Jurors in Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush-money trial were asked to reconsider testimony about Trump’s role in an alleged conspiracy to hide his sex scandal from 2016 voters as deliberations in the unprecedented case began Wednesday.
The panel of seven men and five women – including two lawyers, a retired estate planner, a speech therapist and both Trump admirers and critics – considered the evidence for about five hours before taking a break.
“Not even Mother Teresa could win this charge,” the 77-year-old Trump told news cameras in a court hallway shortly after deliberations began at about 11:37 a.m.
“These charges are fraudulent. They’re all fraudulent,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee told reporters.
About three and a half hours after the start of the trial, jurors returned to the courtroom with a memo requesting that they again hear testimony that Trump knew about what prosecutors say was an illegal scheme to bribe and conceal information from women who claimed to have had affairs with him before the 2016 election.
Jurors were asked to reconsider a June 2016 phone call testimony from National Enquirer publisher David Pecker in which Pecker said Trump asked Playboy model Karen McDougal whether she should pay her to keep quiet about an alleged affair with the real estate mogul.
Pecker testified that he advised Trump to make a payment to “take this story off the market.”
“I believed the story to be true,” he recalled telling Trump in the phone call.
“I think it was very embarrassing for him and for his campaign.”
Pecker also recalled that Trump had told him he was concerned McDougal’s story would get leaked anyway.
“[Trump] “I said, ‘I don’t believe any of this. If you do this, you’re going to get caught,'” Pecker testified.
Mr. Cohen called Mr. Pecker the next day and said, “You’d better believe this story,” and Mr. Pecker ended up paying Ms. McDougal $150,000 to keep her quiet, he later added in his testimony.
The jury also asked to hear again an account of a key meeting at Trump Tower in August 2015 between Pecker and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former “fixer” and personal lawyer.
Two prosecution witnesses testified that during the interviews, they hatched a plan to cover up the women’s stories about affairs with Trump and to run a promotional piece in the Enquirer extolling Trump’s virtues.
In their closing arguments on Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers tried to downplay the Enquirer’s impact on voters in 2016, but prosecutors pointed out that the magazine’s covers could be seen in supermarkets across the country.
The jurors also asked to hear again instructions from Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Marchan on how to determine whether Trump should be found guilty of illegally concealing $130,000 in hush money that Cohen paid to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Prosecutors allege that the Trump Organization documents, including 11 invoices, 12 vouchers and 11 checks, all incorrectly state the purpose of the payments to Cohen as “legal services” rather than reimbursement for payments to Daniels.
A jury could find Trump guilty of any or all of the 34 charges he faces for falsifying business records, felonies that theoretically carry up to four years in prison each.
To convict, jurors would also have to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had “intent” – defined as “a conscious purpose or purpose” – to cover up a “conspiracy” to get himself elected.
Jurors will need to find that the alleged 2016 election conspiracy, including the hush money payments to Daniels and McDougal, was carried out using so-called “unlawful means.”
But to convict Trump, prosecutors “do not have to prove” that an underlying election crime actually occurred, only that Trump tried to cover it up, Marchan explained in his instructions to the jury Wednesday morning.
Judges can decide for themselves what those “illegal means” are. Marchan says they have three options:
The judge said the hush money payments exceeded the $2,700 limit for individual contributions to campaigns and could be found to violate federal campaign finance law, but only if it is determined that the payments would not have been made even if Trump had not been running for office.
Jurors could also find that the payments violated tax laws or that more business records were “falsified” during the course of the alleged conspiracy.
For example, a jury could find that Cohen used “unlawful means” when he falsified records and failed to tell banks the truth when setting up shell companies used to pay bribes, Marchan said.
Jury notes may show they are focusing on the election “conspiracy” portion of the case.
“I think the government has to do that because President Trump has not specified what those particular payments were for,” Jason Goldman, a veteran New York criminal lawyer, told The Post.
But he cautioned against reading too much into the panelists’ requests.
“Trying to predict the meaning behind a juror’s notes is like reading tea leaves,” Goldman said.
“At the same time, the records requests are insightful and suggest the jury is zeroing in on a few key players early on.”
Attorneys for both sides remained in the courtroom, finalizing portions of the transcript that will be read to the jury, which reconvenes at 9:30 a.m. Thursday.
Trump spoke out about the trial again as he left the courtroom on Wednesday, repeating his claim that the case is a “witch hunt.”
“Nobody knows what the crime is,” the former president insisted to reporters in the courthouse hallway.
“This is shameful.”
