Morning Report — Trump jury begins Day 2 of deliberations

Twelve New York jurors, including two lawyers, spent much of Wednesday afternoon deliberating whether former President Trump is guilty of 34 felony charges that boil down to an alleged fraudulent coverup of a pay-for-silence scheme to keep 2016 voters in the dark about an account of sex with a porn star.

Trump is not known for patience when he’s in circumstances beyond his control. He denies the charges, including allegedly masterminding a hush money scheme that included doctored business records, and maintains that he’s a victim of a Democratic prosecutor and a “corrupt” judge. In the first criminal trial of a U.S. current or former president, he’s required to remain in the courthouse while the jury is at work.

“Mother Teresa could not beat these charges. The charges are rigged. The whole thing is rigged,” Trump protested outside the courtroom Wednesday.

Jurors resume their deliberations today. Their verdict on each count — guilty or not guilty — must be unanimous.

The defense’s legal strategy during the trial was to deny a felony occurred and to try to weaken the credibility of key witnesses, including Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who testified against the former president after his own conviction and prison time following his guilty plea for lying to investigators and tax violations.

Jurors asked the judge Wednesday to let them review some testimony from Cohen about an August 2015 meeting he had at Trump Tower with former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker and with Trump (The Hill). Pecker testified for the prosecution that Trump was a friend he sought to help during the 2016 presidential campaign by paying for unflattering accounts about the candidate to prevent them from being published. In tabloid circles, the phrase was “catch and kill.”

Pecker testified that during a meeting in the summer of 2015 with Trump and Cohen, he outlined how he would help the presidential candidate, a deal that included notifying the Trump campaign about women seeking to sell stories about relationships with Trump. Pecker later testified he balked at having the Enquirer pay a “catch and kill” fee to porn star Stormy Daniels, which Cohen testified he paid as a middleman before securing reimbursement from Trump early in 2017.

Daniels testified that she and her lawyer received $130,000 from Cohen to prevent publication of her account of an alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Trump, which she detailed to the jury. But she said she had no knowledge whether the former president was involved in the transaction.

Trump’s legal team did not refute that a married Trump met Daniels in a hotel room or that there was payment a decade later for her silence. Instead, they suggested the payments made on the former president’s behalf were an effort to protect his reputation and family — not his campaign.

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LEADING THE DAY

POLITICS

WORRY WATCH: Democratic leaders are warning against a full-blown meltdown over polls showing President Biden lagging behind Trump, and the party’s danger of losing its Senate majority. Anxiety among Democrats is at a high-water mark, but it’s also something the leaders are used to, write The Hill’s Al Weaver and Alex Gangitano. Every cycle comes with severe bouts of tortured handwringing, and Biden is consistently polling behind Trump or neck and neck, with the polling averages from DDHQ/The Hill showing Trump leading by just more than 1 percentage point.

“I know that there are people freaking out, there always are. This is not news, in essence,” said Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. “The way I describe the election now is that we’re a higher seed team in the basketball tournament. We should win. But we have to go out and win the game. And it’s tied early… but I think we’re much more likely to win this thing than they are.”

Politico: Biden is investing heavily in Pennsylvania — with little to show for it.

Across the aisle, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) views incumbency as Senate Democrats’ biggest advantage in the battle for the upper chamber, acknowledging that the quality of Senate Democratic candidates is a major factor. While Trump is leading Biden in several battleground states, The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports Senate GOP candidates are trailing incumbents.

McConnell’s logic also underscores Democrats’ concerns that Biden’s age — not his record or position on the issues — is their biggest political headwind. 

“I think incumbency, as we learned in ’22, is an advantage. Not a single incumbent lost in ’22. Sen. Daines and I have never said we thought this was going to be easy,” McConnell told reporters during a recent press conference with National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (Mont.). “We’ve got to beat an incumbent in Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and anywhere else we can, but we never said it was going to be a piece of cake.”

