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The Manhattan jury in Donald Trump’s hush money trial has reached a verdict.
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He was found guilty of all 34 crimes related to a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.
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The verdict follows the very first criminal trial of a former American president.
It’s official: Former President Donald Trump is now a convicted felon.
Trump, the 77-year-old presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was found guilty of all 34 criminal counts related to a hush money payment to a porn star.
The jury in Trump’s landmark trial has found him guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying company records to cover up a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels just 11 days before the 2016 election.
They deliberated in the Manhattan courthouse for less than 10 hours over two days and told the judge they reached a verdict Thursday afternoon at 4:20 p.m.
Trump sat quietly after the verdict was read, with his hands in his lap, looking ahead.
When the jurors entered the courtroom, none of them looked at him.
The jury foreman stood with his left hand leaning on the wooden beam in front of the jury chair, in an almost nonchalant posture as he read “guilty” for each count.
After reading the verdict, several of the 12 jurors appeared relieved and even smiling. Others seemed grim, as if struck by the significance of what they had just done.
When the judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, announced the sentencing date of July 11, Trump closed his eyes, as he had done for much of the trial.
At the heart of the criminal case against Trump was a payment that prosecutors said was intended to influence the 2016 election.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, bought Daniels’ silence about a sexual encounter the porn star said he had with Trump in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite in 2006 during a celebrity golf tournament, prosecutors said. Trump paid Cohen back with a series of checks in 2017, when he was already president, prosecutors alleged.
Trump has denied having sex with Daniels and has attacked the Manhattan district attorney’s case against him as a political “witch hunt” and a “scam.”
The former president has also repeatedly labeled Merchan, who presided over the trial, as “totally conflicted” and “corrupt.”
Trump faces a sentence ranging from zero to a maximum of four years in prison.
Over the course of the trial, Merchan has found Trump in contempt of court 10 times for violating his gag order, which could become a factor in the sentence. But the chances of Trump spending any time behind bars are still slim, and probation is more likely.
A historical process with tasteless details
The verdict follows the very first criminal trial of a former American president.
It comes after an 11-hour marathon day of closing arguments, with lawyers from both sides presenting their competing versions of events to the jury.
Jurors heard testimony from 20 prosecution witnesses — including Daniels and Cohen — for more than five weeks in a crowded and chilly 15th-floor courtroom in downtown Manhattan.
Cohen, the prosecution’s key witness, testified that Trump was the one who ordered him to make the hush money payment to Daniels just before the 2016 election.
And Daniels told jurors in graphic detail about the sex she said she had with the then-“Apprentice” star.
Trump’s lawyers presented a brief — but tumultuous — defense case. They put Robert Costello, a criminal defense attorney who previously dealt with Cohen, on the witness stand. Costello called Cohen unreliable, but his testimony may have backfired after the judge burst out at him for mocking his statements.
Prosecutors alleged Trump falsified 34 business documents in 2017, including in his first week in office, when they say he repaid Cohen for paying Daniels the hush money.
Trump paid Cohen back, prosecutors said, in a series of 11 checks, nine of which bore Trump’s handwritten signature — and the jury was shown those pieces at trial.
Much of Cohen’s most damning testimony in the trial came when he quoted what he described as Trump’s own words.
“Just take care of it,” Cohen said Trump told him when he told him to quash the Daniels sex story.
Trump “wasn’t thinking about Melania — this was all about the campaign,” Cohen told jurors.
In his opening statements at the trial, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo described the case against Trump as a “criminal conspiracy,” while Blanche compared hush money to “democracy.”
While Merchan kept the inside of his courtroom lively and professionally moving, Trump and the protesters politicized the atmosphere on the outside. In near-daily hallway news conferences and in Truth Social posts, he blasted the proceedings as unfair and claimed without evidence that the case was orchestrated by President Joe Biden.
In the park across the street from the courthouse, the tone occasionally turned to delirium, with his political allies staging press conferences that were mocked by protesters, supporters floating vulgar balloons into the air, and a Biden press conference supporter Robert De Niro during the closing. arguments.
On the day the verdict was handed down, Trump had a relatively small team with him. His son Eric Trump was the only family member in the room. He sat in the front row of the courtroom with one of his father’s civil attorneys, Alina Habba, and Secret Service agents.
As the verdict was read out – the word “guilty” sounded 34 times – the former president’s son looked furious.
As the elder Trump left, he shook hands with his son, but his demeanor was deflated.
Trump has three remaining criminal cases. Two of them – in Washington, DC and Georgia – are over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The other, in Florida, involves taking classified government documents to Mar-a-Lago after he left the presidency.
None of these other cases are expected to go to trial before the 2024 election.
This story has been updated.
Read the original article on Business Insider
