Subject: Re: Guilty on all counts
What was the underlying crime that the Stormy Daniels payoffs allegedly covered up?

That's not the relevant question. For the charges, the question is "What was the underlying crime that the falsified business records allegedly covered up?"

And that's an easy one to answer. There are three crimes:

1) Criminal violation of FECA. There were two violations of federal campaign finance laws: the amount paid to Daniels exceeded the federal contribution limit, and some of the funds were paid by corporate entities. Falsifying the business records concealed the fact that these payments were made to Daniels by pretending they were payments to Cohen, rather than Cohen simply serving as a conduit.

2) Submittal of fraudulent tax filings. Cohen falsely declared the $130K payment that he passed through to Daniels as personal income to himself, which is tax fraud under NY law. It is not necessary for tax fraud to result in financial harm to the government - knowingly submitting a tax return with intentionally false information is still fraud. The falsified business records at Trump Org concealed that crime by falsely characterizing the payments as being for legal services by Cohen as part of his retainer, rather than client funds to be disbursed by Cohen to a third party. (BTW, this is the one where Dersh's comments are completely inexcusable - he keeps mistakenly talking about this element as if the prosecution was trying to prove that Trump's tax returns were wrong, when the prosecution made it very clear that it's Cohen's returns that were fraudulent. Since the defense motion to dismiss is correctly targeted to those returns, not Trump's, as well as the prosecutor's response and the courts ruling, there's no excuse for Dersh to not know this).

3) Conspiracy to commit election fraud. NY State law makes it unlawful for two or more people to conspire to promote the election of any person to public office through any unlawful means. Making campaign contributions in excess of the legal limit is an unlawful means. Therefore, the false business records that falsified the actual monetary transaction concealed the commission of that crime.

Again, all laid out pretty straightforwardly in the judge's ruling on Trump's motions to dismiss:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/d...