The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial said closing arguments will begin next Tuesday due to the upcoming Memorial Day holiday break – putting in motion a schedule in which jurors could return a verdict in the historic case before the end of the month.
“It was either have a long break now or have a long break then, and unfortunately the calendar is what it is,” Judge Juan Merchan said Monday morning. This week the court is adjourned on Wednesday, which has been a day off for the entirety of the trial, and also on Friday and Monday of next week.
In the opening to the sixth week of the trial, the defense team finished its cross-examination of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, confidant and fixer, and also began making its own case and calling its own witnesses.
In wrapping it’s examination of Cohen, Todd Blanche, Trump’s attorney, continued an aggressive line of questioning from last week meant to expose inconsistencies, discredit his trustworthiness, impugn his character and paint him as someone desperate for retribution.
In one of the most colorful exchanges of the day, Blanche got Cohen to admit that he stole roughly $30,000 from the Trump Organization. The money was supposed to be part of a $50,000 payment made to an IT company, which rigged a poll about the most famous businessmen in Trump’s favor. Instead, Cohen paid the firm $20,000 in a brown paper bag and pocketed the rest.
“You stole from the Trump Organization, correct?” Blanche asked.
“Did you ever have to plead guilty to larceny?” Blanche asked.
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Cohen, who has spent more than 16 hours on the stand, has a history of being a hothead. But he’s been mostly unflappable as the star witness for the prosecution, and has provided crucial testimony that corroborates and built on the narrative that Trump went to great lengths to hide payments made ahead of the 2016 presidential election to silence claims of extramarital sexual encounters.
Cohen was the 19th witness to testify at the trial, and was the prosecution’s final witness.
In presenting its own case, the defense called as its first witness Daniel Sitko, a paralegal who works for Blanche and who presented documentation of roughly 75 calls exchanged between Cohen and Robert Costello. It then quickly moved to calling Costello himself as its next witness.
Costello is a lawyer who initially helped Cohen after his home was raided by the FBI and who acted as a back channel to Trump while federal prosecutors ramped up their investigation into Cohen in 2018. The two had a falling out after a disagreement over legal fees.
Notably, Cohen testified about Costello last week and admitted that he lied to Costello about Trump and the hush money payments – a point that the defense sought to capitalize on to paint, once again, Cohen as untrustworthy.
“He was absolutely manic,” Costello said about Cohen, when asked to describe their first meeting. And when asked if he was cooperating with federal investigators, Costello recalled Cohen saying, “I swear to god, Bob, I don’t have anything on Donald Trump.”
But Costello’s testimony was prickly and at one point the judge cleared the courtroom to admonish Costello for his attitude.
The defense will have a turn to call more witnesses moving forward – though it’s unclear how many it plans to call. Trump has insisted that he wants to testify against the advice of his attorneys, but it’s unlikely that he will.
Once the defense rests, both sides will present closing arguments, in which they will remind jurors of the evidence that bolsters their case and ask them to recall testimony from key witnesses as they consider a verdict.
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business documents in order to conceal payments made to silence a former porn star Stormy Daniels from sharing a story about a sexual encounter with him – and not because it would upset his wife, but because it would hurt his 2016 presidential campaign.
While falsifying business documents is considered the bread and butter of the Manhattan district attorney’s office, this particular case is in somewhat unchartered territory. For a felony conviction, prosecutors must prove that Trump falsified records in order to conceal another crime, which the prosecution has argued is a New York State campaign finance violation – even though Trump is not charged with that particular crime.
It’s unclear how the judge will explain the complex dynamic to jurors and how he might direct them to reach a decision.