We will know within days, if not hours, whether it was truly a bad omen for Donald Trump, but legal experts said the series of questions asked by the jury in his hush-money trial suggest the prosecution's argument – that the former president engaged in a criminal conspiracy before and after the 2016 election – has 12 New Yorkers seriously pondering a conviction.
On Wednesday afternoon, the jury considering whether to find Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records submitted a note requesting to review four pieces of evidence: the testimony from former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker concerning a phone call he had with Trump, in which, according to Pecker, the former president named Michael Cohen as his point man; Pecker's discussion of Playboy model Karen McDougal and Cohen's efforts to buy her silence; and both Pecker and Cohen's accounts of a 2015 meeting at Trump Tower where the Republican candidate, they say, agreed to a catch-and-kill scheme to keep damaging stories out of the press.
