After a marathon day of closing arguments in Donald Trump’s New York hush money trial, jurors today begin deliberating the former president’s fate on 34 counts of falsifying business records, the final phase of an unprecedented trial pitting Trump against the city and state where he made his name.
The jury must decide whether the maneuvers surrounding a $130,000 bribe to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 by Trump’s mobile legal adviser Michael Cohen were “a conspiracy and cover-up” intended to “deceive voters,” as Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass put it Tuesday, pointing to a “mountain” of documentary evidence that he said corroborated the testimony of Cohen, Daniels and numerous other witnesses.
Defense attorney Todd Blanche gave the jury another option: They could view the entire transaction as a sordid behind-the-scenes campaign drama that was not worthy of criminal prosecution and, with the convicted, disqualified attorney Cohen – the “GLOAT” or “biggest liar of all time,” as Blanche put it – as the prosecution’s key witness, was not provable anyway.
Trump says Daniels’ claim that he had a sexual encounter with him in 2006 is fabricated. His lawyers argue that the 34 checks, pay stubs and accounting entries from 2017 documenting payments totaling $420,000 to Cohen were for legal purposes and not forged documents as part of a scheme prosecutors say was designed to conceal Cohen’s payments and keep voters in the dark.
Whatever the verdict and however long it takes, the first criminal trial of a former US president may be the only one of the four Trump trials that will be tried by a jury before the November election. For that reason alone, the verdict could be a decisive event with implications for Trump’s third run for the White House.
A sign of the high stakes in this trial was the anonymity of the 12 jurors and six alternates from the day they arrived as potential candidates. Their names were not released publicly for security reasons. The people against Donald Trump The trial began on April 15 with jury selection in a massive Art Deco courthouse in Lower Manhattan, the same repair-prone municipal building where film producer Harvey Weinstein was tried and convicted of sexual assault and where he returned in May after his 2020 conviction was overturned.
Once the panel was assembled, Trump’s trial stretched over six weeks of evidence, testimony and pleadings. The time the jury actually spent on the case in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom was a less impressive-sounding 17 days, from opening arguments to closing arguments on Tuesday. But the trial has taken up an indescribable range for other reasons as well: disruptions to the jurors’ daily routine, a security bulwark of uniformed court officials, Secret Service agents and NYPD vehicles visible from behind rows of barriers, and a 24/7 media camp populated by local, national and international journalists and experts covering the latest “trial of the century.”
Trump himself, a veteran at putting himself in the spotlight, has been reluctant to appear as the defendant in Trumpian fashion. Twice a day, he has railed before reporters in the hallway — with Blanche by his side and a gallery of supporters watching — about a “rigged” case and a “conflicted” judge with Democratic family ties. This morning, he continued that in a series of Truth Social posts, lambasting the judge and calling the proceedings a “BOOGIE COURT.”
He has tested the limits of Merchan’s news blackout through public testimony about trial witnesses, jurors and others, and complained about the “refrigerator” of a 15th-floor courtroom where he is forced to sit when he would rather be elsewhere, running his presidential campaign.
This morning, however, Trump entered the courtroom shortly before 10 a.m. without pausing to speak to reporters. It was the second time in a row that he skipped a routine that had become one of the trial’s subplots, including his quick exit on Tuesday night.