Live Updates: Jury Begins Deciding Trump’s Fate in Hush-Money Case
"Twelve New Yorkers have begun deliberations on the 34 felony counts against Donald Trump in the first criminal trial of an American president. He is accused of falsifying business records in connection with a payment to a porn star.
Pinned
After weeks of tawdry testimony describing sex, tabloid deal-making and claims of a conspiracy that stretched into the Oval Office, a group of 12 New Yorkers must now decide whether to convict Donald J. Trump in the first criminal trial of an American president. The jurors filed out of a Manhattan courtroom on Wednesday to begin deliberations, tasked with reaching a verdict that could either vindicate Mr. Trump’s argument that he did nothing wrong or sully him as a felon as he seeks to regain the presidency.
The criminal case — one of four against Mr. Trump, and most likely the only one that will go to trial before Election Day — exposed what prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office described as a fraud on the American people. Mr. Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with a $130,000 hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, on the eve of the 2016 election. His onetime fixer, Michael D. Cohen, made the payment and was repaid by Mr. Trump, who prosecutors say concealed the nature of the reimbursement. If convicted, he faces a sentence ranging from probation to four years in prison.
This is one of the rare moments in his life when Trump hasn’t been in control of a situation in one way or another. Even when he lost the 2020 election, he created an entire apparatus that worked, in vain, to overturn it. There’s not much for him to do in a system with rules he doesn’t control.
Trump tells reporters in the hallway that, after listening to Justice Merchan’s instructions to the jury, he believes “Mother Teresa could not beat the charges.”
He again calls the judge “corrupt” and “conflicted” and complains that he cannot fully back up his accusations about him because of the gag order that has been imposed on him, which does not in fact limit him from speaking about the judge.
He again complains that the trial has kept him from campaigning for weeks, though he has held a handful of rallies, public appearances and fund-raisers on days that court has not been in session.
He also rails against Robert De Niro, who held a news conference outside the courthouse with the Biden campaign yesterday. “He’s a broken-down fool,” Trump said. Then, noting that De Niro got heckled, he added that the actor “got MAGAed yesterday. He got a big dose of it.”
That remark about De Niro is the kind of retribution-minded comment Trump’s advisers insist isn’t intended as retribution.
Trump is leaving the courtroom. He cannot leave the courthouse while the jury is deliberating, as Justice Merchan informed him with a quirk of his mouth, as if to say, “nothing to be done about this.”
Jurors four and six, a man and a woman, are gathered around a laptop with a paralegal for the prosecution. Todd Blanche stands behind the computer looking on. Everyone nods. The male juror prepares to take the computer and the paralegal seems hesitant. “He can take it,” the judge says. He does and the two jurors leave the room.
All the trial exhibits are on that laptop, which could help speed up the deliberations: the jurors will not have to request specific documentary evidence they wish to review. Nor will they have to view it in the courtroom, which always takes awhile.
Justice Merchan is now talking to the alternate jurors, whose seating assignments have been confusing to people trying to figure out which jurors had which seat assignments. The alternates are not being excused, Merchan says.
If one of the 12 jurors is unable to continue deliberating for any purpose, an alternate steps in. They remain on site, so they can tag in if necessary. It must be immensely frustrating for the alternates. After watching the case for weeks, they are not allowed to participate in discussions about it.
Justice Merchan commends the alternates for paying attention. The judge, who often clocks the jury for attentiveness, praises one in particular who went through “several notebooks” taking down notes.
For the past five weeks, the 12 unidentified jurors in Donald J. Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial have listened to opening statements, witness testimony, closing arguments and the judge’s final instructions.
Now is the time for their deliberations to begin. The jurors will retreat behind closed doors on Wednesday and start to debate whether the first president to be criminally prosecuted has committed felony crimes.
The criminal case against Donald J. Trump is with the jury, which will now begin its deliberations. It’s 11:28 am.