The New York Times: “The Tilt,” by Nate Cohn: Perhaps lost in the polling: The presidential race is still close. If Biden won in battlegrounds Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, “he’d probably be re-elected as president. They would combine to give him exactly 270 electoral college votes provided he held everywhere he won by six percentage points or more in 2020. That means he could lose all of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio and so on, and still win.”

Cohn’s math assumes a victory in Virginia, but the race is tight. It is telling if Biden is worried about losing the state in November. 

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ZOOM IN

CONGRESS

SUPREME COURT JUSTICE Samuel Alito wrote letters to House and Senate Democrats saying he won’t step aside from two pending high court cases related to Trump and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol following news reports about contentious flags flown at his house and vacation home. Alito said he was not involved in flying an upside-down American flag and a “Appeal to Heaven” flag, pointing to his wife’s decision making. Democratic lawmakers have criticized Alito as biased amid pending cases before the court and urged the nine justices to adopt stringent ethics rules covering conflicts of interest. Trump, marking time in a Manhattan courthouse as a jury weighs his guilt or innocence, immediately praised Alito Wednesday on social media for “INTELLIGENCE, COURAGE, AND ‘GUTS’” in refusing to recuse himself.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats asked Chief Justice John Roberts to detail how the Supreme Court plans to enforce its code of conduct, arguing Alito violated its policies (The Hill).

“Adopting a code of ethics and failing to enforce [it] only serves to reinforce the perception that Supreme Court justices operate without consequences for clearly unethical behavior,” ranking member Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and the committee’s Democrats wrote in the letter. “Do you plan to request Justice Alito recuse himself from any cases related to Donald Trump? If not, why not?”

THE HOUSE ETHICS COMMITTEE on Wednesday launched an investigation of Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) after the congressman and his wife were indicted on allegations that they accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and laundered the money. Three people associated with the lawmaker and his wife have pleaded guilty in the investigation. Cuellar, who is facing a challenging reelection race this fall, said he is innocent (The Hill).

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is emphasizing the need for federal legislation that would add protections around the spread of nonconsensual artificial intelligence (AI) deepfake pornography. Ocasio-Cortez said the issue is increasingly putting “everyday people” at risk of “being targeted by this kind of reputational, sexual violence that is at its core exploitative” (The Hill). 

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ELSEWHERE

INTERNATIONAL

THE WHITE HOUSE HAS SNARLED Congress’s plans to reprimand the International Criminal Court (ICC) over the Israel-Hamas War, shooting down the sanctions concept that bipartisan House negotiators had hoped to move to Biden’s desk early next month. The court came under fire after its top prosecutor announced his intent to seek arrest warrants for Israeli leaders — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — as well as Hamas leaders for war crimes. But White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that legislation against the ICC “is not something the administration is going to support” (The Hill).

Netanyahu said Wednesday he’s “surprised and disappointed” that the Biden administration won’t support the sanctions, Politico reports. In an interview with Sirius XM’s “The Morgan Ortagus Show,” set to air Sunday, Netanyahu defended himself against the court’s allegations that he and Israeli authorities purposefully withheld humanitarian aid from entering Gaza since the war began.

SEVEN MORE MONTHS: Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said Wednesday that he expects Israel’s war in Gaza to continue through at least the end of the year, appearing to dismiss the idea that the war could come to an end after the attacks on Rafah. Israeli officials have told the public to expect a protracted campaign that would progress in phases toward lower intensity fighting. But Hanegbi’s assessment appeared to be at odds with earlier projections that the country was “on the brink of victory” in its war against Hamas (The New York Times).

U.S. NOD TO UKRAINE TO STRIKE INSIDE RUSSIA? The White House could be open to strikes by the Ukrainian military inside Russia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested Wednesday while traveling in Moldova (The New York Times). The U.S. would “adapt and adjust” its stance based on changing conditions on the battlefield, he told a reporter. Washington has supplied the Ukrainians with military aid but previously warned of a possible widening conflict and NATO vulnerabilities if Ukraine attacked inside Russia’s borders and Moscow then escalated. Biden is contemplating a nuclear armed adversary while weighing the future for an ally struggling in war (The New York Times).

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THE CLOSER

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