The defense team representing former President Donald Trump against New York’s "hush money" allegations has rested.
Judge Juan Merchan said he wanted to avoid creating a large gap of time between summation and deliberations. He sent the jury home until May 28 and warned the members not to research the case.
Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has accused the former president of taking part in a plan to pay pornographic performer Stormy Daniels to prevent her from selling her claims that she had an affair with Trump to a tabloid ahead of the 2016 election. While the hush money charges could have been misdemeanors, the prosecution claims Trump’s alleged actions were a form of election interference. Trump pleaded not guilty and his lawyers rested their case without calling him to the stand.
The trial has so far lasted nearly five weeks. Prosecutors called an array of witnesses, including Daniels, National Enquirer Published David Pecker, and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign press secretary Hope Hicks. Their case, however, seemed to largely rest on the testimony of Michael Cohen, a former attorney for Trump who orchestrated the $130,000 payment to the porn actress at the center of the state’s allegations.
The defense pressed Cohen on details of his testimony and called into question his credibility during four days of cross-examination. Cohen was previously convicted of tax evasion, campaign finance violations, and making false statements.
On the stand, Cohen admitted to stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organizations while also making payments to Daniels and a tech company. He said he viewed the money as a form of “self-help” after his annual bonus was reduced.
When the trial reconvenes next week, both the defense and the prosecution will present their closing arguments. The judge estimated his deliberation instructions will take an hour and that the jury would most likely begin deliberating on May 29.
Before the court was dismissed for the day, the judge, prosecutors and lawyers debated the charges against Trump and the jury instructions.
The defense questioned the language of the Federal Election Campaign Act and argued that the “unlawful means through which the alleged conspiracy was carried out should itself be a criminal violation, necessitating the addition of the term ‘willfully’ in two places,” reports NBC News.
“The government says that the language of New York Election Law 17-152 (which is apparently the crime the district attorney's office will argue Trump intended to conceal) only discusses ‘unlawful means,’ and it is not limited to criminal violations,” added the outlet.
Donald Trump Jr., President Trump’s eldest son, attended the trial. He told Breitbart that the case is setting a “disastrous precedent” and that all of America should be “embarrassed” by the “absolute miscarriage of justice.”
“There’s no crime. The only problem is the witnesses who are experts in these things aren’t allowed to actually testify to that, because you have a rigged system,” said Trump Jr.
“If it can happen to Donald Trump … with a platform, hundreds of millions of followers, the ability to fight — they will do it to anyone, and they have weaponized this system against their political enemies, and they’ve started to go down a very dangerous and a very slippery slope,” he continued. “This insanity cannot stand.”