When they are deliberating, the jurors communicate with the judge — if they have questions or want to hear testimony again for example — by sending jury notes. The judge asks the foreperson to sign each note with his number, not his name. He also asks that the foreperson include the date and time of each note.
“That concludes my instructions on the law,” the judge says. That took him about an hour and 10 minutes. He asks the lawyers to approach the bench.
Justice Merchan appears to be wrapping up. He is explaining the details of the verdict sheet and the way that deliberations work, including that jurors will be kept in the jury room while they deliberate and they cannot leave while they are discussing the case. They are asked to give their cell phones and other devices to court officers while they deliberate.
Justice Merchan is emphasizing, as judges do in criminal trials, that jurors have to both hold fast to their own opinions of the case, and listen to — and consider — other jurors’ opinions.
Trump leans into the defense table to rifle through the papers in front of him as Justice Merchan tells the jurors that their verdict must be unanimous.
Justice Merchan has been speaking for just over an hour now. He has moved on to motive — and the difference between motive and intent.
He explains that while intent means “conscious objective or purpose,” motive is “the reason why a person chooses to engage in criminal conduct.” He reminds jurors that they must consider Trump’s intent, but that the prosecution did not have to prove his motive.
Justice Merchan is again explaining the potential “unlawful means” that jurors could find that Trump or the other conspirators identified by prosecutors — Michael Cohen and David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer — used to aid Trump’s election in 2016.
The defense lawyers made clear during the conference on charging instructions how concerned they were that there would be a broad explanation for what the jurors could consider. Both the defense and the prosecution had some victories in that conference.
But state law is different than federal law, and most of the commentary on television and in op-ed pages stems from an understanding of federal law — not the state laws applicable here.
This is exactly right. In my experience, lawyers with experience in federal court tend to hold a different — and often far more negative — view of the prosecution’s case than do state practitioners.
Interestingly, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, the defense lawyers, are both former federal prosecutors. And they have argued about the prosecution’s theory, not just to the jury but to the judge himself, which seems to me to have signified that they, like many of their federal peers, genuinely don’t think much of it.
The jurors’ heads have shifted down, and many appear to be taking careful notes, as they hear the instructions related to the secondary crimes — known in the law as “predicate” or “object” crimes — for the second time.
Justice Merchan is now explaining what intent is, and what it isn’t. He then says that to decide whether the required intent can be inferred beyond a reasonable doubt is up to the jurors here.
Justice Merchan arrives at the 34th and last count, which relates to a check dated Dec. 5, 2017. Having concluded, he repeats the definition of falsifying business records, again giving the jurors the chance to process these complex charges, where each single count includes within it at least two other potential crimes.
When we reached count 23, Trump crossed his arms over his chest, then hit the arm of one of his lawyers, Emil Bove. He whispered to him, and then turned away to take a sip of water.
The jurors may be aware this is the last time they’ll be with the judge until there’s a verdict.
Justice Merchan doesn’t provide such a complex spiel for every count — but he explains which document each count pertains to. Remember, there are 11 invoices from Michael Cohen, 12 entries in the Trump Organization’s general ledger and 11 checks, nine of them signed by Trump.
All of those records were involved in payments to Michael Cohen: the prosecution says, reimbursements for the hush money. The defense argues that they were payments for legal services, an argument that Trump has contradicted before in legal filings and elsewhere.
Having explained the law in abstract, the judge now illustrates how it applies to the charges in question. He says that, to find Trump guilty of the first charge, jurors would have to find that Trump, personally or acting in concert with others, made or caused a false entry in business records, specifically an invoice from Michael Cohen dated Feb. 14, 2017.
They would also have to find that Trump caused that false record with intent to defraud — that is, with the goal of keeping it secret — and that he either intended to commit another crime or aid the commission of another crime.
Justice Merchan is now explaining to the jurors what I’ve taken to thinking of as the “false records sandwich” prosecution theory. Under this theory, jurors could find that Trump falsified records…to hide an election conspiracy that used the unlawful means…of other falsified records."
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