Books written, or ghostwritten, by President Trump are being pulled off the shelf to serve as evidence in the hush-money criminal case brought against him by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. 

“When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can,” a quote from Mr. Trump’s 2004 book “How to Get Rich” reads. Another one reads, “For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back.” 

Prosecutors informed the defense in a recent court filing that they plan to use these quotes in his upcoming criminal trial over hush money payments to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, ABC News reports.    

A grand jury indicted Mr. Trump last year on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up secret payments to Stormy Daniels, legal name Stephanie Clifford, who claims she had an extramarital affair with Mr. Trump. The former president denies the affair and has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The alarming number of felony counts, 34, is in fact the sum of a simple equation: Mr. Bragg alleges that Mr. Trump fraudulently recorded 11 checks, 11 invoices, and 12 ledger entries. According to the district attorney, Mr. Trump made 11 payments to his former lawyer, and current nemesis, Michael Cohen, in 2017. 

While Mr. Trump disguised these payments as legal service fees, they were in fact, Mr. Bragg alleges, reimbursements for the hush money Mr. Cohen gave to Ms. Daniels shortly before the election in 2016, so she would not publicize her alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. According to Mr. Bragg, the hush money was transferred through a shell corporation with an account at a Manhattan bank. 

Falsifying business records is in itself a misdemeanor, not a felony, but Mr. Bragg, in a novel legal strategy, accuses Mr. Trump of the intent to commit or conceal another crime, including breaking “state and federal election laws,” by trying to hide “damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election.” These allegations combined raise the charge to a felony, punishable by up to four years in prison under New York law. 

The trial, the first criminal trial against a former president in US history, is scheduled to commence at New York on March 25.

This week, the Manhattan district attorney’s office informed the defense that it intends to submit as evidence quotes from some of Mr. Trump’s books, published between 1987 and 2015. The books include “The Art of The Deal,” Mr. Trump’s memoir that peaked at no. 1 on the New York Times best seller list, “Think Like a Billionaire,” “How to Get Rich,” “Think Big and Kick Ass,” and “Great Again.”

Defense attorneys reminded the court, in their own filing, that four of these books had been ghostwritten, questioning the validity of the quotes. At least one of Mr. Trump’s ghostwriters, Tony Schwartz, says he wrote “The Art of the Deal,” the book that first put Mr. Trump on the map in 1987, entirely by himself, and regrets doing so.

Furthermore, the defense argued that it sees no correlation between the books and the criminal case, especially since the books were all written before Mr. Trump was president.  

“Whatever President Trump’s style of business operations was in 1987, 2004 and 2007 … is by no means probative for how he would have operated those businesses when he was President of the United States of America,” a defense lawyer, Todd Blanche wrote in his filing this week, according to ABC News. 

But prosecutors say that certain passages in these books describe Mr. Trump’s relationships with women, an essential part of their case. They quote, say, from Mr. Trump’s 2007 book, “Think Big and Kick Ass”: “I have been able to date (screw) them all because I have something that many men do not have … I don’t know what it is but women have always liked it.” 

From 2004’s “How to Get Rich,” prosecutors quoted Mr. Trump as declaring: “All the women on The Apprentice flirted with me, consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected. A sexual dynamic is always present between people, unless you are asexual.” 

Defense attorneys argued that apart from irrelevance, these citations could mislead the jurors: “Many of the statements that the People seek to admit have no apparent relevance to the issues in this case and will only lead to juror confusion.” 

But prosecutors found that Mr. Trump’s “rhetoric about attacking his perceived opponents is, according to him, part of his long standing worldview.”

In another motion filed this week, the district attorney asked the presiding judge that the names and residential addresses of the jurors be kept from the public and from the defendant, and only be made available to the attorneys, because Mr. Trump’s statements pose “a significant risk of juror harassment and intimidation,” prosecutors wrote. 

Mr. Bragg claims that Mr. Trump’s social media posts, in which he singles out people and discloses their names to his followers, have caused jurors “to fear for their own safety and the safety of their families.” 

On Monday, Mr. Bragg asked the judge to impose a gag order on Mr. Trump, prohibiting him from making public statements about witnesses, court staff, and attorneys, saying Mr. Trump’s remarks incite “significant and imminent” threats, as the Sun reported. 

The defense argued a gag order would be a blatant, unconstitutional violation of Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights. 

The presiding New York state supreme court judge, Juan Merchan, has yet to rule on the gag order request.  

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, another supreme court judge, Arthur Engoron, who awarded New York state more than $464 million in damages after New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, sued Mr. Trump and others for business fraud, received an envelope containing white powder at his chambers. The director of communications at the New York State Office of Court Administration, Al Baker, told the Associated Press that “the officer and other workers who may have been exposed to the powder were temporarily isolated. No injuries were reported.”