Jury To Begin Deliberations In Trump Hush Money Trial

deadline.com:

After a marathon day of closing arguments in Donald Trump’s New York hush-money trial, jurors are poised to begin deliberating the former president’s fate today on 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records — the last phase of an unprecedented case pitting Trump against the city and state where he made his name.

The jury will have to decide if the maneuvering around a $130,000 payoff in 2016 to porn star Stormy Daniels by Trump’s roving legal fixer, Michael Cohen, was “a conspiracy and a cover-up” designed to “hoodwink voters,” as Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass put it on Tuesday, citing a “mountain” of documentary evidence he said corroborated the testimony of Cohen, Daniels and numerous other witnesses.

Defense lawyer Todd Blanche gave jurors another option: to regard the whole transaction as a messy backstage campaign drama unworthy of felony prosecution, and unprovable in any case with convicted, disbarred lawyer Cohen — the “GLOAT,” or “greatest liar of all time,” in Blanche’s words — as the prosecution’s star witness.

Trump says Daniels’ claim of a sexual encounter with him in 2006 is made up. His lawyers have argued that the 34 checks, pay stubs and ledger entries in 2017 logging payments totaling $420,000 to Cohen were for legal work, not falsified documents in a scheme alleged by prosecutors to disguise Cohen’s reimbursement and keep voters in the dark.