Jury to decide Trump’s fate in NY hush money case

Twelve New Yorkers will soon be tasked with a mission unlike any other in history.

They will consider whether former president and current presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump should be convicted and create a scenario in which a felon could be elected to the White House.

The 12 justices must reach the same verdict on all 34 charges against Trump or the case will end in a mistrial.

Who knows what they will decide.

“Anyone who claims to know what a jury will do or how long it will take is either lying to you, lying to themselves, or a lot smarter than anyone I’ve ever met,” said Mitchell Epner, a former New York federal prosecutor now with the law firm Kudman Trachten Aloe Posner.

The jury trial against Trump, which begins this week, will focus not on his recent run for president but on his 2016 campaign. He is accused of falsifying business records to hide payments to porn stars just weeks before voters decided whether to elect him that year. Jurors ultimately gave Trump a surprise victory.

Prosecutors say Trump instructed his allies to stifle publicity at all costs. The money was paid to prevent a scandal from becoming public because one more scandal could have derailed his presidential ambitions. But the defense argues that Trump kept his allies at arm’s length from working to put him in the nation’s highest office and was unaware of the illegal schemes they engaged in to get him there.

Trump’s criminal trial has seen testimony from 22 witnesses, all of whom were former associates of the president, over the course of more than four weeks, and once closing arguments finish on Tuesday, the former president’s jury is expected to begin deliberating this week to find him innocent.

Trump’s jury is a melting pot of Manhattanites, from physical therapists to investment bankers, immigrants to lifelong New Yorkers.

They were selected to hear Trump’s case over four days in April, a hearing complicated by Trump’s controversial political reputation, deep ties to New York City and intense media coverage.

The jury is made up of seven men and five women, most of whom are college educated and follow a range of media outlets. Notably, two of the jurors are lawyers.

While having lawyers on the jury panel may seem ideal in a complex and significant case like Trump’s, it can be a “double-edged sword,” said former Manhattan prosecutor Jeremy Saland.

“You don’t want an attorney who knows the law and understands the law to impose their own way of using the law, their own way of reading the law, their own understanding of the law on the rest of the jury,” Saland said. “Even if that’s unintentional, you don’t want the juror to expect that attorney to say, ‘Oh, I see, that’s what you meant,’ or, ‘Oh, thanks for explaining that area of ​​law to me.'”

“I don’t want to give too much weight or importance, even if it’s unintentional, to the idea that juries are equal,” he continued. “This isn’t an Orwellian novel. You know, it’s not, ‘All jurors are equal, some jurors are more equal than others.'”

Once the jury leaves to decide, the 12 lawyers have equal opportunity to choose whether to help or hinder the prosecution in the Manhattan district attorney’s case, said Jessica Levinson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Levinson said prosecutors may be hoping that lawyer jurors can act as “teaching assistants” in the deliberation room, walking jurors through some of the complex procedures they need to follow to decide whether to convict Trump of complex campaign finance violations.

But she said jurors could also point out the numerous elements that jurors must unanimously agree on to convict Trump and suggest that if they couldn’t agree on just one, “the whole thing falls apart.”

There are several pressing questions the jury must answer that could make or break the case.

When the National Enquirer and its then-publisher David Pecker suppressed negative stories about Trump and emphasized bad news about his 2016 opponent, were they acting in the interest of magazine sales or to pave the way for Trump to reach the White House?

Was porn actress Stormy Daniels’ detailed testimony about an alleged sexual relationship with Trump unnecessary in a lawsuit over falsifying business records, or does it prove that Trump was hiding something from voters?

And perhaps most pertinent of all: can Michael Cohen be trusted?

Cohen, a former Trump operative who paid Daniels to silence her and orchestrated other hush-money deals, was the district attorney’s star witness and the last person to take the stand in his main case.

Before jurors met Cohen, prosecutors warned him he had “some issues.”

Cohen, who was once Trump’s personal lawyer, also pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance and other charges related to the conspiracy for which Trump is currently indicted.

Nonetheless, Cohen provided some of the most incriminating testimony against Trump.

He acknowledged that 11 invoices he submitted to Trump that form the basis of the 11 charges he faces were false records. He said the $35,000 Trump paid him each month in 2017 was for “marginal” work he did for his then-boss, undermining defense arguments that the invoices, which form the basis of 11 other charges against Trump, were for attorneys’ fees.

He also recounted the vast conspiracy to interfere in the election that prosecutors are trying to convince jurors of, admitting to paying Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet and arranging two other deals at Trump’s direction.

“Sometimes we just have to take Michael Cohen at his word,” Epner said of the state lawsuits, but noted that many of the cases have extensive corroboration. “Most importantly, Michael Cohen is the only person Donald Trump has ever heard any details about how this compensation program works and is the only source of direct evidence.”

“And if Donald Trump heard it and didn’t agree with it, then he’s not guilty,” he added.

During three days of cross-examination, the defense accused Cohen of lying and of misconduct that Trump didn’t know about, saying the hush money deals were a fraud of which he was unaware. Cohen admitted under cross-examination that he stole from the Trump Organization and that he repeatedly posted accusations against his former client online, including during the trial.

With Cohen’s credibility under attack, jurors’ perception of his testimony is an uncertain factor — a dangerous position for prosecutors, whose case could be significantly strengthened by the former fixer’s allegations.

“Much of this will be directly and indirectly the fault of Michael Cohen,” Salland said.[Jurors] “You’d have to say, ‘Yes, I hate Michael Cohen. He’s a shady, lying, disreputable, selfish, vindictive little man. But at the same time, I understand his feelings.'”

But defense attorneys may have their own credibility issues that jurors must consider.

Their main witness was Robert Costello, a lawyer who once advised Cohen and acted as an intermediary between the Trump White House, then under federal investigation, and the exiled fixer.

Costello denied Cohen’s testimony that a “pressure campaign” had been waged against him, and complained about it to Judge Juan Marchan while on the stand, prompting the judge to reprimand him and remove him from the courtroom.

Legal experts agreed that jurors trust the judge more than anyone else in the courtroom.

“Jurors are looking to the judge for clues and clues about what’s credible and what’s problematic,” Levinson said, “and when they see a witness having an adult tantrum and the judge clears the room, that sends a very important message to jurors.”

Once the jury accepts the case, they can reach a verdict at any time.

If the jury finds Trump guilty, he would be the first U.S. president to be convicted of a crime and the first major party nominee to be convicted of a felon. If the jury acquits Trump, he will have evaded the law once again.

Salland said it would be “naive” to think the gravity of the jury’s historic decision would not affect their deliberations.

“It doesn’t matter whether you think it’s a stupid prosecution, a meritless prosecution, a political prosecution, or whether you think it’s absolute justice and a necessary prosecution,” he said, “because if you’re sitting in a jury room, regardless of what you do, what you say, what the outcome is, it could have far-reaching ramifications that we can’t really contemplate right now.”