NEW YORK — “We the jury have reached a verdict.”
After countless allegations and a seven-week trial in which 22 witnesses took the stand, Trump can no longer escape his fate.
A 12-member jury in New York delivered a verdict that shocked the political world on Thursday: They found Trump guilty of all charges in the case, making him the first former president to be indicted.
The jury finished its duties at 4:20 p.m., 10 minutes before dismissing for the day, after a total of about 11 hours of deliberations. There were gasps of surprise in the courtroom as the verdict was read out.
Trump laughed with his lawyer but quickly changed his tune and sat with his arms crossed, occasionally whispering with his lawyer, waiting for the arrival of 12 New Yorkers.
“We’d like to ask for an additional 30 minutes to complete the paperwork, is that possible?” the juror wrote in a note announcing they had reached a verdict, and the request was granted, creating a tense atmosphere in the courtroom.
Just after 5 p.m., jurors began streaming into the courtroom with verdicts in hand. On their way to the box, they passed Trump but didn’t look at him. Some glanced at the ground, others looked anywhere but at the defendant they were about to convict.
Two jurors exchanged nervous smiles as they sat down, while the others remained straight-faced when asked if they had actually reached a verdict.
“Yes, there is,” the foreman replied.
Then came the historic moment: the judge ad litem called for a verdict on the first count.
“Guilty,” the man said in an emotionless Irish accent, his neck red.
The judge quickly recited 33 more “guilty” verdicts and concluded that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) and his office had proven the entire case beyond a reasonable doubt. The verdict took just two minutes to read.
427 days after the former president was first indicted, Bragg also won the first guilty verdict. He sat in the second row of the gallery and stared straight ahead as the first “guilty” verdict rang out.
The guilty plea confirmed that Trump illegally falsified business records in an attempt to conceal hush money paid by a former operative to a porn star before the 2016 election.
Trump, his face red and biting his cheek, looked around the courtroom packed with reporters before trudging slowly out of the courtroom.
The former president has emerged through the courtroom’s twin sets of wooden and metal doors hundreds of times, fist pumped and carrying a printed stack of favorable press coverage, sometimes flanked by senior lawmakers, sometimes accompanied by an entourage of security guards and lawyers.
After being found guilty, Trump stood before the cameras one last time in the courthouse hallway, his solemn demeanor giving way to an expression of exasperation.
“This has been a rigged and dishonorable trial,” Trump said outside the courtroom. “The real verdict will be given by the American people on November 5th. The American people know what happened here, everybody knows what happened here.”
Across the street, a raucous crowd had gathered, louder than at any point during the trial, most of them celebrating the guilty verdict, but others were simply passing through the streets of Lower Manhattan.
Initially the crowd remained calm, pressed against barricades at the edge of the park, but the protest quickly became confrontational, with a large police presence nearby.
Pascal Hogue, a 22-year-old Columbia University journalism student, dropped by Manhattan Criminal Court after learning that his sentence would be handed down on Thursday. He attended several days of testimony at the start of the trial, including from star witness Michael Cohen, a central figure in the case and a fixer for Trump.
“I’m not surprised that there was ultimately a guilty verdict, but that’s for the jury to decide,” Hogue said.
Keith Allen, 56, of New York, who joined the crowd as he walked by, said he believed the verdict was just and was “emotional.”
“He should never have been president in the first place,” Allen told The Hill about Trump’s first term. “He’s a criminal.”
The trial is over, but it likely won’t be the last time Trump appears in Manhattan Criminal Court.
On July 11th, he will return to be sentenced in the same place where he once proclaimed his “innocent” status.
