Former U.S. president Donald Trump sits in the courtroom during his hush money trial at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on May 21.Michael M. Santiago/Reuters
Donald Trump’s lawyers rested their defence Tuesday without the former president taking the witness stand in his New York hush-money criminal trial, moving the case closer to the moment when the jury will begin deciding his fate.
“Your honour, the defence rests,” Trump lawyer Todd Blanche told the judge. Mr. Trump’s team concluded with testimony from a former federal prosecutor who had been called to attack the credibility of the prosecution’s key witness, one of two people summoned to the stand by the defence. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office called 20 witnesses over 15 days of testimony before resting its case Monday.
The jury was sent home for a week, until May 28, when closing arguments are expected, but the lawyers returned to the courtroom to discuss how the judge will instruct jurors on deliberations. Mr. Trump, the first former U.S. president to be tried criminally, did not answer questions about why he did not testify.
Mr. Trump had previously said he wanted to take the witness stand in his own defence, but there was no requirement or even expectation that he do so. Defendants routinely decline to testify. His lawyers, instead of mounting an effort to demonstrate Mr. Trump’s innocence to jurors, focused on attacking the credibility of the prosecution witnesses. That’s a routine defence strategy because the burden of proof in a criminal case lies with the prosecution. The defence doesn’t have to prove a thing.
Yet even as Mr. Trump denounces the trial as a politically motivated travesty of justice, he has been working to turn the proceedings into an offshoot of his presidential campaign. He’s capitalized on the trial as a fundraising pitch, used his time in front of the cameras to criticize President Joe Biden and showcased a parade of his own political supporters.
Prosecutors have accused the presumptive Republican presidential nominee of a scheme to scoop up and bury negative stories in an illegal effort to influence the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing. It’s the first of Mr. Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial, and quite possibly the only one before the 2024 presidential election.
“They have no case,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday morning before court adjourned. “There’s no crime.”
Jurors have been given a lesson on the underbelly of the tabloid business world, where Trump allies at the National Enquirer launched a plan to keep seamy, sometimes outrageous stories about Mr. Trump out of the public eye by paying tens of thousands of dollars to “catch and kill” them. They watched as a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, recounted in discomfiting detail an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump in a hotel room. Mr. Trump says nothing sexual happened between them.
Donald Trump’s lawyers have rested their defence in the former president’s New York hush money trial, bringing the case one step closer to final arguments.
The Associated Press
And they sat intently in the jury box as Mr. Trump’s former-lawyer-turned-foe Michel Cohen placed the former president in the middle of the scheme to buy Ms. Daniels’s story to keep it from going public as Republicans were wringing their hands in distress over the fallout from the infamous Access Hollywood tape.
But the crux of the prosecution’s case centres not on the spectacle but on business transactions, including internal Trump Organization records in which payments to Mr. Cohen were falsely labelled legal expenses. Prosecutors argued that those payments were really reimbursements to Mr. Cohen doled out in chunks, for a US$130,000 payment he made on Mr. Trump’s behalf to keep Ms. Daniels quiet. Mr. Trump has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records.
As he left a news conference Tuesday with supporters of the former president outside the courthouse, Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. defended his father’s decision not to testify.
“There’d be absolutely no reason, no justification to do that whatsoever. Everyone sees it for the sham that it is,” the younger Mr. Trump said.
The judge has yet to rule on a defence request to throw out the charges before jurors even begin deliberating based on the argument that prosecutors have failed to prove their case. Such long-shot requests are often made in criminal cases but are rarely granted.
The final witness was Robert Costello, called in an effort to undermine Mr. Cohen’s credibility. The two had a professional relationship that splintered in spectacular fashion. During his testimony Monday, he angered the judge by rolling his eyes and talking under his breath. The judge cleared the courtroom and threatened to remove him if he didn’t show more respect for decorum.
Mr. Costello had offered to represent Mr. Cohen soon after the lawyer’s hotel room, office and home were raided and as Mr. Cohen faced a decision about whether to remain defiant in the face of a criminal investigation or to co-operate with authorities in hopes of securing more lenient treatment.
Mr. Costello has repeatedly maligned Mr. Cohen’s credibility and was even a witness before last year’s grand jury that indicted Mr. Trump, offering testimony designed to undermine Mr. Cohen’s account. In a Fox News Channel interview last week, Mr. Costello accused Mr. Cohen of lying to the jury and using the case to “monetize” himself.
Mr. Costello contradicted Mr. Cohen’s testimony describing Mr. Trump as intimately involved in all aspects of the hush-money scheme. Mr. Costello told jurors Monday that Mr. Cohen told him Mr. Trump “knew nothing” about the hush-money payment to Ms. Daniels.
“Michael Cohen said numerous times that President Trump knew nothing about those payments, that he did this on his own, and he repeated that numerous times,” Mr. Costello testified.
Mr. Cohen, however, testified earlier Monday that he had “no doubt” that Mr. Trump gave him a final sign-off to make the payments to Ms. Daniels. In total, he said he spoke with Mr. Trump more than 20 times about the matter in October, 2016.
Prosecutors have said that they want to show that Mr. Costello was part of a pressure campaign to keep Mr. Cohen in Mr. Trump’s corner once the then-lawyer came under federal investigation. On that theme, prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked Mr. Costello about a 2018 e-mail in which he assured Mr. Cohen that he was “loved” by Mr. Trump’s camp, “they are in our corner” and “you have friends in high places.”
Asked who those “friends in high places” were, Mr. Costello said he was talking about Mr. Trump, then the president.
Mr. Costello bristled as he insisted he did not feel animosity toward Mr. Cohen and did not try to intimidate him. “Ridiculous. No,” he said to the latter.
After the defence rested, Justice Merchan dismissed the jurors and looked ahead to closing arguments – the last time the jury will hear from either side. Deliberations could begin as early as next Wednesday.
Justice Merchan told the jurors that closing arguments would normally come immediately after the defence rested, but he thought they would take at least a day. Given the impending Memorial Day holiday, “there’s no way to do all that’s needed” before then, he said.
“I’ll see you in a week,” Justice Merchan told the 12-person panel.