NEW YORK (AP) — Closing arguments in Donald Trump 's historic hush money trial began Tuesday morning in a Manhattan courtroom, giving prosecutors and defense attorneys one final opportunity to convince the jury of their respective cases before deliberations begin.
Defense lawyer Todd Blanche spoke for about 2 1/2 hours in the morning while prosecutor Joshua Steinglass was expected to go as long as 4½ hours.
Jurors will undertake the unprecedented task of deciding whether to convict the former U.S. president of felony criminal charges stemming from hush money payments tied to an alleged scheme to buy and bury stories that might wreck Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
At the heart of the charges are reimbursements paid to Michael Cohen for a $130,000 hush money payment that was given to porn actor Stormy Daniels in exchange for not going public with her claim about a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump.
Prosecutors say the payments to Cohen, Trump's then-lawyer, were falsely logged as “legal expenses” to hide the true nature of the transactions.
Trump has denied all wrongdoing.
He pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records, charges which are punishable by up to four years in prison.
Closing arguments are expected to last all day Tuesday, with jury deliberations beginning as soon as Wednesday.
The case is the first of Trump's four indictments to go to trial as he seeks to reclaim the White House from Democrat Joe Biden.
The other cases center on charges of illegally hoarding classified documents at his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It’s unclear whether any of them will reach trial before the November election.
Currently:
— Here’s what every key witness said at Donald Trump’s hush money trial
— As Trump’s hush money trial nears end, would-be spectators camp out for days to get inside
— Closing arguments, jury instructions and maybe a verdict? Major week looms
— Trump hush money case: A timeline of key events
— Key players: Who’s who at Trump’s hush money criminal trial
— Hush money, catch and kill and more: A guide to unique terms used at Trump’s trial
Here's the latest:
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass on Tuesday afternoon tried in his summation to counter the defense’s efforts to discredit Michael Cohen’s testimony.
He said that the jury should take Cohen’s past dishonesty into account.
“How could you not?” he asked.
But he says that Cohen’s anger is understandable given that, “To date, he’s the only one that’s paid the price for his role in this conspiracy.”
Cohen, Steinglass argued, did Trump’s bidding for years, was his right-hand man, and when things went bad, was cut loose and thrown under the bus.
“Anyone in Cohen’s shoes would want the defendant to be held accountable,” he argued.
At the outset of its summation in Donald Trump's hush money trial, the prosecution sought to rebut the defense's claim that porn actor Stormy Daniels was trying to “extort” the then-presidential candidate.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass noted that Daniels' representatives initially sought to sell the story of a sexual encounter between the porn actor and Trump to media outlets — not to Trump. Steinglass also cited Daniels' testimony that she came to believe that going public was the best way to protect herself and her family from pressure to stay silent.
Regardless, allegations of extortion are “not a defense to election fraud,” the prosecutor said.
“You don’t get to commit election fraud or falsify business records because you believe you’ve been victimized,” he told jurors.
The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial told jurors after a lunch break that they must disregard an “improper” comment from defense lawyer Todd Blanche urging them not to send the former president to prison.
Judge Juan M. Merchan gave the instructions after scolding Blanche before the break over the remark made near the end of the defense’s summation.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass has begun delivering his closing arguments in Donald Trump's hush money trial. He speaks from the same podium that Blanche used, looking directly at jurors from a position between the prosecution and defense tables.
“This case, at its core, is about a conspiracy and a cover-up,” Steinglass said as he began.
Prosecutors have presented “powerful evidence of the defendant’s guilt,” he said.
As he continued, Trump sat at the defense table with his body angled toward Steinglass, listening as Steinglass spoke.
Donald Trump’s children held a news conference outside the courthouse during a lunch break in his hush money trial, with Donald Trump Jr. echoing defense lawyer Todd Blanche and calling Michael Cohen “the GOAT (greatest of all time) of liars.”
He said the Biden campaign holding a news conference at the trial showed the case was a “political persecution” and in using one of his father’s frequent terms, called it a “witch hunt.”
“This is a sham. This is insane. It needs to stop,” he said.
His brother Eric Trump decried “political warfare” and said his father is the “toughest man I’ve ever seen” and “he endures this nonsense every single day.”
“I want to say sorry to the jury that’s in there. This has been the greatest colossal waste of time,” he said.
Lara Trump, Eric Trump's wife and the Republican National Committee co-chair, said that Alvin Bragg, the top law enforcement officer in New York, was focusing on her father-in-law instead of crime in New York.
