NEW YORK – Jurors found former president Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts in the hush-money case that involved porn actress Stormy Daniels and his former attorney Michael Cohen.
Trump, convicted of charges related to falsifying business records, accused President Joe Biden’s administration of using the New York County court system to attack him politically.
“This was a rigged disgraceful trial. The real verdict is going to be November 5th by the people and they know what happened here,” Trump said outside of the courtroom.
Related document: Jury’s verdict sheet (.pdf)
Trump’s sentencing on the low-level felony case is set for July 11 — four days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Trump also accused New York County Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan — who has presided over the historic trial since it started with jury selection on April 15 — of being “conflicted” and “corrupt.”
“We didn’t do a thing wrong; I am a very innocent man,” Trump said adding, “I am fighting for our country. I am fighting for our Constitution.”
Related story: DeSantis shows solidarity with Trump
Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s former primary running mate, released a statement on X discrediting the criminal case as a “leftist” and “liberal” effort to “get” Trump before the election.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg thanked the “12 everyday New Yorkers” on the jury for their “time and commitment” while they heard testimony from 22 witnesses and saw evidence that included checks.
Related document: Court jury instructions (.pdf)
Jury deliberations took two days. On Thursday afternoon, Merchant walked into the courtroom to announce, “At this time, I am going to excuse the jury around 4:30 p.m.”
Minutes later, the court announced there was a verdict. It was unanimous.
The jury includes two lawyers, two engineers, a banker, a teacher, a retired wealth manager, a salesperson, a commerce specialist, a product development manager, and a speech and physical therapist.
Related story: Trump becomes first former U.S. president convicted of felony crimes
Trump was indicted on March 30, 2023, and arraigned on April 4, 2023. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.
While awaiting the verdict, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee published a post on his Truth Social page.
“I DID NOTHING WRONG! IN FACT, I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT. The testimony in Court was amazing for the Defense!”
The U.S. Secret Service caravan traveled from the courthouse to the Trump Tower in Manhattan where Trump raised his fist and thanked his supporters. Trump was set to attend a fundraiser on Thursday night and have a news conference on Friday.
Related story: Trump to be sentenced 4 days before Republican National Convention
GUILTY of all charges
Out of the 34 counts, 11 are related to invoices, 12 to ledger entries, and 11 to checks.
- Count 1: Invoice
- Count 2: Detail General Ledger
- Count 3: Detail General Ledger
- Count 4: Check
- Count 5: Invoice
- Count 6: Detail General Ledger
- Count 7: Check
- Count 8: Invoice
- Count 9: Detail General Ledger
- Count 10: Check
- Count 11: Invoice
- Count 12: Detail General Ledger
- Count 13: Check
- Count 14: Invoice
- Count 15: Detail General Ledger
- Count 16: Check
- Count 17: Invoice
- Count 18: Detail General Ledger
- Count 19: Check
- Count 20: Invoice
- Count 21: Detail General Ledger
- Count 22: Check
- Count 23: Invoice
- Count 24: Detail General Ledger
- Count 25: Check
- Count 26: Invoice
- Count 27: Detail General Ledger
- Count 28: Check
- Count 29: Invoice
- Count 30: Detail General Ledger
- Count 31: Check
- Count 32: Invoice
- Count 33: Detail General Ledger
- Count 34: Check
WATCH 4 p.m. report from the courthouse
WATCH 12 p.m. report from the courthouse
COURTROOM COVERAGE: Day 2 of deliberations
Trump becomes first former U.S. president convicted of felony crimes
The Associated Press
Donald Trump became the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes Thursday as a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.
Trump sat stone-faced while the verdict was read as cheering from the street below — where supporters and detractors of the former president were gathered — could be heard in the hallway on the courthouse’s 15th floor where the decision was revealed after more than nine hours of deliberations.
“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” Trump told reporters after leaving the courtroom. “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people. They know what happened, and everyone knows what happened here.”
Judge Juan Merchan set sentencing for July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where GOP leaders, who remained resolute in their support in the immediate aftermath of the verdict, are expected to formally make him their nominee.
The verdict is a stunning legal reckoning for Trump and exposes him to potential prison time in the city where his manipulations of the tabloid press helped catapult him from a real estate tycoon to reality television star and ultimately president. As he seeks to reclaim the White House in this year’s election, the judgment presents voters with another test of their willingness to accept Trump’s boundary-breaking behavior.
Trump is expected to quickly appeal the verdict and will face an awkward dynamic as he returns to the campaign trail with felony convictions. There are no campaign rallies on the calendar for now, though he’s expected to hold fundraisers next week.
The falsifying business records charges carry up to four years behind bars, though prosecutors have not said whether they intend to seek imprisonment, and it is not clear whether the judge — who earlier in the trial warned of jail time for gag order violations — would impose that punishment even if asked. The conviction, and even imprisonment, will not bar Trump from continuing his pursuit of the White House.
