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Dear SeekandFind - "How should the payment to Stormy Daniels be declared in order to make it NOT illegal? " As I have posted previously, in order to make the financial records 100% accurate, the accountants could have described the payments to Cohen as "Legal expenses and NDA consideration". Doing this would not allow anyone to trace the payment to Daniels, as the Trump Organization (TO) likely enters into numerous settlements and NDAs every year (e.g. disgruntled former employees, slip and fall victims at Trump hotels, etc. )
So TO could have accurately described the payments without any reputational risk whatsoever. Why didn't they do this when it would have been so easy? Because they didn't think it was WRONG to describe the payments as simply "legal expenses", or they didn't know what Cohen did with the money, or the exact amount he paid Daniels. Therefore they could not have satisfied the standard of wilfulness - they did not know what they were doing might be considered illegal. So they can't be guilty, the supposed illegal accounting entry has to be made KNOWINGLY for to be a crime. (misdemeanor). Why Trump's team didn't point this out is a mystery to me, or maybe they did point it out to the jury but the TDS took over.