Pinned
Jesse McKinley and Kate Christobek
Trump’s case heads to the jury: 5 takeaways from closing arguments.
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As the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump began its seventh week, the prosecution and the defense made their final pitches to jurors, sending the landmark case into deliberations on Wednesday.
A defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, spent three hours Tuesday hammering Michael D. Cohen, the prosecution’s star witness, including accusing him of perjury. He attacked Stormy Daniels, the p*rn star whose account of a tryst with Mr. Trump in 2006 set in motion the charges the former president faces.
The prosecution countered with an even longer, more detailed summation, pushing into the evening. A prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, guided jurors through reams of evidence they had introduced and elicited, including testimony, emails, text messages and recordings.
Mr. Trump, 77, is charged with falsifying 34 business records to hide Mr. Cohen’s reimbursem*nt for a $130,000 hush-money payment he made to Ms. Daniels. Mr. Trump has denied the charges and the sexual encounter.
Once deliberations begin Wednesday, no one knows how long they will take. If convicted, Mr. Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — could face prison or probation.
Here are five takeaways from closing arguments and Mr. Trump’s 21st day on trial.
‘Michael Cohen is a liar’ was a refrain. It may be the defense’s best bet.
“The human embodiment of reasonable doubt.”
“An M.V.P. of liars”
“The greatest liar of all time.”
Those were words Mr. Blanche used to describe Mr. Cohen, saying Mr. Trump’s former fixer and lawyer had “an ax to grind” after being passed over for a White House job and pleading guilty to federal charges related to the hush-money payment.
Mr. Blanche’s calculation was simple: Mr. Cohen had linked Mr. Trump to the payment of Ms. Daniels, saying the former president directed him to “just do it.”
“What Mr. Trump knew in 2016, you only know from one source,” he said. “And that’s Michael Cohen.”
If jurors don’t believe Mr. Cohen, they may have a hard time finding Mr. Trump guilty.
The defense portrayed the payment as a workaday transaction.
Mr. Blanche sought to portray the conduct in the case as largely business as usual and not crime, including the use of a nondisclosure agreement to silence Ms. Daniels.
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Mr. Blanche also suggested there was no hard evidence of any untoward effort to influence the election.
“It doesn’t matter if there was a conspiracy to try to win an election,” Mr. Blanche said. “Every campaign in this country is a conspiracy,” he added, to get a candidate elected.
Indeed, he suggested that Mr. Trump was a victim of behavior equivalent to extortion, including by Ms. Daniels. He said the payoff “ended very well for Ms. Daniels, financially speaking.”
Stagecraft made an impact.
Mr. Blanche homed in on an Oct. 24, 2016, phone call that lasted about a minute and a half. In it, Mr. Cohen said, he had discussed the payoff with Mr. Trump. Mr. Blanche suggested Mr. Cohen had perjured himself, suggesting the call was actually to Mr. Trump’s bodyguard about pranks a teenager had played on him.
Mr. Steinglass, the prosecutor, had a dramatic response: Pretending to be Mr. Cohen, Mr. Steinglass feigned a conversation in which he was able both to tell the bodyguard about the prank and update Mr. Trump. It took less time than the actual phone call.
It was a sharp rebuttal to what had been a high point for the defense.
Mr. Steinglass directly addressed the defense’s focus on Mr. Cohen’s flaws, calling him an “ultimate insider” who had “useful reliable information.”
“They want to make this case about Michael Cohen: It isn’t,” Mr. Steinglass said. “It’s about Donald Trump.”
Prosecutors presented a unified tale.
In Mr. Steinglass’s closing argument, he focused on telling a sweeping story about fraud on American voters.
He argued that an agreement Mr. Trump struck with The National Enquirer to buy and bury unflattering stories was a “subversion of democracy” perpetuated by a “covert arm” of the 2016 Trump campaign. He added that the fraud deceived voters “in a coordinated fashion,” preventing the American people from deciding for themselves whether they cared that Mr. Trump slept with a p*rn star or not.
