It all comes down to this.
On Wednesday, the jury in Donald Trump’s hush money trial will receive instructions from Judge Juan Merchan on the relevant law in the case. They are then expected to begin deliberations in which the 12-member panel will try to reach a unanimous decision about whether or not to convict the former president.
Exactly how long it will take jurors to reach a verdict remains anyone’s guess. They’ll have to weigh the conflicting narratives put forward by the prosecution and Trump’s defense team about the current presumptive Republican nominee’s involvement in a scheme to silence a porn star’s claims of a sexual encounter with Trump ahead of the 2016 election.
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The deliberations will begin after the opposing legal teams made their final pitches to jurors in closing arguments Tuesday.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors claim Trump’s former-lawyer-turned-nemesis Michael Cohen paid adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to stop her from speaking about her account of a tryst with Trump, and that the Trump Organization then falsely recorded reimbursements to Cohen as legal fees in order to conceal the hush money scheme. Trump did so, they claim, to protect his 2016 campaign and thereby unlawfully influence the election. Trump denies having sex with Daniels.
“We’ll never know if this effort to hoodwink the American voter impacted the election, but that’s something we don’t need to prove,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said during his closing arguments. He spent hours walking jurors through the testimony and evidence at trial which he claimed put Trump at the heart of a criminal conspiracy.
“The name of the game is concealment, and all roads lead inescapably to the man who needed it most, the defendant, former President Donald Trump,” Steinglass said.
Trump’s defense attorneys had argued earlier in the day that the former president was himself being targeted by an extortion scheme, and that the prosecution’s case rested on the testimony of Cohen—a man Trump lawyer Todd Blanche called the “greatest liar of all time.” Blanche insisted there “was no conspiracy to influence the 2016 election” and that the payments made to Cohen were actually for legal services.
When jurors complete their deliberations, there are several possible outcomes. They could convict him on all of the charges or acquit him of every count. Or they could reach a mixed verdict, finding him guilty on some of the counts and not guilty on others. If for any reason the panel cannot come to a unanimous decision, Judge Merchan could eventually declare a mistrial.
