Jury Begins Sifting Evidence as It Weighs Trump's Fate in Criminal Case – The New York Times
Trump Hush-Money Trial
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Justice Juan M. Merchan explained the 34 charges of falsifying business records that Donald J. Trump faces before jurors went behind closed doors to start their deliberations.
William K. Rashbaum, Jonah E. Bromwich and
It’s all up to the jury now.
After seven weeks of legal wrangling and tawdry testimony, the first criminal trial of an American president moved to a jury of Donald J. Trump’s peers on Wednesday morning, the final stage of the landmark trial.
Mr. Trump’s fate is in the hands of those 12 New Yorkers, who will weigh whether to brand him as a felon. It could take them hours, days or even weeks to reach a verdict, a decision that could reshape the nation’s legal and political landscapes. And while the country anxiously awaits their judgment, Mr. Trump will continue to campaign for the presidency.
The moment that deliberations began marked a transfer of power from the experts in the courtroom — the lawyers arguing the case and the judge presiding over it — to the everyday New Yorkers who forfeited weeks of their lives to assess a mountain of evidence about sex and scandal.
The jurors, who spent more than four hours deliberating on Wednesday without reaching a verdict, meet around a long table in an unremarkable room with unforgiving lighting and walls painted a hue best described as municipal. Located off a small hallway behind the courtroom, it is steps from the jury box and has a door at each end, outside of which a court officer stands guard.
The judge, Juan M. Merchan, had invited the jurors to send him a note if they were confused about the law, or wanted to revisit testimony from the trial. And they took him up on the offer, buzzing the court officer to relay a message requesting four excerpts from the testimony.
On Thursday, a court reporter will read that testimony to the jury, most of which comes from David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, who prosecutors say was part of a conspiracy to suppress unflattering stories on Mr. Trump’s behalf during the 2016 election. Another portion of testimony relates to Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer who was the prosecution’s star witness.
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