes about 800 million dollars a year.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You know, there's something really detached from reality there.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: So that's, I think, one of, you know, the interesting things about Truth Social going public is understanding why It is so overvalued, and that has a lot to do with the fact that its principal owner is running for president of the United States.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You're saying this valuation was probably not a correct valuation.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Who are the people that valued this company as high as they did?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Looking at this company, what financial analysts are calling it is that it's really not too dissimilar from meme stocks.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Only in 2021 could we use a GameStop stock to totally fuck over every hedge fund and Wall Street scumbag
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You know when people invested in companies like GameStop because they had an affinity for the company more so than because they actually wanted to make a wise financial investment
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: A bunch of Reddit users have banded together to take down Wall Street through the use of GameStop. GameStop. Dumb money.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: In this particular case, you know, there are a lot of, you know, small investors, small-time investors who, you know, are buying a few stocks here and there, essentially to show their affinity or loyalty to Donald Trump.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You know, they kind of want to, you know, just stand with him. And kind of it's a way to express their support, just like wearing a Trump t-shirt is also be a part owner of his company, even if it's a small scale.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But it's also drawing in a lot of big time investors.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And that's, I think, where it can really go sideways is once it starts drawing in, you know, these big time investors, be they, you know, special interest groups, you know, individual, you know, wealthy people, you know, foreign businesses, you know, it's just kind of a way to buy influence in a second Trump term should he win because they're going to be co-owners of his company.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And what they do with their stock, whether they sell it all at once, whether they buy it more, has direct impact on Donald Trump's net worth.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Can you give us a for instance? Tell us what actually could happen if somebody owns a big part of Truth Social or is heavily invested in Truth Social and they want something from Donald Trump.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: How do you leverage that?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: One of the things that the group Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington had pointed out is that one of the major investors in the company that merged with True Social, his name is Jeffrey Yoss.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And he also happens to be one of the biggest investors in ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok in the U.S.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You know, so we don't know exactly how he influenced Trump's views on TikTok.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But we do know that when the bill to ban TikTok came to the floor of the House and Congress, Trump came out against banning TikTok in the U.S., not a position he had taken before.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who who will go crazy without it.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: The thing I don't like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And, you know, it's all conjecture here.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You know, did Jeffrey Yoss, you know, buy his way into influencing Donald Trump to change his mind on that?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You know, it could be true. We don't really know.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But that's just like an illustration into how, you know, this can really all go awry.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: This is why ideally you want people in public office to divest from their businesses while they're in office so that they actually put the interest of the country and their constituents ahead of their own business interests.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: If Trump hasn't really divested from that business and knows exactly how that deal is going, is he going to put his own financial interest ahead of the country's if he's also on the side negotiating some treaty between the United States and that country?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Remind us again, how much debt does Donald Trump have?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And if he were to sell his shares in Truth Social today, tomorrow, early next week, would it clear all his debts?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: So Trump has debt on a rolling basis.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Right now he has hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: His problem for now is that he actually can't sell his stock in Truth Social.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: So while on paper it inflated his net worth a whole bunch, it hasn't materially changed his life in the sense that it hasn't actually given him any cash to pay off that debt.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And he can't sell his stock for, I think, another six months.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: This is a standard operating procedure for mergers.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Part of the reason they do that is that they want their principal shareholders to commit to the stock when it goes public so that it doesn't tank.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Because if Trump sells his shares in this company, it's going to essentially go under.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: There's no other reason investors will want to be there.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And so if he can't sell his stock for six months or so, how is he actually paying for all of these legal bills?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: So for now, you know, he, for example, secured a bond from a lender for his financial fraud case in New York.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Since he's been running for office again, you know, he's been using his campaign fundraising to cover his legal bills.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Now, things like civil damages, and that has to come out of his own pocket.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But when it comes to hiring lawyers, when it comes to, you know, court fees, that money has been coming from his campaigns and PACs.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You know, one of the PACs, you know, it's like the majority of its fundraising has actually been directed toward Donald Trump's legal expenses, you know, not television advertisements or ground operations.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You know, so it's really diverting a lot of money that could otherwise be used for conventional campaigning to using it toward bailing Donald Trump out.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: I've gotten emails from the Trump campaign asking if I can give a couple bucks.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: Is there any evidence that people are getting tired of this?
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: There was some evidence before that people are getting tired of Trump using a lot of his money for his legal fees.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: I think part of that evidence was the fact that he was being well out-fundraised by Joe Biden in his re-election campaign.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: His fundraising numbers had kind of slouched a little bit.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But as the general election picks up, that will certainly change.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: And the most recent fundraising numbers kind of show that.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: He has now picked up some of his big donors again in the most recent filing shows that he raised $65 million and is far outpacing his numbers from last year.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: So donors are coming back to Donald Trump, you know, especially when we're talking about big donors who have a lot at stake this election.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: You know, they're probably going to put a lot of money behind Trump and not really care how he spends that money so long as it gets him to the White House.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: So we're probably going to see his fundraising numbers improve as we get closer to November.
--:-- Abdullah Fayyad: But he is still being out-fundraised by President Biden and still has a long way to go to make up for that deficit.
--:-- Noel King: That was Vox's Abdullah Fayyad.
--:-- Noel King: Today's show was produced by Jesse Alejandro Cottrell and Hadi Muagdi.
--:-- Noel King: Amina El-Sadi is our editor.
--:-- Noel King: Laura Bullard and Matthew Collette and Amanda Llewellyn fact-checked.
--:-- Noel King: and Rob Byers and Patrick Boyd, engineer.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained.
