May 29, 2024 4:42 PM ET
4:42 PM ET May 29, 2024. Crowds waiting to enter the trial. Photo by Josh Cochran.
Donald Trump dozed off while the judge was giving crucial instructions to the jury on Wednesday, getting up once to ask one of his lawyers for a bottle of Poland Spring. (Trump's favorite, Diet Coke, is banned in the courtroom.) After Judge Juan Marchand ordered the jury to deliberate, Trump chatted with Donald Jr. and Alina Hubba, his incompetent lawyer from his previous trial. Then he pursed his lips, took rapid breaths, and appeared anxious.
“Mother Teresa couldn't defeat the charges” because of the way a judge he called “corrupt” had instructed the jury. He seemed to imply he thought a guilty verdict was likely.
Indeed, Marchan's hour-long jury instructions were standard in New York and included unsurprising rulings dating back to pretrial motions in March — the only difference was that he read the more complicated sections twice.
The judge sided with the defense and told the jury that to focus on tax violations they would have to find that Trump “knowingly” conspired to commit the illegal act, but he twice noted that if they found campaign finance violations to be an underlying crime, there would be a blanket ban on corporate contributions and an individual contribution cap of $2,700 — far less than the $130,000 hush money Michael Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels with Trump's approval.
Judge Marchan essentially instructed the jury that they could believe Cohen lied on many counts but find him credible on others. He also told the jury “do not have to be unanimous as to whether the defendant committed a crime personally or conspired with others to commit a crime, or both.” Unanimity would only be necessary to find the defendant guilty on all 34 charges.
Because state law requires intent to commit another crime to falsify business records, the judge spent a lot of time defining that term.
After about five hours of deliberation in the afternoon, the jurors sent a memo to the judge asking him to reconsider at least some of the judge's complicated instructions, which will likely happen on Thursday. The jury also wants to see again testimony from former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker about a specific 2016 phone conversation with Trump that he had five weeks ago (emphasized by prosecuting attorney Joshua Steinglass in closing arguments on Tuesday). They also want to hear again why Pecker walked away from the deal with Karen McDougal and how Pecker and Cohen described the August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower that prosecutors say was where the conspiracy began.
Trump's legal team also highlighted the meeting, arguing that it's common for candidates to “work with the media” to hushed up sex stories, as Pecker said he did with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rahm Emanuel. (It's not common.)
Jurors are used to keeping poker faces, so it's hard to tell which way they're moving, but you can tell they're carefully considering the evidence.
Show more
Source link