Trump faces three other felony indictments, but the New York case may be the only one to reach a conclusion before the November election, adding to the significance of the outcome. Though the legal and historical implications of the verdict are readily apparent, the political consequences are less so given its potential to reinforce rather than reshape already-hardened opinions about Trump.
Ahead of the verdict, Trump’s campaign had argued that, no matter what the jury decided, the outcome was unlikely to sway voters — and that the election would instead be decided by issues such as inflation.
For another candidate in another time, a criminal conviction might doom a presidential run, but Trump’s political career has endured through two impeachments, allegations of sexual abuse, investigations into everything from potential ties to Russia to plotting to overturn an election, and personally salacious storylines including the emergence of a recording in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals.
In addition, the general allegations of the case have been known to voters for years and, while tawdry, are widely seen as less grievous than the allegations he faces in three other cases that charge him with subverting American democracy and mishandling national security secrets.
Even so, the verdict is likely to give President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats space to sharpen arguments that Trump is unfit for office, though for now the White House offered only a muted statement saying that it respected the rule of law. On the other hand, the decision will also provide fodder for the presumptive Republican nominee to advance his unsupported claims that he is victimized by a criminal justice system he insists is politically motivated against him.
Trump maintained throughout the trial that he had done nothing wrong and that the case should never have been brought, railing against the proceedings from inside the courthouse — where he was joined by a parade of high-profile Republican allies — and racking up fines for violating a gag order with inflammatory out-of-court comments about witnesses.
Republicans showed no sign of loosening their embrace of the party leader, with House Speaker Mike Johnson releasing a statement lamenting what he called “a shameful day in American history.” He called the case “a purely political exercise, not a legal one.”
The first criminal trial of a former American president always presented a unique test of the court system, not only because of Trump’s prominence but also because of his relentless verbal attacks on the foundation of the case and its participants. But the verdict from the 12-person jury marked a repudiation of Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in the proceedings or to potentially impress the panel with a show of GOP support.
The trial involved charges that Trump falsified business records to cover up hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, the porn actor who said she had sex with the married Trump in 2006.
The $130,000 payment was made by Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer Michael Cohen to buy Daniels’ silence during the final weeks of the 2016 race in what prosecutors allege was an effort to interfere in the election. When Cohen was reimbursed, the payments were recorded as legal expenses, which prosecutors said was an unlawful attempt to mask the true purpose of the transaction. Trump’s lawyers contend they were legitimate payments for legal services.
Trump has denied the sexual encounter, and his lawyers argued during the trial that his celebrity status, particularly during the 2016 campaign, made him a target for extortion. They’ve said hush money deals to bury negative stories about Trump were motivated by personal considerations such as the impact on his family and brand as a businessman, not political ones. They also sought to undermine the credibility of Cohen, the star prosecution witness who pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges related to the payments, as driven by personal animus toward Trump as well as fame and money.
The trial featured more than four weeks of occasionally riveting testimony that revisited an already well-documented chapter from Trump’s past, when his 2016 campaign was threatened by the disclosure of an “Access Hollywood” recording that captured him talking about grabbing women sexually without their permission and the prospect of other stories about Trump and sex surfacing that would be harmful to his candidacy.
Trump himself did not testify, but jurors heard his voice through a secret recording of a conversation with Cohen in which he and the lawyer discussed a $150,000 hush money deal involving a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who has said she had an affair with Trump: “What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Trump was heard saying on the recording made by Cohen.
Daniels herself testified, offering at times a graphic recounting of the sexual encounter she says they had in a hotel suite during a Lake Tahoe golf tournament. The former publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, testified about how he worked to keep stories harmful to the Trump campaign from becoming public at all, including by having his company buy McDougal’s story.
Jurors also heard from Keith Davidson, the lawyer who negotiated the hush money payments on behalf of Daniels and McDougal.
He detailed the tense negotiations to get both women compensated for their silence but also faced an aggressive round of questioning from a Trump attorney who noted that Davidson had helped broker similar hush money deals in cases involving other prominent figures.
But the most pivotal witness, by far, was Cohen, who spent days on the stand and gave jurors an insider’s view of the hush money scheme and what he said was Trump’s detailed knowledge of it.
“Just take care of it,” he quoted Trump as saying at one point.
He offered jurors the most direct link between Trump and the heart of the charges, recounting a meeting in which they and the then-chief financial officer of Trump Organization described a plan to have Cohen reimbursed in monthly installments for legal services.
And he emotionally described his dramatic break with Trump in 2018, when he decided to cooperate with prosecutors after a decade-long career as the then-president’s personal fixer.
“To keep the loyalty and to do the things that he had asked me to do, I violated my moral compass, and I suffered the penalty, as has my family,” Cohen told the jury.
The outcome provides a degree of vindication for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who had characterized the case as being about election interference rather than hush money and defended it against criticism from legal experts who called it the weakest of the four prosecutions against Trump.
