CNN
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Prosecutors will make closing arguments to a New York jury on Tuesday about why they should convict former President Donald Trump of an array of business crimes, but jurors will face the daunting task of summarizing weeks of testimony and evidence that Trump allegedly committed felonies to gain an advantage in the 2016 presidential election.
Closing arguments in President Trump’s historic hush-money criminal case will be an opportunity for prosecutors from District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to explain to the 12 jurors how each witness they call and evidence they present supports their conviction on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
The trial, underway since mid-April, is already set to be complicated, with witnesses frequently going over business record-keeping practices and other mundane details of mundane testimony, but with jurors absent from the case since Tuesday and a lengthy break before closing arguments, the prosecution will face additional challenges.
“There are going to be a lot of moments throughout a trial as you hear testimony, as you present documents and other evidence, where jurors are going to think, ‘How does this apply?’ It’s inevitable. It’s your job in closing arguments to bring it all together and make sense. And that’s especially going to be the case because this is a lengthy trial,” said Ellie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor and senior legal analyst at CNN.
“This is going to be more of a case that gets closed than a typical case,” he added.
Former New York prosecutor Bernarda Villalona said the prosecution will “tell its case from the beginning” in closing arguments. Unlike opening statements, which lasted about 40 minutes, she said, the prosecution’s closing arguments in this case could last several hours and include visual aids such as PowerPoint presentations to help jurors review some of the key evidence.
“The boring part is over. The boring part was getting them to sit and listen,” Villalona added, referring to the 12 jurors. “The interesting thing is, the boring part is actually the most important part of this case, because the boring part is where we get the documents. This case is about the documents, and the documents speak for themselves.”
Trump’s defense will make closing arguments first on Tuesday, followed by the prosecution’s. After both sides have finished, Judge Juan Marchand will instruct the jury on the charges against the former president, after which the jury will begin voting. The judge said he expects the verdict to be reached on Wednesday.
Closing arguments come exactly one week after the defense finished its presentation on Tuesday and more than five weeks after opening statements were made and the first witness, former tabloid executive David Pecker, took the stand.
Prosecutors called 20 witnesses over the 19-day trial, who testified for more than 50 hours in total. Many of the witnesses were not well-known, but some were well-known enough to be memorable to jurors, including former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress whose allegations of an affair with Trump are at the center of the case. (Trump denies the allegations.)
Meanwhile, Trump’s team called only two witnesses – a paralegal who introduced phone records into evidence and Robert Costello, the lawyer who represented Cohen in 2018.
Trump is charged with 34 first-degree felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal restitution of hush money paid to Daniels before the 2016 election. If convicted, Judge Marchan could sentence Trump to probation or a maximum of 20 years in state prison for each charge, ranging from 18 months to four years.
In their closing arguments, prosecutors are likely to argue that all of their witnesses play important roles in the case, regardless of their professional status or connection to the alleged crimes. They will also have to counter defense arguments that the prosecution’s star witness, Cohen, has a history of misconduct that weakens their case, Honig said.
“The prosecution’s argument is that all the evidence is interrelated and corroborated and they don’t need to rely solely on the testimony of one witness. They will say this is a document case,” he explained, continuing to refer to various accounting documents that were presented during the trial.
“And they’ll say, ‘Michael Cohen is here to guide you, but you don’t have to believe him. Everything he says is backed up by evidence and other testimony,'” Honig said.
Throughout the trial, prosecutors repeatedly presented jurors with 11 invoices, 12 receipts and 11 checks – 34 documents that made up the alleged falsification of business records – that were used to pay $420,000 to Cohen in 2017, including a $130,000 hush money payment that was “enhanced” after taxes.
Prosecutors presented jurors with a story showing how Cohen sent $35,000 in invoices to the Trump Organization each month, then had the company’s administrators process the checks so they could be written. Trump signed nine of the 11 checks. (The other two were made out of Trump’s revocable trust and were signed by Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, and one of Trump’s sons.)
Karen Friedman Anifilo, who at one time served as the Manhattan district attorney’s top prosecutor, said she expected prosecutors to present several themes in their closing arguments, including that most of the people who testified in their case were “Trump witnesses, people who would be expected to be friendly to him.”
Another theme, she said, could be “look at the kind of people Trump values.” Prosecutors have argued that Trump chose to surround himself with people like Cohen and Pecker, who were following his directions before the 2016 election.
“These are his subordinates, these are people he handpicked, and he shouldn’t now have the benefit of saying, ‘They’re flawed, you can’t rely on them,'” Anifilo said.
“And even if you don’t rely on them,” she said, echoing Honig, “the third theme will be, ‘You don’t need to rely on them because everything is corroborated by other witnesses or documents or the record or Mr. Trump’s own words.'”
Villalona said the length of the trial may not ultimately be a big issue in the jury’s verdict because jurors are allowed to take notes during deliberations and can also request that parts of the trial be read aloud.
“The nice thing about New York is that you can ask for the entire trial to be read out loud, and the judge will do that,” she said, “so if you forget something that David Pecker said on the first or second day of the trial, you can have it read to you,” adding that any exhibits introduced as evidence are sent to the jury so they can review them in detail when they reach their verdict.
Still, Villalona said each side’s closing arguments will be carefully crafted not only to win a verdict in their favor but also to highlight each lawyer’s position in the historic trial.
“The prosecution and defense will be making closing arguments for the last time in their careers,” she said.
CNN’s Jeremy Herb, Kara Scannell and Lauren Del Valle contributed to this report.
