Testimony ended Tuesday in the New York criminal trial of Donald Trump, the first ever for a U.S. president, but the 12-member jury will not hear closing arguments by his lawyers and prosecutors until May 28 and then start deliberations on his guilt or innocence a day later.
Trump had long said he wanted to testify in his own defense, but in the end, did not. He walked out of court after his defense lawyers rested their case in the sixth week of the trial after calling just two witnesses.
Trump raised his hand in a fist in the court entryway where he often has railed against the case but did not stop to answer reporters’ questions about why he did not testify.
The crux of the case against Trump centers on prosecutors’ claims that he sanctioned his one-time political fixer Michael Cohen to pay $130,000 in hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels just ahead of the 2016 election.
The aim, prosecutors have contended, was to influence the outcome of the election that Trump won to silence Daniels from talking about her claim of a one-night tryst with Trump a decade earlier.
The 34-count indictment accuses the former president of falsifying business records at his Trump Organization real estate conglomerate to hide his 2017 reimbursement to Cohen for the hush money, by claiming it was money owed Cohen for his legal work, which Cohen said during four days of testimony was not the case.
Trump has denied a liaison with Daniels and all the charges he faces.
Because the trial has typically been recessed on Wednesdays and with the Memorial Day holiday next Monday, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan pushed off the conclusion of the case.
He told the jurors, “I think the best thing that we can do is to adjourn now until next Tuesday. At that time, you will hear summations from the attorneys. Probably Wednesday, I’ll ask you to come in … hear the jury charge and then I would expect that you will begin your deliberations hopefully at some point on Wednesday.”
Merchan ordered the jurors to not talk about or research the case, saying, “It might be tempting to think now that both sides have rested you can kind of let up a bit, but in fact these instructions take on even greater significance.”
The judge is holding a Tuesday afternoon session to hear arguments from the lawyers in the case on what legal instructions he should give the jurors to guide their deliberations.
Merchan could also rule at that point on a longshot request Monday by Trump lawyer Todd Blanche to dismiss the case without sending it to the jury. But since Merchan has already told the jury about his plans for the end of the trial, it seemed highly unlikely that the judge would now decide to end the case without letting the jurors decide it.
Defendants in U.S. trials are not required to testify and when they do, often hurt their case more than help it. Trump was apparently talked out of testifying by his lawyers.
Over years in the public eye, both as a real estate magnate and a politician, Trump has waxed and waned in his views on whether criminal defendants should testify. At times he has said they look “guilty as hell” if they don’t take the witness stand to defend themselves, and at other times said they should exercise their constitutional right against self-incrimination.
Trump, the country’s 45th president and now the presumptive Republican presidential candidate in the November election against President Joe Biden, would have faced a tough cross-examination by prosecutors about the details of the case and Cohen’s testimony implicating him.
Merchan also had already ruled that prosecutors would have been allowed to ask Trump about two civil cases he lost in the last few months where he was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. One involved business fraud at his Trump Organization real estate conglomerate and the other his defamation of a New York writer who had won a sexual assault decision against him.
But Cohen was a flawed witness for the prosecution, acknowledging he has been a serial liar over the years and stole $60,000 from Trump’s company. He also pleaded guilty to a campaign finance law violation linked to the hush money payment, perjury and other offenses and served 13½ months in a federal prison.
The last witness in the case called by the defense, New York lawyer Robert Costello, attempted to cast Cohen as a liar not to be believed. Costello had advised Cohen after federal agents raided Cohen’s then-residence, a New York hotel room, in April 2018, but was never hired as his attorney.
Costello said Monday that Cohen told him, “‘I swear to God, Bob, I don’t have anything on Donald Trump.’”
“Michael Cohen said numerous times that President Trump knew nothing about those payments. That he did this on his own. He repeated that numerous times,” Costello said.
At the time, Trump and his allies worried that Cohen might turn against the president and implicate him in the hush money payment to Daniels but that only came months later. Costello indicated to Cohen that he, meaning Cohen, had “friends in high places,” a reference to Trump, but Cohen did not retain the lawyer and eventually turned against Trump, ending his years of tending to the future president’s every need.
Evidence in the trial shows that Trump repaid the hush money to Cohen in 2017 after he became president, personally signing nine of the 11 checks.
Cohen alleged that Trump twice approved the arrangement to pay him back, including once at his Trump Tower in New York and a second time in the Oval Office at the White House after he became president.
Blanche never questioned Cohen about the two crucial conversations he claimed to have had with Trump about the reimbursement scheme.
Since his release from prison, Cohen has often assailed Trump and testified last week he wants Trump convicted. If Trump is found guilty, he could be placed on probation or sentenced to up to four years in prison.