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His arguments, intended to rebut Mr. Blanche’s minimization of the election fraud claims, could be crucial. Prosecutors need to show that the business records were falsified to hide a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.
Now, we wait.
The jury will receive its instructions from the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, on Wednesday morning.
Mr. Trump will stay at the courtroom, or thereabouts, as will the massive press corps that has descended on Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building. The jury will retreat to discuss the case, perhaps sending out notes for help from the judge or to ask to review evidence.
Then — barring a hung jury — a verdict will come, bringing a celebration for Mr. Trump or for Manhattan prosecutors. Either way, however, the first criminal trial of an American president will be complete.
May 28, 2024, 8:26 p.m. ET
Matthew Haag
Here’s what the prosecution said in its closing argument.
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Over more than five hours on Tuesday, a Manhattan prosecutor made his final case to the jury in Donald J. Trump’s criminal hush-money trial that the former president had orchestrated “a conspiracy and a coverup” to help him win the 2016 presidential election.
The prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, argued that 20 witnesses called to the stand and evidence presented during six weeks of testimony had shown that Mr. Trump was guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The charges stem from his repayment, made on the eve of the 2016 election, of hush money that silenced a p*rn star’s account of a sexual encounter a decade earlier.
Mr. Steinglass wove a sweeping story of how Mr. Trump, with help from The National Enquirer and his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, among others, sought to bury negative news stories about Mr. Trump in the days and months before the election. One effort included the catch-and-kill operation to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels, the p*rn star, which Mr. Steinglass said kept the American public from knowing about her account when they voted.
“This scheme, cooked up by these men, at this time, could very well be what got President Trump elected,” Mr. Steinglass said. “This was overt election fraud, an act in furtherance of the conspiracy to promote Mr. Trump’s election by unlawful means.”
A deal with Ms. Daniels took on extra urgency, he said, following the leak in October 2016 of an “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Mr. Trump bragging about grabbing women’s genitals.
Mr. Steinglass started his closing argument by countering the statements by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche earlier in the day. He said that the Trump team’s closing argument — which claimed that Mr. Trump was a victim of extortion — did not change the underlying facts of the case. And, Mr. Steinglass noted, extortion is not a defense for falsifying business records.
Mr. Steinglass acknowledged to the jurors that some of the witnesses had biases. Both Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels have talked publicly about wanting to see Mr. Trump convicted, and Mr. Cohen admitted on the stand that he stole money from the Trump Organization. But he said their testimony was credible and often corroborated by others who took the stand.
“I’m not asking you to feel bad for Michael Cohen,” Mr. Steinglass told the jury. “He made his bed.”
At the end of the marathon day, just before 8 p.m., Mr. Steinglass said that while the former president is a former president, the law applies to him the same as it does to everyone else.
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May 28, 2024, 8:03 p.m. ET
Michael Gold
Reporting from inside the courthouse
After a marathon day in court, Trump opts not to deliver his usual remarks to the reporters waiting in the hallway. They said they were told he has a private event at 8:30 p.m.
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May 28, 2024, 8:02 p.m. ET
Kate Christobek
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Trump motions several times to his lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, as Justice Merchan asks if there is anything else the parties need to address. Trump whispers to Blanche and then pushes back quickly from the defense table before standing up to exit the courtroom.
May 28, 2024, 8:02 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
It was a long day, but it’s worth dwelling on where we’re at. Closing arguments just ended in the first criminal trial of an American president. Tomorrow, the jury will receive instructions on the law — from the judge this time, not a prosecutor — and then they will begin their deliberations, seeking to determine whether Trump is guilty or not guilty of 34 felonies. A remarkable moment as we near the end of this trial.
May 28, 2024, 8:05 p.m. ET
Kate Christobek
Reporting from inside the courthouse
In perhaps what is an acknowledgment of the late hour, Justice Merchan tells the courtroom that the proceedings will continue on Wednesday at 10 a.m.
May 28, 2024, 8:01 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Steinglass says that when the jurors deliberate, they should return and, in the interest of justice and the state of New York, find Trump guilty on all 34 counts against him. Steinglass is done, with less than five minutes to go.