But it took on added importance not only because it proceeded to trial first but also because it could be the only one of the cases to reach a jury before the election.
The other three cases — local and federal charges in Atlanta and Washington that he conspired to undo the 2020 election, as well as a federal indictment in Florida charging him with illegally hoarding top-secret records — are bogged down by delays or appeals.
COURTROOM COVERAGE: Day 1 of deliberations
Jury in Trump hush money trial resumes deliberations after rehearing instructions, testimony
The Associated Press
The jury in former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial resumed deliberations Thursday after revisiting portions of the judge’s instructions and rehearing testimony from multiple key witnesses about the alleged scheme at the heart of the history-making case.
The judge responded to a jury request by rereading 30 pages of jury instructions. The 12-person jury, which deliberated for about 4 1/2 hours Wednesday without reaching a verdict, also reheard testimony Thursday morning from a tabloid publisher and Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer.
It’s unclear how long the deliberations will last. A guilty verdict would deliver a stunning legal reckoning for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee as he seeks to reclaim the White House while an acquittal would represent a major win for him and embolden him on the campaign trail. Since verdicts must be unanimous, it’s also possible the case ends in a mistrial if the jury can’t reach a consensus.
In a memo Wednesday evening, Trump campaign senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles blasted the proceedings as a “kangaroo court” and argued the case would not matter in November.
“The bottom line is this case doesn’t have an impact on voters,” they wrote.
Trump, who on Wednesday appeared to be priming supporters for the possibility of a guilty verdict by saying “Mother Teresa couldn’t bear these charges,” struck a pessimistic tone again Thursday.
“It’s all rigged. The whole thing, the whole system is rigged,” he said. It’s the same language he used to try to inoculate himself against losses in the 2020 presidential election and Iowa’s 2016 GOP primary.
He continued to rail against the case on his social media network from a room in the courthouse, writing in capital letters, “I did nothing wrong! In fact, I did everything right!”
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records at his company in connection with an alleged scheme to hide potentially embarrassing stories about him during his 2016 presidential election campaign.
The charge, a felony, arises from reimbursements paid to then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen after he made a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels to silence her claims that she and Trump had sex in 2006. Trump is accused of misrepresenting Cohen’s reimbursements as legal expenses to hide that they were tied to a hush money payment.
Trump has pleaded not guilty and contends the Cohen payments were for legitimate legal services. He has also denied the alleged extramarital sexual encounter with Daniels.
To convict Trump, the jury would have to find unanimously that he created a fraudulent entry in his company’s records or caused someone else to do so and that he acted with the intent of committing or concealing another crime.
The crime prosecutors say Trump committed or hid is a violation of a New York election law making it illegal for two or more conspirators “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”
While the jurors must unanimously agree that something unlawful was done to promote Trump’s election campaign, they don’t have to be unanimous on what that unlawful thing was.
The jurors, a diverse cross section of Manhattan residents and professional backgrounds, often appeared riveted by testimony, including from Cohen and Daniels. Many took notes and watched intently as witnesses answered questions.
In their first burst of communication with the court, jurors asked to rehear excerpts of the judge’s legal instructions, including a portion related to how inferences may be drawn from evidence.
They also reheard testimony Thursday from Cohen and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker about an August 2015 meeting with Trump at Trump Tower, where the tabloid boss agreed to be the “eyes and ears” of his fledgling presidential campaign.
Pecker testified that the plan included identifying potentially damaging stories about Trump so they could be squashed before being published. That, prosecutors say, was the beginning of the catch-and-kill scheme at the heart of the case.
Jurors also reheard Pecker’s account of a phone call he said he received from Trump in which they discussed a rumor that another outlet had offered to buy former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story that she had a yearlong affair with Trump in the mid-2000s. Trump denies the affair.
Pecker testified that Trump told him, “Karen is a nice girl,” and asked, “What do you think I should do?” Pecker said he replied: “I think you should buy the story and take it off the market.” He added that Trump told him that he doesn’t buy stories because they always get out and that Cohen would be in touch.
The publisher said he came away from the conversation thinking Trump was aware of the specifics of McDougal’s claims. Pecker said he believed the story was true and would have been embarrassing to Trump and his campaign if it were made public.
The National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., eventually paid McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story in an agreement that also included writing and other opportunities with its fitness magazine and other publications.
The fourth bit of testimony jurors requested was Pecker’s account about his decision in October 2016 to back out of an agreement to sell the rights to McDougal’s story to Trump through a company Cohen had established for the transaction, known as an “assignment of rights.”
“I called Michael Cohen, and I said to him that the agreement, the assignment deal, is off. I am not going forward. It is a bad idea, and I want you to rip up the agreement,” Pecker testified. “He was very, very, angry. Very upset. Screaming, basically, at me.”
Pecker testified that he reiterated to Cohen that he wasn’t going forward with the agreement.
He said Cohen told him: “The boss is going to be very angry at you.”
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