The trial over Donald Trump’s hush money is coming to an end. Today, the lawyers will make their closing arguments before the case goes to the jury.
The former and possibly future president has a lot at stake: The jury will decide whether the machinations surrounding a payment made by Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 amounted to a criminal conspiracy that violated campaign finance and tax laws.
The Manhattan district attorney accuses Trump of authorizing an illegal plot in the closing stages of the 2016 presidential campaign to cover up Daniels’s claim that she had long-ago extramarital sex with him. Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 for her silence in October through a home equity loan that he funneled to Daniels’s attorney through a shell company created specifically for the transaction. Prosecutors say the crime was Trump authorizing a fake paper trail to disguise his repayment to Cohen as routine legal work.
The final chapter of the trial follows nearly five weeks of testimony ranging from the mundane cataloging of financial documents to uncomfortable details of an alleged 2006 sexual encounter between Trump and Daniels that set in motion the events that led to the case.
Jurors watched Daniels argue with Trump defense attorney Susan Necheles about the porn star’s truthfulness, his career choices and his motives for claiming that Trump cheated on his wife, Melania Trump, with her. They watched defense attorney Todd Blanche call Cohen a liar for testifying that she contacted Trump to tell him a deal with Daniels was imminent.
They also saw Trump’s former White House communications director, Hope Hicks, cry on the witness stand and – before being sent out of the courtroom by Merchan – they saw a Trump ally, Robert Costello, grumble “ridiculously” when the judge upheld a prosecutor’s objection to part of Trump’s testimony.
In total, almost two dozen witnesses were heard, including two who were called as part of the defense team’s comparatively brief counter-statement. Trump was not heard because he exercised his right as a defendant not to testify.
In the meantime, jurors have seen reams of text messages, emails and phone records from both sides. They must decide whether the documents and testimony prove an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 presidential election through accounting fraud or whether they show nothing more than dirty maneuvering behind the scenes of a national election campaign.
The jurors were given a week off to resume their normal lives while following Merchan’s instructions to stay away from trial coverage and commentary. The court’s ban on jurors covering the unprecedented case also extends to social media, where Trump has been busy during the recess proclaiming his innocence and portraying the judge and prosecutors as his tormentors. Among Trump’s complaints on his Truth Social platform were that Merchan gave the jurors seven days off and did not keep them away from the outside world. He also complained that the prosecution had the final say in the case, even though that is standard procedure in a trial.
Trump denies having sex with Daniels. He and his lawyers both say Cohen was actually paid for work in progress and that the nondisclosure agreement Daniels signed was a legal device to protect his campaign and family from embarrassment.