What A Day - Hush Money Trial: Closing Arguments Are Over, Now Jurors Deliberate

Starting point is 00:00:01 It's Wednesday, May 29th. I'm Priyanka Arabindi. And I'm Josie Duffy Rice, and this is What A Day, the show where we are loving Robert De Niro's latest role heckling Trump supporters in public. The Biden campaign called in De Niro as a surrogate. He was joined by two former Capitol police officers right outside the Manhattan courtroom of Trump's hush money trial, where he got into a profane shouting match with one of the MAGA heads there. There was a big internet question, Al Pacino or Robert De Niro recently. This is putting me in the Robert De Niro camp. On today's show, the DNC finds a way to get President Biden on the Ohio ballot. Plus,

Starting point is 00:00:36 is it hot where you are? We look at the extreme weather events across North America. But first, we are in the final stretch of the first criminal trial against a former U.S. president, Donald Trump. Trump has been charged with 34 counts of falsifying business documents as part of his attempts to cover up the hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election. This follows more than four weeks of witness testimony and tense courtroom proceedings. On Tuesday, Trump's defense attorney Todd Blanch delivered closing arguments in front of a Manhattan jury. He spent a lot of time hammering the prosecution's key witness, Trump's former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. The closing arguments on the prosecution side, which were led by Assistant

Starting point is 00:01:18 DA Joshua Steinglass, extended well into the evening, lasting nearly five hours long. He characterized the payments to Daniels as an attempt to, quote, hoodwink the American voter. The court was finally dismissed around 8 p.m. Eastern. Today, jurors will return to the courtroom for jury instructions from Justice Juan Marchand and will begin their deliberations.

Starting point is 00:01:39 Yesterday was a very long day in court. Yeah. And a very long trial. But do we have a sense of like what happened in the courtroom on Tuesday? Yes. So to hear a little bit more about what went down yesterday and how Trump's defense addressed the jury, I called up Harry Littman. He is a senior legal affairs columnist for the LA Times and a former deputy assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice. He has been in the courtroom consistently

Starting point is 00:02:05 over the past several weeks, watching this trial unfold every single step of the way. I started by asking him about the focus of Trump's defense team's closing arguments. Take a listen. They obviously had to say that Michael Cohen's a liar. And they had to say that if you think he told one lie, you can't trust anything he said and that he's a thief. The main thing they had to say that I found stunning, they actually said the payments here were for bona fide legal services, that he never had any sex with Stormy Daniels. They ended with a 10-part recitation. Here are all the things that if you just believe one of them, there's reasonable doubt. But they kind of all mushed together, and that actually makes an important point about Todd Blanche's presentation as well.

Starting point is 00:02:58 It too kind of mushed together. That is, it didn't have a lot of dynamics. The only time he sort of really like went into high dudgeon was to call Michael Cohen a liar. But at any given point, he was pretty flat and it wasn't exactly clear where he was going. It just wasn't very engaged. It didn't have pop. It didn't have clear organization. So I thought it was a pretty ineffective closing argument. There was also a point, you know, where Trump's defense attorney seemed to go a little too far. He told the jurors, you cannot send someone to prison based on the words of Michael Cohen, after which Justice Mershon stepped in.

Starting point is 00:03:42 What happened there? Ooh, was that ugly. You're not allowed to talk to the jury about sentencing. That's for the judge, not for the jury. And Merchan was livid. And he said to him, you, as long as you've been a prosecutor, Mr. Blanche, I can't believe you would have done that accidentally. He basically accused him of doing something really improper

Starting point is 00:04:06 on purpose, presumably to try to promote a mistrial or maybe even to shake them up. But Mershon was livid and he just basically gave the pen to the DA, write any curative instruction you want. And when they came back, he gave the instruction. Basically, he said to Blanche, do you have any objections? And Blanche was just totally sheepish, couldn't say anything. But he gave a pretty strong curative instruction. Normally, you would just say to a jury, don't think about sentencing. He actually added, this crime doesn't necessarily involve prison time, something a jury wouldn't know. But to really disabuse them of any notion that they, as opposed to the judge,

