NEW YORK >> Donald Trump and two confidants hatched a plan in August 2015 to boost his upstart presidential campaign, prosecutors say. They carried it out, and Trump won the election.

Nearly nine years later, Trump will face the same men, Michael Cohen and David Pecker. But unlike at that long-ago meeting, he won’t be seated at the desk in his 26th-floor Trump Tower office: He will be at the defendant’s table in a lower Manhattan courtroom.

With his criminal trial set to begin in earnest today, Trump’s former allies are each expected to take a turn on the witness stand.

Trump is charged in a 34-count indictment with falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 hush-money payment to a former porn actor in order to influence the 2016 election. Cohen paid the woman, Stormy Daniels, less than two weeks before the election to keep silent about her claim that she had sex with Trump a decade before.

Lawyers defending Trump will likely argue that his employees were responsible for the paper trail that falsely described the reimbursement of the hush money as legal fees for Cohen.

But prosecutors for Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, will try to show that the payment was part of a larger effort to suppress negative news about Trump to sway the election. That scheme, they will contend, resulted in not just the hush-money payment at the center of the trial, but two others.

Though the other episodes are not part of the formal indictment in the case, prosecutors will use them to argue that the true purpose of the Daniels payment was related to the election, making it a federal campaign finance violation, and that his company’s records were falsified to cover it up. The accusation that Trump concealed another crime elevates charges that would normally be misdemeanors into felonies.

The August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower is the beginning of a story that prosecutors have foreshadowed in filings and arguments in court. The details in this article are drawn from court documents, interviews with people involved in the events or familiar with them, private communications and other records.

Cohen had been a lawyer and dogged fixer for Trump. Pecker was the publisher of The National Enquirer, and had traded favors with Trump since the 1990s.

Trump had announced his presidential campaign in June 2015. The plan the men laid out two months later was simple: Pecker would use The Enquirer to publish positive stories about Trump’s campaign and negative stories about his rivals. He would alert Trump, through Cohen, when The Enquirer learned of stories that might threaten Trump. The Enquirer could buy the rights to those stories in order to suppress them, a practice known in the tabloid world as “catch and kill.”

“The entire point of the Trump Tower meeting was to control the flow of information that reached the electorate, to accentuate the positive, hide the negative and exaggerate information,” Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor, told Justice Juan Merchan, the judge in the hush-money case, in court.

Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s lawyers, asked Merchan to bar evidence about the meeting and other hush-money deals, saying a “side trial” would prejudice the jury.

“This is just to embarrass President Trump,” he complained, but the judge disagreed.

Trump’s associates paid a price for helping him. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance crimes in 2018. The Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., made a deal that year to avoid federal prosecution, acknowledging that it had illegally tried to influence the election. On the witness stand, they are expected to testify that the payment to Daniels was for Trump’s election.

The door attendant

The information was potentially explosive. Dino Sajudin, a former door attendant at a Manhattan building managed by the Trump Organization, called The Enquirer’s tip line in late 2015. He said he had overheard other employees saying that Trump fathered a child out of wedlock with a woman who had worked for him.

In November 2015, American Media guaranteed Sajudin $30,000 if it published a story based on his tip, and its reporters began to investigate.

They did not immediately alert Cohen or Trump; first, The Enquirer’s editor, Dylan Howard, set out to determine whether the information was accurate. The tabloid arranged for Sajudin to take a lie-detector test, according to a memo that Howard wrote.

Though the test indicated that Sajudin had been truthful about what he had heard, Enquirer reporters doubted the child was actually Trump’s: She strongly resembled the man she knew as her father, a Trump Organization driver.

Cohen, then special counsel to Trump, learned of the door attendant’s claims after a reporter contacted the company. He called Howard, irate, insisting the story was false.

American Media nonetheless amended Sajudin’s deal to pay him regardless of whether The Enquirer published anything. The amendment also included a confidentiality provision requiring him to pay the company $1 million if he disclosed the tip elsewhere.

The Playboy model

By the middle of 2016, Trump had driven every other Republican rival from the race. As the general election campaign against Hillary Clinton began, a woman from Trump’s past began exploring the sale of her story.

That woman, 1998 Playboy Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal said she met Trump at the Playboy Mansion in June 2006, and they began a 10-month affair, spending time at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, his golf course in New Jersey and in his Trump Tower apartment.

McDougal, living in Arizona, saw a chance to revive a flagging modeling career. In June 2016, she hired a Beverly Hills lawyer, Keith Davidson, to represent her in the sale of her story. Davidson contacted Howard.

At a meeting in Los Angeles, Howard debriefed McDougal, who now expressed reservations about coming forward.

Afterward, Howard jumped on a three-way call with Pecker and Cohen. Howard relayed McDougal’s hesitation, and told them that she had shown no hard documentation of the affair. The Enquirer decided not to purchase her story — for the moment.

That changed. In late June, Trump called Pecker personally, asking him to keep McDougal from talking, the tabloid executive has told prosecutors.

After conversations she had started with ABC News about telling her story on air grew serious, American Media swooped in with an offer.

The company agreed in early August to pay McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story, one that The Enquirer would never publish. To camouflage the purpose of the deal, the contract guaranteed that American Media would put her on two magazine covers and have the right to publish fitness columns by her.

Davidson, who also represented Daniels in her hush-money deal, is likely to testify about both agreements. Prosecutors also referred in court documents to another piece of evidence they might use: a recording of Trump that Cohen secretly made on his phone as the men discussed a deal, which never went through, to buy the rights to McDougal’s story back from Pecker.

“So what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Trump asked on the recording.

The adult film actress

Daniels also tried to benefit from Trump’s momentum in early 2016.

Her agent reached out to Howard and editors at other publications, seeking about $200,000 to tell her story of having sex with Trump in 2006 when he was at a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

Daniels had no takers. Howard thought her story had little value because it had been written about on a gossip site in 2011. At the time, she had publicly denied the encounter.

But a month before the general election, her story’s value suddenly increased. On Oct. 7, 2016, The Washington Post published a recording of Trump on the set of “Access Hollywood” talking about groping women. The ensuing uproar revived Daniels’ negotiations with The Enquirer. Her agent negotiated a price of $120,000 with Howard, but Pecker nixed the deal, unwilling to spend more after paying McDougal.

Cohen had been in London visiting his daughter, who was studying abroad, when the “Access Hollywood” recording hit. He had gotten on a three-way call with Trump and Hope Hicks, the campaign’s press secretary, and then spoke to Hicks alone to discuss damage control. Hicks is also expected to testify.

Steinglass said in court that after the recording emerged, Trump was desperate to “lock down the Stormy Daniels story” and prevent more damage.

On Oct. 10, Cohen began to negotiate a price with Davidson, the lawyer representing Daniels, settling on $130,000. A nondisclosure agreement identified Daniels by the pseudonym Peggy Peterson, or “PP,” and Trump as David Dennison, or “DD.”

But Cohen delayed paying for weeks, and Daniels began contacting news outlets again.

With the election rapidly approaching, Cohen drew the money from his own home equity line of credit and wired it to Daniels’ lawyer through a shell company on Oct. 27.

Her silence was assured.