“If they can profit off it on the other side, so can we,” she said, and plugged Trump’s campaign website where donations can be accepted.
Before an afternoon lunch break, the judge in Donald Trump's hush money trial scolded defense lawyer Todd Blanche for imploring jurors not to send Trump to prison on the words of Michael Cohen and said he would instruct the jury to disregard the comment.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass had taken issue with what he cast as a “ridiculous comment” and asked the judge to intervene.
“I think that saying that was outrageous,” Judge Juan M. Merchan scolded Blanche. “Someone who’s been a prosecutor as long as you have and a defense attorney as long as you have, you know that making a comment like that is highly inappropriate. It’s simply not allowed. Period.”
If Trump is convicted, sentencing will be up to the judge, not the jury.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, charges punishable by up to four years in prison. It’s unclear whether prosecutors would seek imprisonment in the event of a conviction, or if the judge would impose that punishment.
Defense lawyer Todd Blanche finished his summation Tuesday by telling jurors the hush money case “isn’t a referendum on your views of President Trump.”
“This is not a referendum on the ballot box -- who you voted for in 2016 or 2020, who you plan on voting for in 2024. That is not what this is about,” the attorney told jurors. “The verdict you have to reach has to do with the evidence you heard in this courtroom,” and nothing else, he reminds them.
He implored the jury to return a quick “not guilty” verdict.
As he neared the end of his summation on Tuesday, defense lawyer Todd Blanche reminded jurors of Michael Cohen’s admitted fixation on Donald Trump — and his desire to see him behind bars.
Blanche played short clips of Cohen’s podcast in which he commended District Attorney Alvin Bragg and said that the idea of seeing the former president booked on criminal charges “fills me with delight.”
The case against Trump is built around testimony from “a witness that outright hates the defendant, wants him in jail, is actively making money off that hatred,” Blanche said.
While Cohen has testified that he lied to protect Trump, his family and others, Blanche asserted that the ex-lawyer “is lying simply to protect Michael Cohen and nobody else. Period.”
Blanche’s voice grew to a roar — the loudest he had been all morning — as he also declared that Cohen had lied about speaking to Trump by phone about the Stormy Daniels arrangement on Oct. 24, 2016.
“It was a lie,” Blanche said. “That was a lie and he got caught red-handed.”
Blanche called Cohen “literally like an MVP of liars.”
“He lied to Congress. He lied to prosecutors. He lied to his family and business associates,” he said.
Lawyer Todd Blanche tried on Tuesday to downplay the fallout from the “Access Hollywood” tape that sent Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign into a tailspin, telling the jury: “It was not a doomsday event.”
Blanche conceded in his summation that Trump was bothered by the story. “Nobody wants their family to be subjected to that type of thing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re running for office, if you’re running ‘The Apprentice’ ... Nobody wants their family exposed to that type of story.”
Nonetheless, he argued characterizations of the tape as devastating were an exaggeration. He pointed to testimony from Trump’s former assistant Madeleine Westerhout, whom he said cast the fallout as “a couple of days of frustration and consternation.”
Westerhout, who was then working for the Republican National Committee in close coordination with the Trump campaign, had testified that the tape “rattled the RNC leadership” but that Trump wasn’t thrown by it.
Reince Priebus, then-chair of the Republican National Committee, had told Trump after the tape was released that he had two choices: drop out of the race or lose by the largest margin in history, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has recounted.
Turning to Stormy Daniels’ story, defense lawyer Todd Blanche noted in his summation that her allegations of a 2006 sexual encounter with Donald Trump were aired on a gossip site in 2011 — four years before Trump announced his presidential candidacy. Trump has denied having sex with Daniels.
“So how could this issue have influenced the election?” Blanche argued. “People already knew about the allegations.”
At the behest of Daniels and Michael Cohen, the story was taken off the site.
Blanche asserted that the real impetus behind Daniels’ interest in making a deal in 2016 was that some people wanted to use the election as pressure to “extort” Trump.
Following a brief morning break, Blanche singled out that Daniels issued two statements in 2018 denying that she’d ever had a sexual encounter with Trump. She testified earlier in the hush money trial that she signed off on them at her lawyer’s urging.
Defense lawyer Todd Blanche spotlighted a key piece of prosecution evidence during his summation: the secret recording Michael Cohen says he made of himself briefing Donald Trump on a plan to buy the rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story from the National Enquirer.