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May 28, 2024, 7:56 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Steinglass begins his final conclusion, thanking the jurors for their time and praising their remarkable punctuality as they arrived for proceedings day in and day out. And then he returns to talking about Trump, saying that the evidence is overwhelming and that while the former president is a former president, the law applies to him the same as it does to everyone else.
May 28, 2024, 7:57 p.m. ET
Maggie Haberman
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Specifically, Steinglass invokes Trump’s infamous line about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, saying that he in fact can’t. Blanche objects, and Merchan sustains it.
May 28, 2024, 7:57 p.m. ET
Kate Christobek
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Trump shakes his head as Steinglass says this line.
May 28, 2024, 8:06 p.m. ET
Maggie Haberman
Reporting from inside the courthouse
The closing argument from Steinglass, which lasted more than five hours, somewhat undermines the idea this is a simple case. It’s a simple story, but not a simple legal case.
May 28, 2024, 7:55 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Steinglass says that Trump’s intent to defraud could not be any clearer, arguing that Trump could have simply paid Daniels himself, but instead devised an elaborate scheme to pay Daniels secretly that required the involvement of at least 10 other people. “Everything Mr. Trump and his cohorts did in this case was cloaked in lies,” Steinglass says, adding, “The name of the game was concealment, and all roads lead to the man who benefited the most, Donald Trump.”
May 28, 2024, 7:46 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass has less than 15 minutes left to speak today. He is still seeking to convince the jurors of the specific unlawful means Trump, Michael Cohen and David Pecker used to aid Trump’s election. He is going to take this right down to the wire.
May 28, 2024, 7:46 p.m. ET
Maggie Haberman
Reporting from inside the courthouse
The sky outside the tall windows of the courtroom, which have blinds drawn over them, is starting to darken. It’s disorienting in here.
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May 28, 2024, 7:46 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
It seemed that Joshua Steinglass was finally done explaining the law. He said the prosecution had presented a “mountain of evidence” related to its theory of the Trump Tower conspiracy. But then he went right back to it, briefly, as he began to explain the “unlawful means” that prosecutors will ask the jurors to find Trump used to aid his election win.
The defense just lodged another objection, but Steinglass made it across the legal-explanation minefield to a safer zone of explaining the prosecution’s theory of unlawful means: That’s not a legal explanation, just argument.
May 28, 2024, 7:46 p.m. ET
Michael Gold
Reporting from inside the courthouse
It’s worth remembering that 10 or so hours ago, when we started these summations, Merchan advised the lawyers not to try to explain the law to the jurors, and said that his instructions on the law were the only ones that mattered.
May 28, 2024, 7:44 p.m. ET
Kate Christobek
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass is again showing the jury People’s Exhibit 350, a chart created by the prosecutors that summarizes the 34 counts. Earlier, Steinglass specifically called out this exhibit and told the jury that they could request to see this document during their deliberations. It will be interesting to see if they take him up on that when they start to deliberate tomorrow.
May 28, 2024, 7:45 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Another explanation of the law comes from the prosecutor at the lectern, and the judge again sustains, saying “I’ll explain the law.” “May we approach?” Steinglass asks. Merchan shakes his head no.
May 28, 2024, 7:38 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass — maybe, just maybe — appears to be winding down. He tells the jurors that the judge will explain reasonable doubt to them and asks them to listen carefully. He reminds them of the concept of accessorial liability: That a person who directs someone to commit a crime is equally guilty of that crime. Steinglass brings up his preferred analogy for this, the husband who hires a hitman to kill his wife. The defense objects and the judge sustains it: It is his role to explain the law, not Steinglass’s.
May 28, 2024, 7:44 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Steinglass pushed it and the judge appeared to get angry, reminding the prosecutor that it is the judge's job to instruct the jurors on the law. “Ok,” Steinglass said, and moved on.
May 28, 2024, 7:44 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Steinglass is really courting danger here as he continues to try to explain the law, but there has not been another objection. The judge is glaring at him, and flicking his eyes over at the defense table.
