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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.
Digging further into the two sides’ dispute over the “catch-and-kill” allegations, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said during closing arguments Tuesday that it doesn’t matter that Karen McDougal preferred a deal that would help her career while not airing her claims of an affair with Donald Trump, as her former lawyer and others testified.
“Her motivations are totally irrelevant. The question is: What is the defendant’s motivation?” the prosecutor said, adding that that motivation “was to serve the campaign.”
Trump denies any sexual involvement with McDougal.
Batting back defense lawyer Todd Blanche’s argument that “every campaign in this country is a conspiracy to promote a candidate,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said during closing arguments that Trump’s alleged efforts to suppress negative stories that might hurt his 2016 White House bid were no different.
The purpose of the effort, Steinglass argued, was “to manipulate and defraud the voters, to pull the wool over their eyes in a coordinated fashion.”
Steinglass went on to call the National Enquirer’s work in that area on Trump’s behalf “one of the most valuable contributions that anyone ever made to the Trump campaign.”
“This scheme, cooked up by these three men, could very well be what got President Trump elected,” Steinglass said.
Steinglass also pushed back on Blanche’s contention that the National Enquirer’s deal to bury the Trump Tower doorman’s bogus story wasn’t a form of catch and kill.
Steinglass noted that the tabloid amended its source agreement with doorman Dino Sajudin so that he would be paid the agreed upon $30,000 fee within five days of signing the document — instead of upon publication of the story, as had been previously drafted.
“The only reason to kill a bogus story,” certainly wasn’t to act in a financially responsible fashion or satisfy the tabloid’s investors, Steinglass argued, but to be “in service of the defendant’s campaign.”
After Donald Trump’s lawyer had insisted to jurors that the hush money case rested on Michael Cohen and that they couldn’t trust him, Steinglass sought to persuade the group that there is “a mountain of evidence, of corroborating testimony, that tends to connect the defendant to this crime.”
He pointed to testimony from David Pecker and others, to the recorded conversation in which Trump and Cohen appear to discuss the Karen McDougal deal, and to Trump’s own tweets.
“It’s not about whether you like Michael Cohen. It’s not about whether you want to go into business with Michael Cohen. It’s whether he has useful, reliable information to give you about what went down in this case, and the truth is that he was in the best position to know,” Steinglass said.
The prosecutor then accused the defense of wanting to make the case all about Cohen.
“It isn’t. That’s a deflection,” he said. “This case is not about Michael Cohen. It’s about Donald Trump.”
While the defense in Donald Trump’s hush money case portrayed Michael Cohen as a lying opportunist who has profited off his hatred of Trump. prosecutors suggested in their closing arguments that the disbarred attorney had little choice but to parlay his history with Trump into books, a podcast, merchandise and more.
“I’m not asking you to feel bad for Michael Cohen. He made his bed,” Steinglass told jurors. “But you can hardly blame him for making money from the one thing he has left, which is his knowledge of the inner workings of the Trump Organization.”
The prosecutor later elaborated: “We didn’t choose Michael Cohen to be our witness. We didn’t pick him up at the witness store.”
“The defendant chose Michael Cohen to be his fixer because he was willing to lie and cheat on the defendant’s behalf,” he added.
Blanche, Trump’s lawyer, 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, Todd Blanche reminded jurors of 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 then 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.
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