Blanche said the September 2016 recording, which cuts off before the conversation finishes, is unreliable and was actually about a plan to buy a collection of material on Trump that the National Enquirer had been hoarding — not McDougal. Cohen has said the audio cut off because the iPhone he was using to make the recording was receiving a phone call.
“There is no doubt that this recording discussed AMI and discussed Mr. Pecker,” Blanche said, referring to the National Enquirer’s parent company and then-publisher. “There is a lot of doubt that it discussed Karen McDougal.”
After playing parts of the recording, Blanche urged jurors to trust their ears when deciphering a specific part — whether Trump mentioned a dollar figure that he might have to spend, as Cohen and prosecutors contend, or whether he said something else.
“What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Trump said, according to Cohen and prosecutors, as in $150,000.
“Listen to the recording. See if you hear one-fifty,” Blanche told jurors.
Donald Trump’s campaign staffers held their own news conference outside the courthouse Tuesday morning in the exact same spot where actor Robert De Niro and Jan. 6 officers had just spoken on behalf of Joe Biden's campaign.
Jason Miller, Trump’s senior campaign advisor, called De Niro “a washed-up actor,” and said the news conference showed that the hush money trial was political.
“After months of saying politics had nothing to do with this trial, they showed up and made a campaign event out of a lower Manhattan trial day for President Trump,” Miller said.
Karoline Leavitt, the campaign press secretary, called the Biden campaign “desperate and failing” and “pathetic” and said their event outside the trial was “a full-blown concession that this trial is a witch hunt that comes from the top.”
The defense in Donald Trump's hush money trial took issue on Tuesday with the notion that there was a conspiracy to suppress negative stories to help Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Defense lawyer Todd Blanche pointed to American Media Inc.'s $30,000 payment to Dino Sajudin, a former Trump Tower doorman who falsely alleged the former president had fathered a child out of wedlock. It was one of three potentially damaging stories about Trump the tabloid did not run.
Blanche then pointed to former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s testimony that he saw the doorman story as a potential blockbuster and would gladly have published it if it had been true.
“This isn’t a catch and kill. This is an opportunity,” Blanche said. “It was worth too much to catch and kill, full stop.”
He also noted Pecker had testified that the tabloid only published about half the stories they purchased.
“That’s meaningful. That matters,” Blanche told the jury.
He later targeted prosecutors' portrayal of Karen McDougal's deal with AMI as part of the purported hush money conspiracy, emphasizing testimony from her lawyer and others that she didn’t want her claim published.
Rather, Blanche said, the former Playboy model wanted to reenergize her career by getting into magazines, according to the testimony — though McDougal herself didn’t testify.
“This was not a catch-and-kill,” Blanche said.
Defense lawyer Todd Blanche implored the jury in Donald Trump's criminal trial to reject the prosecution’s contention that he engaged in a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election by involving himself in efforts to bury negative stories about him — and to reject the allegation that, after the fact, he falsified records of Michael Cohen’s payments to hide that conspiracy.
“The government wants you to believe that President Trump did these things with his records to conceal efforts to promote his successful candidacy in 2016, the year before,” Blanche said.
“Even that, even if you find that is true, that is not enough ... it doesn’t matter if there’s a conspiracy to win an election. Every campaign in this country is a conspiracy to promote a candidate, a group of people who are working together to help somebody win.”
After arguing earlier Tuesday that Donald Trump may not have been fully aware of all his invoices, defense lawyer Todd Blanche stressed to jurors that the former president was a stickler about watching his finances.
Michael Cohen received $420,000 in all from Trump in 2017, a sum that the ex-lawyer and prosecutors in the former president's hush money case have said included the $130,000 reimbursement related to Stormy Daniels, a $50,000 repayment for an unrelated expense and a $60,000 bonus. On top of that, prosecutors have said, there was extra money to cover taxes that would be due on the $130,000 as income — taxes that wouldn’t apply if it had simply been paid as a business expense reimbursement.
“That is absurd,” Blanche told jurors, pointing to “all the other evidence you heard about how carefully President Trump watches his finances.”
Biden campaign deploys actor Robert De Niro, Jan. 6 first responders near Trump’s trial
Joe Biden's campaign sent actor Robert De Niro and two law enforcement officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to an area in lower Manhattan not far from the criminal court where Donald Trump’s hush money trial is happening.
Speaking while the former president was stuck in court, De Niro said Trump wants to “destroy not only the city but the country and eventually he could destroy the world.”