May 28, 2024, 7:36 p.m. ET
Michael Gold
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass is offering three rebuttals of the defense’s argument that Michael Cohen acted on his own, without Trump’s knowledge. First, he says that Trump was a micromanager who was directly involved with the details both of his business and his political campaign.
May 28, 2024, 7:36 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Second, Steinglass says, Cohen was and is a self-promoter and it “defies all common sense” that he’d undertake herculean efforts on behalf of Trump and keep it to himself.
May 28, 2024, 7:38 p.m. ET
Michael Gold
Reporting from inside the courthouse
And Steinglass’s third reason is that Trump was the only one who would have benefitted from the scheme that prosecutors accused him of. Cohen, he says, just wanted to be reimbursed and had no reason to push for creating false business records. “The defendant was the beneficiary of this entire scheme,” Steinglass says. “He was the one trying to get elected.”
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May 28, 2024, 7:36 p.m. ET
Maggie Haberman
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass is making a very specific argument in the context of this legal case — that Michael Cohen wasn’t just freelancing, as the Trump lawyers have suggested repeatedly as they tried to distance Trump from the events in the case. But it’s a microcosm of scenarios we’ve seen over and over with Trump for decades. S.E.C. investigators are told that staffers made mistakes, or reporters are told Trump was never really involved in specific controversies and aides actually had them.
May 28, 2024, 7:34 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass has less than half an hour left before he has to stop. He reviews the case for what may well be a final time, starting with the Trump Tower meeting. So this is an abridged version of his already abridged timeline, shrinking this sprawling case down to its key elements as he races the clock.
May 28, 2024, 7:35 p.m. ET
Maggie Haberman
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Steinglass is now presenting the many, many moments at which Trump spoke to key players in this series of events around the Stormy Daniels payment.
May 28, 2024, 7:34 p.m. ET
Maggie Haberman
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass is now walking the jurors through Trump’s own words in 2018, when he described the payments to Michael Cohen as “reimbursem*nts.” Steinglass shows a tweet from Trump, but he said it in a Fox News interview that summer as well. It’s why one of the defense's more head-scratching claims has been that this wasn’t a reimbursem*nt, it was for legitimate legal work.
May 28, 2024, 7:27 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
The point of reviewing this timeline again seems to be to link Trump to each and every action that prosecutors say led to the crime, the falsification of 34 business records related to the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels.
May 28, 2024, 7:29 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
But it may be difficult to understand why we’re reviewing these dates that we already spent so much time on today, and Joshua Steinglass, now back in February 2018, is not necessarily explaining exactly why he seems to be repeating himself.
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May 28, 2024, 7:17 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass has an interesting challenge here. He has to guide these jurors through some of the most important parts of his argument — the closing of his closing — while keeping an eye on the time, seeking to drive home the key points he wants to make without being repetitive or alienating them.
He’s got 45 minutes, and it seems as if he’s hoping to jolt the jurors, yelling that there’s no reason to believe that Cohen didn’t alert Trump to Stormy Daniels’s story in early October 2016.
May 28, 2024, 7:21 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Reviewing the evidence from that month that corroborates Cohen’s testimony, including his calls with Trump, Steinglass asks: “Is this timing just all a coincidence, every single one of these things? ” No, is his implied answer, so obvious he doesn’t say it. Instead, he asserts: “Mr. Trump is being kept abreast of every development.”
May 28, 2024, 7:23 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Steinglass is now highlighting more key testimony, including Hope Hicks's remarks that it would have been “out of character” for Cohen to have made that payment out of the kindness of his heart — meaning, without approval from Trump.
May 28, 2024, 7:16 p.m. ET
Maggie Haberman
Reporting from inside the courthouse
The jurors had seemed to be holding up, as we are entering hour 11 of them being here, before the last break. But some are starting to look a little over it.
May 28, 2024, 7:16 p.m. ET
Maggie Haberman
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass is talking about the infamous tape of Trump and Michael Cohen talking about the payment to Karen McDougal. Todd Blanche effectively pointed out that Cohen secretly taped a great many people, raising questions about his explanations for why he taped his own client. But it doesn’t change the content of the recording.
