CNN
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It was a tawdry tale of lies, revenge, and hush money, with allegedly sordid bedroom scenes, a judge whose patience had finally run out, and an enraged defendant who was, and perhaps will be, the president.
But there will be no more evidence, witnesses or brutal cross-examination in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial. The trial has entered its final stages before jurors retire to deliberate their verdict in the historic case involving the 2024 election.
Unusually, due to the Memorial Day holiday, there will be a week off between Tuesday’s closing testimony and when lawyers for both sides make closing statements in their final summation. The judge will then issue instructions. This is a critical stage in a case where jurors learn how to apply the law and weigh contradictory testimony and different types of evidence.
At that time, seven men and five women from New York asked whether Trump would become the first former president to be convicted of a crime and the first presumptive candidate to run as a convicted felon. I have to decide what to do.
The former president has been preparing for that moment for weeks. He has waged a daily campaign to discredit the court, Judge Juan Marchand, and the man who brought the case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D). “Judges hate Donald Trump. Look at him, look at where he comes from. He can’t stand Donald Trump,” the former president said Tuesday of his daily media rant in the hallway. Said in the latest. At one point, the judge threatened to send him to prison if he continued to violate the gag order protecting key witnesses, establishing a red line that the former president has not yet crossed.
President Trump’s strange habit of reading out loud his allies’ criticism of the incident in conservative media All of this was intended to create an atmosphere of discontent around the trial, which he used to demonstrate the core rationale of his campaign in the White House: that he was a persecuted victim of weaponized justice. It strengthens the claim that it is a person.
As the weeks went by, Mr. Trump appeared in court with Republican leaders, demanding complete control over the Republican Party after winning the nomination for the third year in a row, and American democracy to remain in power. It demonstrated the Republican Party’s continued tolerance for leaders it seeks to destroy. 2020 Election.
It’s still too early to tell whether the lawsuit and eventual verdict in which he was acquitted will have an impact on voters this fall. However, it is difficult to believe that the trial, in which television cameras were prohibited, captured the public’s imagination.
In any trial, it is impossible to know how jurors will interpret the daily drama of the courtroom.
However, there are many issues that need to be resolved in this case, which has serious implications for President Trump’s future and even his freedom. It also has major political implications, as it is the only of the president’s four criminal trials that could end before the election.
In a month of dramatic testimony, prosecutors say Trump paid $130,000 in hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels to defraud voters in 2016 to cover up, as an example of election interference. He claimed that the president illegally falsified business records. President Trump has denied the allegations of an affair with Daniels, and the hush money payments themselves are not illegal. But jurors must consider the complex legal equations at the heart of the case. To reach a guilty verdict, New York prosecutors would have to agree that they proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump falsified his business records, which is usually a misdemeanor in that state. be. Second, to convict Trump of a felony, a jury would have to find that this was done in order to commit another crime related to the election. “Defendant Donald Trump orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told jurors in opening statements in April.
But defense attorneys maintain that Trump is not guilty of any crime. His lawyers argue that Trump had nothing to do with the falsification of financial records, cast doubt on the documentary evidence established by prosecutors, and seek to discredit the prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen. It is said that The former president’s self-described former “thug” is crucial to the case because he is the only person directly involved in Trump’s alleged violation of the law to conceal payments. And the defense sought to prove that Trump did not try to hide details of his alleged affair with Daniels as part of a plan to mislead voters. Rather, they argued, he was worried it would upset his family.
And in his opening statement, Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche told jurors: “Spoiler alert: There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. It’s called democracy.” Ta.
Cohen’s testimony is likely to be a key factor in the deliberations, particularly whether the damage inflicted on Cohen’s credibility during tough cross-examination will be enough to convince one or more jurors that they cannot convict Trump based on the word of his former fixer.
Prosecutors knew they would have problems going to trial because Cohen was already in prison, having been convicted of hush money payments and other crimes, including lying to Congress. So they spent days trying to bolster his testimony with evidence before he took the stand. They called David Pecker, the former president of American Media, which published the National Enquirer. Pecker was not directly involved in the hush money payments at the center of the case. But he was used to prove that Cohen and Trump had a history of using payments to quash unflattering stories about the future president before the 2016 election.
Hope Hicks, a former White House communications director and longtime Trump confidant, was also called by prosecutors and said his campaign was riveted by concerns about the Access Hollywood announcement, calling out her former boss. It seemed like it was confusing. A tape shows him boasting that he can grab women’s genitals. Hicks testified that Trump believed Daniels’ story would be even more damaging. Hicks said he thought it would have been better to address this issue now and not have it come up before the election.
In the most risqué chapter of the trial, Ms. Daniels was called to testify about an alleged affair she had with President Trump in a Lake Tahoe suite in 2006.
Daniels said she “smacked Trump on the buttocks with a magazine” and returned from the bathroom to find him lying in bed in his boxer shorts and a T-shirt. They had sex, she said, and she was shaking when she left the room, which she remembers having a black-and-white tile floor. The judge asked her to spare details of the incident beforehand, and commented after her testimony that some of the explicit details “would be better left unsaid.” But Daniels’ testimony was crucial for the prosecution because it revealed an alleged relationship that prosecutors hoped would lead jurors to believe was the beginning of a cover-up.
When Cohen finally took the stand, he directly implicated Trump in the alleged plot to buy Daniels’ silence. “He said he’d talked to me, some friends, some individuals, smart people, and they said, ‘It’s $130,000. You’re a billionaire, pay the money. There’s no reason to keep this out there, so do it.’ He told me, ‘Just do it,'” Cohen said, paraphrasing Trump’s alleged instructions to him. The former fixer, who once said he would take a bullet for Trump, also denied acting alone, saying anything he did for his former boss required Trump’s approval and that he wanted to make sure he was rewarded.
But during cross-examination, the defense argued that Cohen is a liar, obsessed with ousting Trump, and enriched by media appearances and podcasts focused on his former idol. His reputation came back to haunt him.
The key moment came when Cohen stumbled over a phone call he’d previously testified under oath. He said he’d discussed hush money payments with Trump during an October 2016 phone call. But the defense produced texts Cohen sent before the call — to the phone of a Trump bodyguard who was with the 2016 Republican candidate at the time — to suggest the subject of the 96-second conversation was a different matter. In response, prosecutors tried to downplay the significance of the single call, using redirection tests to say Cohen had spoken with Trump multiple times about the payments, not just at the time.
But Trump’s lawyers on Monday pleaded with the judge to dismiss the case based on Cohen’s testimony, saying the jury should not be asked to reach a verdict based on what the defense sees as unsafe evidence. “The court should not rely on Mr. Cohen’s testimony to send this case to a jury,” Blanch told Marchand.
Compared with weeks of testimony by the prosecution, the defense’s case lasted just 90 minutes and featured just two witnesses before Trump’s lawyers took a break on Tuesday, meaning the former president, who many experts believed would pose too much risk to his case if he testified, did not take the stand.
Some experts questioned whether the defense should have not called one of its witnesses, Robert Costello. Costello got into an argument with an irate Judge Marchan, some of which was seen by the jury. In a surprising scene, Judge Marchan asked if Costello was trying to glare at him after the witness expressed disdain for some of the judge’s interventions.
Mr. Costello intended to refute prosecutors’ claims that Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Cohen into silence in 2018. But legal experts say Mr. Costello may have ended up creating holes in Mr. Trump’s defense. At the very least, his spell on the witness stand may have refocused the case, which in recent days looked as if it could damage Cohen’s reputation, on the former president’s actions and character. .
It was all a sideshow and may have had little impact on the trial’s ultimate fate.
But only a jury can decide that.
