After Closing Statements At Trump’s Hush Money Trial, Jury Starts Deliberations

On Tuesday, attorneys in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial delivered their closing arguments, concluding the Manhattan proceedings. Jurors began deliberations on Wednesday.

As the first former American president to face a criminal trial, Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. These charges stem from a $130,000 reimbursement to his former attorney Michael Cohen for a 2016 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Trump has consistently denied Daniels’ claims of an alleged affair and has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

During closing statements, which extended more than three hours past the jurors’ usual dismissal time, the defense was the first to present its case. It argued that Trump was unaware of the payment to Daniels and maintained that the checks to Cohen were legitimate payments for legal services, not hush money.

Trump’s defense attorney, Todd Blanche, listed ten aspects of the case that he believed should leave jurors with a reasonable doubt. He argued that Trump had no intention to influence the 2016 presidential election, pushing back on claims about Trump’s relationship with National Enquirer publisher David Pecker who helped “catch and kill” potentially damaging stories about Trump.

Blanche argued that Daniels’ story had already been publicized in 2011 in a brief post on the celebrity blog The Dirty, eliminating any need for a hush money payment.

However, Trump’s defense team spent most of their time attacking Cohen’s credibility, calling him the “human embodiment of reasonable doubt” and arguing that he went “rogue” in making the payment to Daniels.

“He lied to you repeatedly. He lied many, many times before you even met him,” Blanche told jurors, “His financial well-being will depend on this case. He is biased and motivated to tell you a story that is not true.”

Blanche went on to call Cohen the “MVP of lying,” dubbing him the “GLOAT” or “The Greatest Liar Of All Time.”

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg‘s team focused on prosecuting Trump for falsifying business records referencing illegitimate checks and invoices. He pointed out the “mountain” of evidence the jury would need to ignore to believe that the $420,000 checks were merely legal expenses for Cohen’s work as Trump’s attorney.

Jurors would need to believe that both Pecker and Daniel’s attorney, Keith Davidson, were lying when they testified that Cohen expected reimbursement for the hush money. They would also have to discredit the Trump Organization’s Jeffery McConney, who explained that CFO Allen Weisselberg told him they were reimbursing Cohen.

Prosecuting attorney Joshua Steinglass highlighted the anything-but-normal “corrupt bargain” between Trump and Pecker, calling it a “subversion of democracy” and “could very well be what got President Trump elected” the following year.

In summarizing his arguments, Steinglass gave jurors three reasons why they should find Trump guilty.

First, “Trump is a micromanager. Second, Cohen was and is a self-promoter,” explaining that “it simply defies common sense” that Cohen would undertake such a “Herculean” effort to silence Daniels and then keep it to himself for leverage, as the defense had suggested.

“And the third reason,” Steinglass told jurors, “is because the defendant was the beneficiary of the entire scheme. The false business record benefited one person and one person only, and that is the defendant.”