Trump Boosters at Hush-Money Trial Rewarded With Top Administration Jobs

(Bloomberg) -- During Donald Trump’s hush-money trial last spring, a string of top Republicans turned up at the Manhattan courthouse in a public show of loyalty. Now several are being tapped for his government.

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President-elect Trump announced the latest on Wednesday with his intention to nominate Representative Matt Gaetz to be US attorney general. The Florida Republican appeared at the New York trial on May 16, when ex-Trump fixer Michael Cohen was being cross-examined. He tweeted from the court and denounced the prosecution during a press conference outside.

Gaetz “played his cards right,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney who is now a professor at New York Law School. “It’s not enough to be a Republican and have experience but you really need to have kissed the ring. It’s not necessarily just people who came to court but people who had absolute loyalty and fealty.”

Other trial attendees included Vice President-elect JD Vance, who attended the trial on May 13 and was chosen by Trump as his running mate two months later. Representative Mike Waltz, of Florida, who has been tapped for national security adviser, also showed at the courthouse. As did Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur who was appointed to head a new “Department of Government Efficiency” along with billionaire Elon Musk.

Those who didn’t attend the trial in person, often found other ways of communicating their solidarity with Trump. Representative Elise Stefanik, selected as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, filed an ethics complaint in September against Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the hush-money case.

The New York prosecution is the only one of the four indictments against Trump to go to trial before the election. A jury found him guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up payments before the 2016 presidential election to an adult film star who claimed to have had a sexual encounter with him.

While Merchan was scheduled to sentence Trump on Nov. 26, he gave the president-elect’s defense team and prosecutors until Nov. 19 to make any additional arguments for “appropriate steps going forward” in light of Trump’s return to the White House.

Trump’s attorneys already were pushing to get the prosecution tossed out on the grounds that it was tainted by testimony and evidence that fell under the US Supreme Court’s blockbuster ruling this summer that presidents are immune from facing charges related to official acts.

The two federal criminal cases against Trump already are winding down because of a longstanding US Department of Justice policy that sitting presidents cannot be federally prosecuted.

In the fourth case — a state prosecution in Atlanta charging Trump and others with conspiring to interfere with the 2020 election — Trump’s lawyers are also preparing to argue that the charges should be dropped because he is returning to the White House.

Georgia’s case against Trump and his co-defendants involves allegations that they conspired to spread false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election and pressured state officials to overturn Joe Biden’s win.

At times during the New York trial, the parade of GOP loyalists were disruptive. After Cohen began to tearfully describe the dramatic moment he realized he had to break with Trump, plead guilty and stop protecting him, a group of Trump’s backers got up and walked out en masse.

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger raised the behavior of members of Congress in the courtroom to Merchan and Trump lawyer Todd Blanche during a sidebar conference.

“I noticed that some of his guests are already here today with their security detail,” Hoffinger said, according to a trial transcript. “But we would just ask that they not be allowed to file in, in the middle of Mr. Blanche’s cross-examination.”

Merchan asked Trump’s attorney to try to control the crowd.

“I don’t have any control over that,” Blanche said. “I mean, they are members of the public.”

--With assistance from Erik Larson.

(Updates with details of Georgia case in 11th paragraph.)

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