As he spoke, Trump protesters screamed anti-Biden chants.
Defense lawyer Todd Blanche stressed during his summation on Tuesday that Donald Trump was busy during the time when he signed the checks at the heart of the hush money case.
“It matters where President Trump was,” Blanche said.
He noted Trump assistant Madeleine Westerhout had testified that the then-president would sometimes sign checks while meeting with people or while on the phone, not knowing what they were.
Blanche argued it was unreasonable to suggest Trump was aware of the details of every invoice just because he knew of some. “That is a stretch and that is reasonable doubt, ladies and gentlemen,” he said.
About an hour into the defense's closing arguments in Donald Trump's hush money case, defense lawyer Todd Blanche took aim at the prosecution’s use of excerpts from Trump’s books to attempt to portray him as a detail-oriented micromanager who would be fully aware of any money his company was spending.
The books were from a decade ago, if not older, and were written with the help of ghostwriters, Blanche told the jury.
“You should be suspicious. That’s a red flag,” Blanche said in an effort to pre-empt the prosecution’s closing.
Blanche then started digging into the details of how payments to Michael Cohen were made, first through a trust set up to hold Trump’s assets while he was in the White House, then through Trump’s personal bank account with checks signed by the then-president.
“This was a very confusing time for the Trump Organization,” Blanche said. There were a lot of adjustments being made as Trump’s assets were put under the trust’s control and it was the first time in decades that Trump wasn’t in charge, he added.
At one point, early in the repayment process in 2017, the then-Trump Organization finance chief emailed a subordinate that it was OK to pay Cohen out of the trust per an agreement with Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr., who were running the Trump Organization’s day-to-day operations at the time. Both were in court on Tuesday.
Blanche questioned why, if prosecutors allege Trump was involved in a conspiracy to conceal the nature of the payments, the sons he put in charge of his company weren’t called to the witness stand.
A key part of prosecutors’ claims in Donald Trump's hush money case is that his former lawyer Michael Cohen wasn’t being paid for legal work in 2017, but rather was being reimbursed in a veiled way for the Stormy Daniels payment.
Defense lawyer Todd Blanche pointed to emails and testimony Tuesday showing that Cohen did indeed work on some legal matters for Trump that year.
While Cohen characterized that work as “very minimal,” Blanche argued otherwise.
“Cohen lied to you. Cohen lied to you,” Blanche said, his voice getting more emphatic.
Blanche noted that Cohen went on TV to discuss his role as Trump’s personal lawyer and put the title in the signature block of every email he sent.
“This was not a secret. Michael Cohen was President Trump’s personal attorney. Period,” he said.
Joe Biden’s campaign announced on Tuesday that it would hold an event with “special guests” as closing arguments in Donald Trump's hush money trial are underway.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller said the former president’s allies will respond with their own event immediately following Biden’s.
He posted on the social platform X that Biden’s allies “aren’t in PA, MI, WI, NV, AZ or GA — they’re outside the Biden Trial against President Trump,” adding: “It’s always been about politics.”
The defense in Donald Trump's criminal trial is using a PowerPoint presentation as it begins its summation and tries to convince the jury that the former president is not guilty, instead shifting blame to former lawyer Michael Cohen and the Trump Organization.
Todd Blanche showed jurors copies of the invoices, vouchers and checks that are at the heart of the hush money case — vouchers and checks he says were entered and prepared by the Trump Organization’s accounting department.
The PowerPoint also notes Cohen sent the invoices for his services. None of the invoices were sent directly to Trump, Blanche said.
Insisting that prosecutors haven’t proven their case, defense lawyer Todd Blanche told jurors during closing arguments Tuesday morning that they “should want and expect more” than key prosecution witness Michael Cohen’s testimony, or that of a Trump Organization employee accounts payable staffer talking about how she processed invoices, or the testimony given by Stormy Daniels’ former lawyer Keith Davidson.
Blanche argued that Davidson “was really just trying to extort money from President Trump” in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
“The consequences of the lack of proof that you all heard over the past five weeks is simple: is a not guilty verdict, period,” Blanche said.
Blanche further laid into Cohen and his testimony, telling jurors he’ll come up repeatedly throughout the defense's summation.
“You’re going to hear me talk a lot about Michael Cohen, and for good reason. You can not convict President Trump, you can not convict President Trump of any crime beyond a reasonable doubt on the word of Michael Cohen,” Blanche said. Cohen “told you a number of things that were lies, pure and simple,” the lawyer added.
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