(CNN) — It was a tawdry tale of lies, revenge and bribery, with a sordid alleged bedroom scene, a judge whose patience finally broke, and an angry defendant who was once president and has a chance to be president again.
But there will be no more evidence, witnesses or brutal cross-examinations in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, which has entered the final phase before jurors retire to deliberate their verdict in a landmark case tangled with the 2024 elections.
Unusually, there will now be a week-long pause—due to the Memorial Day holiday—between Tuesday’s final testimony and when lawyers for each side present their final stories in closing arguments. The judge will then give his instructions, a critical phase of the case in which the jury will learn to apply the law and weigh conflicting testimony and different types of evidence.
That’s when seven men and five women from New York will have to decide whether Trump will be the first former president convicted of a crime and the first possible candidate to run as a convicted felon.
The former president has been preparing for the moment for weeks. He has mounted a daily campaign to destroy the reputation of the court and Judge Juan Merchan, as well as the Manhattan District Attorney, Democrat Alvin Bragg, who prosecuted the case. “The judge hates Donald Trump, just take a look, take a look at him, take a look at where he comes from. He can’t stand Donald Trump,” the former president said this Tuesday in the last of his daily media outbursts in the hallway. . At one point, the judge threatened to send him to jail if he continued to violate the secrecy that protects key witnesses, establishing a red line that the former president has not yet crossed.
Trump’s bizarre practice of reading aloud criticism of the case from his allies in the conservative media was designed to create an atmosphere of grievance around the trial, which he has exploited to reinforce the central argument of his campaign toward White House: who is a persecuted victim of justice.
As the weeks passed, Trump was joined in court by a cadre of Republican lawmakers, exemplifying his complete control over the Republican Party after winning his third consecutive nomination and his continued genuflection toward a leader who sought to destroy American democracy to remain in power after the 2020 elections.
It’s still too early to know whether the case in which he has pleaded not guilty — and the eventual verdict — will have any influence on voters this fall. But the trial, which is closed to television cameras, does not appear to have captured the nation’s imagination.
The intricate task that awaits the jurors
It is impossible to know how jurors interpret the daily drama of the courtroom in any trial.
But there is a lot to resolve in a case that has serious implications for Trump’s future, and even his freedom, and that comes with enormous political overtones as it is potentially the only one of his four criminal trials to conclude before the election.
In a month of dramatic testimony, prosecutors alleged that Trump illegally falsified business records to cover up a $130,000 hush payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to mislead voters in 2016 in an example of election interference. Trump has denied the alleged affair with Daniels, and hush money payments are not illegal in and of themselves. But the jury must work through a complex legal equation at the heart of the case. To reach a guilty verdict, they must agree that New York state prosecutors have proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump falsified business records, which is normally a misdemeanor in the state. Then, to convict Trump of a felony, the jury must determine that this was done 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 his opening statement in April.
The defense, however, maintains that Trump is innocent of any crime. His lawyers have tried to cast doubt on the paper trail established by prosecutors, saying Trump had nothing to do with the falsification of financial records and have sought to erase the credibility of the prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen. The former president’s self-described “former fixer” is central to the case because he provided Trump’s only direct involvement in an alleged scheme to break the law by covering up the payment. And the defense sought to establish that Trump did not try to suppress details of his alleged affair with Daniels as part of a scheme to mislead voters. Rather, they argued, he was worried that he would upset his family.
And in his opening statement, Trump attorney Todd Blanche told jurors: “I have a spoiler alert. There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election: It’s called democracy.”
The fundamental witness
Cohen’s testimony will likely be a vital element of the deliberations, especially if the damage done to his reliability during a blistering interrogation is enough to convince one or more jurors that they cannot convict Trump based on his former fixer’s word.
Prosecutors knew they had a problem with Cohen heading into trial, since he had already gone to jail after being convicted of crimes related to the payment of surreptitious money and other crimes, including lying to Congress. Therefore, they tried to bolster his testimony before he took the stand with days of evidence. They called David Pecker, former head of American Media Inc, which publishes the National Enquirer. Pecker was not directly involved in the hush money payment that is at the center of the case. But he was used to establish that Cohen and Trump had a history of using payments to squash unflattering stories about the future president before the 2016 election.
Former White House communications director and longtime Trump adviser Hope Hicks was also called by prosecutors and appeared to put her former boss in a lot of trouble when she said her campaign was overwhelmed by concerns about the publication. of an “Access Hollywood” recording that showed him boasting that he could grab women by the genitals. Hicks stated that Trump believed Daniels’ story would be even more damaging. “It would be better to deal with it now, and it would have been bad for that story to come out before the election,” Hicks said of her thinking.
Why “it is better not to talk” about the most gruesome tests
In the most risqué chapter of the trial, Daniels was called to testify about her alleged relationship with Trump in a suite in Lake Tahoe in 2006.
Daniels said she “spanked” Trump “right in the butt” with a magazine and returned from the bathroom to find him in bed in his boxers and T-shirt. He said they had sex and that he was shaking when he left the room, which he remembered for its black and white tile floor. The judge had tried to limit the details of the encounter in advance, and after the testimony he commented that some of the explicit details were “better left unsaid.” But Daniels’ testimony was critical to the prosecution because it illustrated the alleged link it wants jurors to believe was the genesis of the cover-up.
When Cohen finally took the stand, he directly implicated Trump in the alleged scheme to buy Daniels’ silence. “He told me that he had talked to some friends, some individuals, smart people, and ‘what’s $130,000. You’re a billionaire, pay it. There’s no reason to keep this thing around, 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 that he had acted alone, saying that everything he did for his former boss required Trump’s signature, and that he wanted to make sure he was pay to.
But Cohen’s reputation came back to haunt him in a cross-examination in which the defense claimed that he was a liar obsessed with bringing down Trump and that he enriched himself from his appearances in the media and podcasts focused on his former idol.
The key moment came when Cohen stumbled upon a phone call about which he had previously testified under oath. He said he had discussed paying hush money with Trump in that October 2016 call. But the defense presented texts that Cohen sent before the call — made to the phone of Trump’s bodyguard, who was with the then-2016 Republican candidate. — that suggested the topic of the 96-second conversation was another matter. In response, prosecutors used their redirect examination to try to downplay a single call, and Cohen said he spoke to Trump about the payment on multiple occasions, not just on that one occasion.
But Trump’s lawyers on Monday pleaded with the judge to throw out the trial based on Cohen’s testimony, saying the jury should not be asked to return a verdict based on what the defense considered shaky evidence. “There is no way the Court will allow this case to go to the jury, based on Mr. Cohen’s testimony,” Blanche told Merchan.
Compared to weeks of testimony presented by the prosecution, the defense case lasted just 90 minutes and included just two witnesses before Trump’s lawyers rested Tuesday. That meant that the former president, who many experts thought would pose an enormous risk to his own case if he testified, did not take the stand.
Some experts wondered whether it would also have been better if the defense had not called one of its witnesses: Robert Costello, who got into a verbal altercation with an enraged Merchan, part of which was seen by the jury. In an extraordinary scene, Merchan asked if Costello was trying to stare at him after the witness showed contempt for several interventions by the judge.
Costello was intended to rebut a claim by prosecutors that Trump mounted a pressure campaign to keep Cohen quiet in 2018. But it may have ended up creating a hole in Trump’s defense, according to several legal experts. At the very least, his time on the stand may have refocused a case that in recent days seemed like it might revolve around Cohen’s reputation on the former president’s behavior and character.
It may all have been a sideshow that will have little to do with the final fate of the trial.
But only the jury can decide that.
