Jury deliberations begin in historic Trump hush money trial

Donald Trump’s fate is out of his hands.

A jury of 12 New Yorkers has begun deliberating in the former president’s hush money criminal case, holding the power to make Trump the first American president ever found guilty of a crime — or the first to be acquitted of one.

The trial concluded Tuesday with closing arguments from Trump’s attorneys and state prosecutors stretching a full day, keeping jurors in court until 8 p.m. to ensure they’d receive the case Wednesday.

Defense attorneys spent much of their time hammering Michael Cohen, Trump’s ex-fixer, while prosecutors defended the documentation that — backed by Cohen’s testimony — forms the foundation of their case against Trump.

“Even if you find the testimony of Michael Cohen to be believable, you may not convict solely on that testimony unless you also find that it was corroborated by other evidence tending to connect the defendant with the commission of the crime,” Judge Juan Merchan said during his instructions to the jury.

The decision on whether or not to convict Trump — or if the case will end in a hung jury if all 12 jurors can’t unanimously decide on all 34 counts — could come at any time.  None of the jurors looked at Trump as they passed by him while exiting the courtroom to begin deliberations.

Trump must remain at the New York courthouse throughout the deliberations, the judge said.

Trump faces 34 felony charges alleging he falsified business records to conceal a hush money payment made to a porn actress in the final days of his 2016 presidential campaign to keep secret their alleged affair a decade earlier. The charges are usually brought as a misdemeanor, so to find Trump guilty, jurors must determine Trump acted with the intent to further another crime.

Throughout just more than four weeks of testimony, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office implicated Trump in a broad conspiracy to clear his path to the White House by stifling negative stories about him ahead of the election. They contend the scheme ran afoul of state and federal election laws.

Jurors heard testimony from allies in Trump’s 2016 campaign orbit and high-up employees in the Trump Organization who testified that Trump’s presidential aspirations were one scandal away from devastation.

Ex-National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, whose tabloid helped kill several salacious stories about Trump in the lead-up to the election, testified that he agreed during a meeting with Trump to be the “eyes and ears” of the then-business mogul’s presidential campaign. 

Porn actor Stormy Daniels described, in graphic detail, her alleged sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 and how she was paid $130,000 weeks before the election to stay silent about it.

And Michael Cohen, Trump’s then-attorney who coordinated it all, linked his onetime client to key business records underpinning the charges that make up the district attorney’s case — though the defense sought rigorously to portray Cohen as a liar on cross-examination.

Defense attorneys attempted to portray Cohen as a serial liar, seeking to undercut his testimony on cross-examination and later calling to the stand his former legal adviser, Robert Costello, as the defense’s main witness.

Costello pushed back on Cohen’s assertion that Trump was personally involved in the hush money deals, and that the then-president’s allies initiated a “pressure campaign” to stop Cohen from flipping when federal prosecutors closed in on him.

Before entering into deliberations, the judge gave the jury instructions Wednesday that lasted more than an hour.

Jurors appeared to hang onto every word, even as Merchan’s instructions often became dry as he went through each of the 34 documents Trump is charged over, one by one.

“Each of you must decide the case for yourself, but only after a fair and impartial consideration of the evidence with other jurors,” Merchan told the jury.

Updated at 11:40 a.m. ET