NEW YORK (AP) — Jurors in Donald Trump’s hush money trial are expected to begin their deliberations Wednesday after receiving instructions from the judge on the law and the factors they can consider as they seek to reach a verdict in the first criminal case against a former American president.
The deliberations follow a marathon day of closing arguments in which a Manhattan prosecutor accused Trump of trying to “mislead” voters in the 2016 presidential election by participating in a hush-money program designed to suppress embarrassing stories that he feared would hurt his campaign torpedo.
“At its core, this case is about a conspiracy and a cover-up,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told jurors during summonses that stretched from early afternoon into the evening.
Trump’s lawyer, on the other hand, branded the prosecution’s star witness the “biggest liar of all time” as he declared his client innocent of all charges and urged the panel for a blanket acquittal.
The lawyers’ dueling accounts, which varied wildly in their assessments of witness credibility, Trump’s guilt and the strength of the evidence, offered each side one last chance to score points with the jury as it prepared for the momentous and historically unprecedented task of deciding whether to convict the presumptive Republican presidential nominee ahead of the November election.
Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying company records, which carries a penalty of up to four years in prison. He has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing. It is unclear whether prosecutors would seek prison time if convicted, or whether the judge would impose that sentence.
Jurors will have the option to convict Trump of all charges, acquit him of all charges, or hand down a mixed verdict finding him guilty of some charges and not others. If they reach an impasse after several days of deliberations and fail to reach a unanimous verdict, Judge Juan M. Merchan could declare a mistrial.
The lawsuit included allegations that Trump and his allies conspired during the 2016 presidential campaign to suppress potentially embarrassing stories through hush money payments, including to a porn actor who claimed she and Trump had sex a decade earlier. His lawyer Todd Blanche told jurors that neither the actor, Stormy Daniels, nor the Trump lawyer who paid her, Michael Cohen, can be trusted.
“President Trump is innocent. He committed no crimes and the prosecutor did not meet his burden of proof, period,” Blanche said.
Steinglass sought to allay potential concerns from jurors about the credibility of witnesses. Trump, for example, has said he and Daniels never had sex and has repeatedly attacked Cohen as a liar.
The prosecutor acknowledged that Daniels’ account of the alleged 2006 meeting in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite, which Trump has denied, was “cringe-inducing” at times, but he said the details she offered — including about the decor and what she said that she saw while snooping around. in Trump’s toiletry bag – were full of touchstones ‘that stuff rings true’.
And, he said, the story matters because it “strengthens (Trump’s) incentive to buy her silence.”
“Her story is messy. It makes people uncomfortable to hear. It probably makes some of you uncomfortable to hear. But that’s the point,” Steinglass said. He told jurors: “In the simplest terms, Stormy Daniels is the motive.”
The payout came against the backdrop of the revelation of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump bragged about sexually grabbing women without their consent. Had the Daniels story emerged in the aftermath of the shooting, it would have undermined his strategy. of walking away from his words, Steinglass said.
“It is critical to appreciate this,” Steinglass said. At the same time, he dismissed his words on the tape as “locker room talk” as Trump “negotiated to muzzle a porn star,” the prosecutor said.
Blanche, who spoke first, tried to downplay the fallout, saying the “Access Hollywood” tape was not a “doomsday scenario.”
Steinglass also tried to reassure jurors that the prosecution’s case did not rest solely on Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, who paid Daniels $130,000 to keep his mouth shut. Cohen later pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in the hush money payments, and to lying to Congress. He went to prison and was suspended, but his direct involvement in the transactions made him a key witness at the trial.
“It’s not about whether you like Michael Cohen. It’s not about whether you want to do business with Michael Cohen. What matters is whether he has useful, reliable information about what happened in this case, and the truth is he was in the best position to know that,” Steinglass said.
While the case sometimes featured perfunctory discussion of sex and gossip industry practices, the actual charges involve something decidedly less flashy: reimbursements that Trump signed for Cohen for the payments.
The refunds were recorded as being for legal fees, which prosecutors say was a fraudulent label designed to conceal the purpose of the hush money transaction and illegally interfere with the 2016 election. Defense attorneys say Cohen actually made substantial has done legal work for Trump and his family.
In his own hour-long speech to the jury, with sweeping denials that reflected Trump’s “deny everything” approach, Blanche lambasted the entire basis of the case.
He said Cohen, not Trump, created the invoices submitted to the Trump Organization for reimbursement and rejected the prosecutor’s caricature of a detail-oriented manager, suggesting instead that Trump was preoccupied with the presidency and not by the checks he signed. And he rejected the idea that the alleged hush-money scheme amounted to election interference.
“Every campaign in this country is a conspiracy to promote a candidate, a group of people working together to help someone win,” Blanche said.
As expected, he saved his most animated attack for Cohen, with whom he tangled during a lengthy cross-examination.
Echoing the term “GOAT,” which is mainly used in sports as an acronym for “the greatest of all time,” Blanche dubbed Cohen the “GLOAT” – the greatest liar of all time – and also called Cohen “the human embodiment of reasonable doubt’. That language was intentional because in order to convict Trump, jurors must believe prosecutors have proven their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
“He lied to you repeatedly. He lied many, many times before you even met him. His financial and personal well-being depend on this case. He is biased and motivated to tell you a story that is not true,” Blanche said, a reference to Cohen’s relentless and often bitingly personal social media attacks on Trump and the lucrative income he has derived from books and podcasts about Trump.
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Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.
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