Forget the sex. Check out those titillating invoices at the Trump hush money trial.

NEW YORK — Can the sex-infused criminal trial of a former U.S. president who may be on the cusp of being jailed for contempt be … boring? Prosecutors on Monday made their best effort to prove it possible.

For hour after hour, jurors at Trump’s hush money trial were treated to a monotonous display of checks, accounting ledgers and bank statements. The narrators on this soporific journey were also far from electric: two longtime Trump Organization employees in charge of recording expenses and routing them for payment.

The documentary grunt work, however, was for a potentially crucial purpose. Prosecutors appear to be trying to check all the boxes that constitute the elements of the 34 felony charges Trump is facing, all of which turn on technical intricacies of New York’s business recordkeeping laws.

Jurors did see Trump’s Sharpie-crafted signature on several $35,000 checks that were drawn from Trump’s personal bank account and sent to Michael Cohen in 2017. Prosecutors hope jurors will conclude that Trump was personally involved in Cohen’s arrangement of hush money to keep porn star Stormy Daniels quiet about her alleged sexual encounter with Trump.

But the salacious details were entirely absent Monday as attorneys grilled a former Trump Organization financial controller and a current bookkeeper about “accounts payable” and the nuts and bolts of how money moved through the massive company. In many of the instances at issue in the case, these witnesses said, the money ultimately moved at the direction of Trump himself.

The sense of abrupt deceleration stemmed in part from sky-high expectations for an explosive confrontation between Trump and Cohen, or live testimony from one or both of Trump’s alleged paramours who figure in the case: Daniels and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate who got a payout from Trump allies at the National Enquirer.

For court watchers hoping for that level of drama, they’ll need to wait at least another day — or possibly much longer. Prosecutors revealed on Monday afternoon that they still have about two weeks’ worth of witnesses to go.

Defense attorneys, meanwhile, appeared to revel in the prosecution’s responsibility for the tedium and mercifully offered up only cursory cross-examination of both witnesses: former controller Jeffrey McConney and accounts payable clerk Deborah Tarasoff. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche’s questioning of Tarasoff took only five minutes.

“The checks that we just went through for the past hour and a half…,” Blanche said as he opened one of his few questions to Tarasoff, who’s worked for Trump for 24 years and gave Trump’s son Eric Trump a smile and a pat on the leg as she returned to the courtroom after a break.

As prosecutors plodded through the documents Monday, they did draw out some subtext and nuances, suggesting to jurors that there was an unusual air of secrecy and irregularity around the payments to Cohen. The documents associated with those payments — including the checks that prosecutors laboriously displayed — are the very business records that Trump is accused of falsifying in violation of a New York law on corporate fraud.

McConney testified that he was instructed to make the payments to Cohen at a brief meeting in 2016 with Trump’s then-CFO Allen Weisselberg. The controller said that while the payments were recorded as legal expenses pursuant to a “retainer agreement,” they did not go through the Trump Organization’s legal department as such payments typically did.

Emails suggested Cohen was slow to understand that Trump’s accountants wanted invoices to support the monthly $35,000 payments Cohen received.

“A lot of people ask for money. I need an invoice,” McConney explained matter of factly.

When McConney reiterated that requirement to Cohen, Cohen offered a somewhat puzzling reply: “Jeff Please remind me of the monthly amount.”

Cohen also at first simply typed in a few lines under the word “Invoice” in an email. He later sent monthly invoices to Weisselberg — but often curiously continued to omit the amount.

In later testimony, Tarasoff said she checked with McConney and Weisselberg on those invoices and confirmed that Cohen was due $35,000 each month.

Prosecutors’ suggestion of subterfuge and irregularity around the payments could be harnessed later to suggest Donald Trump’s consciousness of guilt on a key element in elevating the business-records charges from misdemeanors to felonies: that he knew the hush money payment to Daniels was legally required to be reported as a campaign contribution and that he conspired with others to hide it.

Trump’s attorneys disputed that there was any unusual secrecy around the payments and have suggested that any discretion around the matter was to protect Trump’s wife Melania and other members of his family, not to influence the 2016 presidential election or to circumvent the more esoteric and debatable aspects of campaign finance law.

While prosecutors have seized on the categorization of the payments as “legal expenses” in Trump Organization bookkeeping records as a flagrant falsehood, McConney said under cross-examination that label was simply one of a limited number of choices in “a drop-down menu” in the dated computer system used by Trump’s finance personnel.

“These categories: There was a level of rigidity to them, right? … If you’re talking about payment to an attorney, legal expenses was the account that was used,” Trump lawyer Emil Bove asked McConney, who readily agreed.

And while the prosecution made much of McConney keeping his notes about the structure of the payments to Cohen in a locked drawer, the controller said that was standard practice for most of what he had in his office, since it contained information on employee payroll and bonuses.

“I had a lot of sensitive information,” McConney said.

While few reporters were seen gripping the courtroom’s wooden armrests Monday, the hush money trial has featured an unusual dose of suspense for journalists — and for Trump’s defense attorneys. That’s because prosecutors have been unusually guarded about their schedule for the witnesses they plan to call each day.

The judge, Juan Merchan, has refused to order that sort of routine disclosure, citing Trump’s public comments about witnesses and his repeated violations of the judge’s gag order.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said Monday that the prosecution has been voluntarily telling Trump’s attorneys “the day before” about whom the government plans to call the following day. “We did not want to have the next witnesses’ names out there,” Steinglass said.

The most attention-grabbing developments of the day — the judge’s renewed threat to throw Trump in jail if he again violates the gag order and Trump’s defiant statement at day’s end that he’d proudly become a political prisoner if necessary — both took place out of earshot of the jury.

Most members of the jury remained attentive through the long slog Monday, but one seemed visibly bored by the repetitive testimony. During the morning session, he stared out into the gallery largely filled with reporters. By the afternoon, he was resting his head in his hands as the documents popped up on small video monitors in front of the jurors and oversize ones mounted on the walls of the courtroom.

Gerstein reported from New York. Cheney reported from Washington. Ben Feuerherd contributed reporting from New York.