Starting point is 00:04:49 might be sending Trump to jail. It must have been just, you know, an all-time humiliating moment for Blanche. Yeah, you know, another big thing about today ended up being a really long day. So why did you think this ended up taking so long? Do you think it worked in the favor of the legal teams? And how was the jury seeming to respond to that? They seemed okay. They seemed ready to work through. Some of them had made like child care arrangements. Merchan

Starting point is 00:05:14 himself said, I'm watching them. They still look pretty clear eyed. And they did. So they seemed attentive all the way through. Why so long? When they first asked, I said it's going to be four and a half hours. I thought maybe as long as he was going, he was hoping to sort of push it over to the next day. There's an advantage to that. They sleep on what he said. And then just before charging, he really, you know, rams home the last points. But I think that's just how long it was.

Starting point is 00:05:43 And in any event, the jury said, no, let's just stay. You know, speaking of the jury, you actually tweeted earlier that you were concerned about one juror. I know you can't identify that person, but you know, what is giving you pause there? I don't think there is a chance in hell of an acquittal here. So his best scenario is somebody holds out. There is a juror who, it's very kind of subtle body language, but seems a little bit apart from the other 11. Also, she or he seems a little like glassy-eyed to me, less focused on a little bit more tuned out.

Starting point is 00:06:20 I will say this, anybody who's in the courtroom, if you ask them, is there anyone you're worried about? they would all identify this one person. Something interesting in New York, in the federal system, other systems, you're not supposed to do what's called jury nullification. That is, acquit someone who you think the evidence is there for, but nobody can stop it. In New York, though, still nobody can stop it, but he's actually going to instruct them, if you believe that the evidence is there beyond a reasonable doubt, you must, you must vote to convict. So if there are 12 people in there,

Starting point is 00:06:57 and one is saying, I don't know, I just don't see it, the other 11 can say, look, you made a promise, and that promise is, if you don't have a reasonable doubt, you must vote to convict. That's a fair bit more pressure you can bring to bear on a recalcitrant juror. I know there's no way of knowing for sure, but do we have any sense when we could expect a verdict to come down? You know, I think there is a way of knowing just by based on the complexity of the case, how many documents are involved and the level of attentiveness of this jury. Thursday comes to be in the realm of possibility for my, you know, if I was in a pool and I could pick my time before anybody, I'd go with five o'clock Friday. I've had time to work through 34 counts, and it's the weekend, time to go home if they can just finish up, etc. So I think it's better than 50-50 that by the end of day Friday, if they don't do it by then and we're into the next week, I don't think it's for sure that the case is in trouble and a hung jury, but two days, three days, then that's real nail-biting time.

Starting point is 00:08:06 So I'm going for Friday. That was my conversation with Harry Lipman. We will continue to update you on this trial and the outcome, but that is the latest for now. We'll get to some headlines in just a moment, but if you are enjoying our show, please make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends. We'll be right back after some ads. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. On Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee announced their plans to nominate President Biden through a, quote, virtual roll call to make sure he qualifies for Ohio's general election ballot. They're expected to vote on a remote roll call resolution on June 4th, which is what the

Starting point is 00:08:55 committee did in 2020 because of the pandemic. As we mentioned on yesterday's show, the Democratic National Convention is two weeks after Ohio's August 7th deadline for certifying candidates. And Ohio's Republican Governor Mike DeWine called a special session for the State Assembly to pass legislation to add Biden to the ballot. But Ohio Democrats have accused DeWine and state Republicans of adding a poison pill to the legislation. DNC Chair Jamie Harrison said in a statement, quote, Through a virtual roll call, we will ensure that Republicans can't chip away at our democracy through incompetence or partisan tricks, and that Ohioans can exercise their right to vote for the presidential candidate of their choice. At least two dozen people are dead and more than a million were without power on Tuesday after severe storms battered the eastern half of the U.S. over Memorial

Starting point is 00:09:40 Day weekend. Texas was hit again by severe weather on Tuesday, resulting in hundreds of flight cancellations and delays at Dallas's two major airports. Over the weekend, roughly 70 tornadoes were reported across more than a dozen states, stretching all the way from Texas to Virginia. It's been the worst year for tornadoes in more than a decade, which is a trend that we can only expect to continue as climate change makes severe weather