May 28, 2024, 7:15 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass, who had hewn to a chronological timeline, is now back in 2016 as he seeks to connect Trump to each element that prosecutors say is a crime. He argues that David Pecker corroborated the idea that Michael Cohen had kept Trump up to date on the hush-money payments at every step. Cohen, Steinglass says, “is not some rogue actor here.”
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May 28, 2024, 7:12 p.m. ET
Maggie Haberman
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Joshua Steinglass has presented a lot of evidence that Trump treats people terribly. That isn’t a point in major dispute. It remains to be seen if the jurors will consider those actions as part of a crime.
May 28, 2024, 7:12 p.m. ET
Jonah Bromwich
Reporting from inside the courthouse
Justice Merchan thanks the jurors for their flexibility again and calls Joshua Steinglass back to the lectern. Before they returned, the judge told the prosecutor that he needed to wrap up — at least for the day — by 8 p.m. If he does not conclude by then, it sounded as if it was possible that Steinglass would have to conclude tomorrow.
So we’ll see if he makes it under the wire, as the clock crawls on toward 7:15 and the light in the courtroom windows begins to change.
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May 28, 2024, 6:00 p.m. ET
Jesse McKinley
What is the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, and how does it factor into the trial?
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Donald Trump’s Lewd Comments About Women
In a 2005 recording obtained by The Washington Post before the presidential election, Donald J. Trump talks about women in vulgar terms to Billy Bush, then the host of “Access Hollywood.”
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About a month before Donald J. Trump was elected president in 2016, a recording surfaced of him speaking in vulgar terms about women, causing a crisis within the Trump campaign and pandemonium across the Republican Party.
The so-called “Access Hollywood” tape, first obtained by The Washington Post, showed Mr. Trump bragging about grabbing women’s genitals, saying he could do so with abandon because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Prosecutors have mentioned the tape at various stages of Mr. Trump’s criminal trial, including during closing arguments on Tuesday. They have argued that the release of the tape sent the campaign into damage-control mode to confront the intense fallout, becoming so desperate that Mr. Trump agreed to pay off Stormy Daniels, a p*rn star who was shopping a story of a 2006 sexual encounter with him.
Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000. The payment is at the heart of the 34 felony charges against Mr. Trump, who is accused of falsifying business records to cover it up.
On Tuesday, one of the prosecutors, Joshua Steinglass, reminded jurors, through testimony from Mr. Trump’s former spokeswoman Hope Hicks, that Mr. Trump recognized the potential damage of the tape.
Mr. Steinglass also showed jurors video clips of Mr. Trump himself acknowledging that the “Access Hollywood” tape and its aftermath could swing a very tight election. “If 5 percent of the people think it’s true, and maybe 10 percent,” Trump said in one clip, “we don’t win.”
On the tape, Mr. Trump recounted to the television personality Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood” how he once pursued a married woman, expressing regret that they did not have sex. He bragged about what he considered his special status with women.
“You can do anything,” Mr. Trump said on the three-minute recording, which was captured on the set of “Days of Our Lives,” where Mr. Trump was making a cameo appearance.
The judge in Mr. Trump’s criminal trial, Juan M. Merchan, had ruled in March that prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office could question witnesses about the tape, but found that it would be prejudicial to play the actual video. He reaffirmed that ruling on April 15.
“You can bring out what was said in the tape,” Justice Merchan said, adding that he didn’t want jurors “to hear Mr. Trump’s voice and his gestures.”
In a victory for the defense, the judge also ruled that day that the prosecution could not introduce evidence about sexual assault allegations against Mr. Trump that arose after the tape became public, calling them “complete hearsay.”
However, Justice Merchan said that prosecutors could introduce emails that followed the tape’s disclosure, showing frantic efforts by Trump advisers to contain the fallout. The correspondence, he said, “bolsters the people’s claim that this was a crucial event.”
One of those emails, from Ms. Hicks to other campaign aides after the tape was released, included a transcript of Mr. Trump’s remarks, introducing those comments to jurors.
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