On the docket: more than 10 hours of closing arguments
It’s all over but the deliberations.
After more than five weeks of dramatic testimony, Donald Trump’s business fraud hush-money trial concluded on Tuesday with more than 10 combined hours of closing arguments.
Trump’s team portrayed Trump as the victim of a vindictive former employee, ex-Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. Trump was far too busy as president to pay attention to the details of the money he paid Cohen, they argued during almost three hours of summation.
Prosecutors spent six hours reviewing the evidence and testimony they’d elicited that they say show he’d falsified business records to cover up his repayment to Cohen for paying porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 before the 2016 election to keep quiet about her claim she’d had an affair with Trump.
At 8pm ET, prosecutors finally wrapped up. Jurors will return on Wednesday morning to receive instructions and guidance from Judge Juan Merchan, then head to deliberate whether Trump is guilty.
Here’s how each side closed their case:
What Trump’s lawyers argued
Michael Cohen is a liar and an unreliable witness
The core of Trump’s legal argument is that Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and attorney and the star witness of the trial, is a serial liar with an ax to grind against his old boss.
“Cohen is the human embodiment of reasonable doubt,” said Trump attorney Todd Blanche.
Blanche argued that Cohen lied about talking to Trump about paying off Daniels during a short phone call he made to Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller in late October 2016.
He also suggested that Cohen, or someone else, might have tampered with evidence, pointing to a recording Cohen made of a phone call with Trump where they discussed the scheme to buy the silence of former Playboy model Karen McDougal. The recording cut off abruptly; Blanche argued that shows it might have been doctored.
Trump paid Cohen properly
Blanche said that Trump’s payments to Cohen, which were reported as “legal services”, were properly described because Cohen was Trump’s personal attorney at the time.
“There’s no other way to categorize an invoice from a lawyer” to Trump, Blanche argued. “The government has criminalized that,” he continued. “That’s absurd.”
He also argued that Trump didn’t actually know that payments to Cohen had been classified that way, pointing out that he was a busy president when he signed the checks to Cohen.
This is key: Trump has been charged with falsifying business records. If Trump’s team can convince at least one juror that never happened, or that Trump didn’t know about it, then he won’t be convicted.
There’s no proof of election interference
To charge Trump with felony counts of falsifying business records, prosecutors need to show that he likely did so in furtherance of another crime: In this case, conspiring to unlawfully boost his 2016 election chances. Trump’s attorneys tried to undercut that narrative as well.
Blanche pointed out that the National Enquirer’s head honcho David Pecker had killed negative stories about Trump as early as 1988. And he argued that Trump wanted to keep Daniels’ allegations that they’d had an affair out of the news because of how his family, especially his wife Melania, would react.
He also claimed that even if Trump had been trying to boost his election chances, that’s just how campaigns work. “It doesn’t matter if there was a conspiracy to try and win an election. Every campaign in this country is a conspiracy to win an election. You have to find that this effort was done by unlawful means,” he said.
What prosecutors argued
Focus on the ‘smoking gun’ documents
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass zeroed in on the January 2017 meeting between Cohen and then Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg where they hammered out the plan for Trump to repay Cohen for the $130,000 he paid Daniels, according to Cohen. And he pointed to the “smoking gun” – the document where Weisselberg wrote down how much Cohen would be paid.
Steinglass also mocked Trump’s lawyers’ contention that the massive payments to Cohen were for legal work.
“I’m almost speechless that they’re still trying to make the arguments that in 2017 the payments were for services rendered,” Steinglass said, pointing to Cohen’s testimony that he did perhaps 10 hours of legal work for Trump and his family in all of 2017, but was paid $420,000. “Cohen spent more time being cross-examined at this trial than he did doing legal work for Donald Trump in 2017,” Steinglass said. “Do you think that Donald Trump would spend $42,000 an hour on legal work?”
The hush-money payments ‘had everything to do with the campaign’
Multiple witnesses made it clear that Trump was worried about what Daniels’ story could do to his election prospects in 2016, the part of the scheme that would warrant felony convictions.
“The payment had everything to do with the campaign – it was an unlawful campaign contribution to the campaign,” Steinglass said.
There’s no way Trump would pay Cohen $35,000 a month without caring
Steinglass pointed out multiple times that Trump physically signed many of the checks to Cohen. And he mocked Trump’s lawyers’ claim that Trump had no part in the scheme for Cohen to be repaid.
“What is the defense here? Trump didn’t know about the reimbursement – that it was all cooked up by Weisselberg and Cohen?” Steinglass said, incredulously. “Despite his frugality and attention to detail, the defendant didn’t ask any questions because he already knew the answers.”
Steinglass then quoted Trump bragging about how frugal he is – including a line from one of his books: “I always sign my checks, so I know where my money’s going.”
‘This case is not about Michael Cohen’
Prosecutors tried to emphasize the hard evidence and other witnesses that corroborated Cohen.
“This case is not about Michael Cohen. This case is about Donald Trump. And whether he should be held accountable for making false entries in his own business records. Michael Cohen’s significance in this case is that he provides color and context to documents. He’s like a tour guide,” Steinglass said.
But they still needed to defend their star witness.
Steinglass said that Cohen was “understandably angry” at Trump because “to date, he’s the only one who paid the price.”
Sidebar: Biden’s campaign shows up at the courthouse
President Biden’s campaign has largely avoided weighing in on Trump’s trial – but on Tuesday that changed.
The Biden campaign held a press conference outside the courthouse with actor Robert De Niro and a pair of police officers who defended the US Capitol from pro-Trump rioters on January 6 2021.
“At the end of the day, this election is about Donald Trump and his vision for the office of the president of the United States, not as a public servant who answers to the elected, to the people who elected him, but as an authoritarian, who answers to and serves only himself,” said former Capitol police officer Michael Fanone.