Starting point is 00:10:05 worse and worse. The storms in Texas were fueled by a massive heat dome that has been setting record-breaking temperatures in Mexico since early May. The heat has been creeping north into the southern U.S., pushing parts of southern Texas past 110 degrees in recent weeks. Meteorologists expect the heat dome to build farther north and west in the coming weeks. That is not good news. No, no, no. The Pentagon said Tuesday that it will take more than a week to rebuild and repair a temporary pier built off the coast of Gaza for humanitarian aid deliveries. Over the weekend, a portion of the U.S.-built pier broke apart in heavy seas, forcing the U.S. military to suspend aid deliveries there. Defense Department Deputy Spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters the floating pier will now

Starting point is 00:10:50 have to be removed from the Gaza coast and repaired in southern Israel. We believe that given the time of year, we will be able to re-anchor this pier and it will be able to be operational and hopefully weather conditions won't hinder it anymore. Singh said more than a thousand metric tons of aid have been delivered via the pier. In the two weeks it's been operational. Its temporary closure comes at a really bad time, though. Aid deliveries through two major land routes in southern Gaza have been severely constrained in recent weeks as Israeli troops have moved deeper into Rafah.

Starting point is 00:11:23 Two weeks this thing lasted. This war has been ongoing for what? Seven plus months at this point? Two weeks of aid. It's frankly embarrassing, but that is all. It's embarrassing. The idea that we'll just re-anchor it and hopefully there'll be no more bad weather.

Starting point is 00:11:36 It just feels ridiculous. Truly. And finally, speaking of embarrassing, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley is at it again. Just days after an Israeli airstrike killed at least 45 refugees in Rafah, Haley spent her Memorial Day weekend in Israel where she signed military weapons. In a photo posted to X, the former South Carolina governor is shown writing on an artillery shell, quote, finish them. America heart Israel. Always Nikki Haley. It's like a yearbook signature.

Starting point is 00:12:08 It's crazy. Insane. It's sick, honestly. Truly. It's just a horrible, horrible thing to write. As a reminder, this is an ongoing war. Gaza health authorities reported that 20 people were killed in an incident at a tent camp on Tuesday along the coast that Israeli officials had designated a humanitarian corridor. The Israeli military has denied involvement. It's truly unbelievable that people sign rockets, that that's like a politician thing to do. It just really underscores the lack of care of lives that has permeated this entire conflict. It's disgusting. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:41 And those are the headlines. One more thing before we go. In December of 2014, a prominent Indian judge died at a wedding of a heart attack. And at the time, his passing barely made the news. But when his niece approached a journalist two years later, she shared a different narrative, that the circumstances around his death had made his family doubt the official story. Hosted by Ravi Gupta, Killing Justice follows the reporting and legal fallout from this tip. He examines the conflicting evidence to answer

Starting point is 00:13:10 how one man's death became a magnet for the increasingly polarized politics in India and what this means for the future of the world's largest democracy. Listen to episodes one and two of Killing Justice now. New episodes are released every Monday. That is all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, heckle Robert De Niro's hecklers, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just obscure DNC roles and definitions like me,

Starting point is 00:13:37 What A Day is also a nightly newsletter, so check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Josie Duffy Rice. I'm Priyanka Arabindi. And come on our podcast, Robert De Niro. Priyanka, recently learned of you from your classic film, The Intern. Not, okay.

Starting point is 00:13:51 I've known about The Intern for a long time. I just was saying that is one of the primary reasons I'm familiar with him. Did you know about Robert De Niro before The Intern? I mean, like, conceptually, yes. Conceptually. Actually, maybe not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Conceptually, he is good enough.

Starting point is 00:14:16 What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Bill Lance. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Natalie Bettendorf. We had production help today from Michelle Aloy, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrian Hell. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka.

What A Day - Hush Money Trial: Closing Arguments Are Over, Now Jurors Deliberate

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.