WASHINGTON Would Donald Trump ever have become president if he hadnt paid off porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet in the days before the 2016 election?

The answer is impossible to know, but the premise of the question forms the basis of the very first criminal trial of a former president in American history: whether Trumps scheme to keep Daniels claim of a 2006 affair with him under wraps was, in fact, a crime for which the coup -attempting former president should be punished.

While hush money case has become the shorthand to describe the first of Trumps four criminal cases to go to trial, particularly among Trump defenders who wish to diminish it, that is not how it will be described to prospective jurors Monday at the scheduled start of jury selection. Judge Juan Merchans first sentence of a 223-word summary describing the case to jurors reads: The allegations are, in substance, that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the 34-count indictment against Trump just over a year ago, will argue that the ledger entries and other business documents Trump created claiming that he was paying lawyer Michael Cohen for legal services when in reality he was repaying him for the $130,000 check he delivered to Daniels, were felonies under New York law.

The core is not money for sex, Bragg told New Yorks public radio affiliate last year. We would say its about conspiring to corrupt a presidential election and then lying in New York business records to cover it up.

Trumps campaign did not respond to HuffPosts queries for this report. He has primarily argued on social media and in his campaign speeches that the case was brought to hurt his efforts to regain the presidency, another piece of the witch hunt that he claims the deep state is conducting against him.

He repeated those claims Friday during a brief news conference. Its not even a crime, he said. Its very unfair that we have this judge who hates Trump.

Its unclear precisely how long the trial will last or even how many days it will take to seat a jury, although estimates suggest it could stretch into June.

Merchan, in an April 8 letter to prosecutors and defense lawyers, noted the logistical challenges involved in trying a former president and presumptive major party nominee who travels with a substantial Secret Service detail. In a case where security concerns are implicated every time anyone enters or exits the courtroom, or mingles around the corridors, moving the entire jury panel is no simple task, Merchan wrote.

Braggs filing accompanying the indictment lays out the plan Trump and his ally David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer, developed to catch and kill stories that could hurt Trumps presidential campaign. The scheme also involved paying off a doorman at a Trump building, who claimed Trump had a fathered a child outside his marriages, as well as a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who also claimed shed had an affair with Trump in 2006 and 2007. Neither of those payments, though, were made by Cohen, and the actual indictment only involves Trumps reimbursements to him.