Already a subscriber?Donald Trump was convicted Thursday of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign, capping an extraordinary trial that tested the resilience of the US justice system and transformed the former commander in chief into a felon.in Manhattan — across the board, on all 34 counts — will reverberate throughout the nation and the world as it ushers in a new era of presidential politics.
A jury of 12 New Yorkers needed two days of deliberations to decide a case stemming from Trump’s first White House run, when, prosecutors say, he perpetrated a fraud on the American people. The case — coloured by tabloid intrigue, secret payoffs and an Oval Office pact that echoed the Watergate era — spotlighted months of scheming that begot a hush-money payment to a porn actor and a plot to falsify documents to bury all trace of that deal.
Trump, who repeatedly violated a judge’s order barring him from attacking Cohen and the jury, attended every day of the trial in a lower Manhattan courthouse that had long ago lost its majesty — a fading hulk with cracked wood paneling and yellowed fluorescent lighting that suited the case’s seedier elements.
To Trump’s base, however, he remains not just a man but a movement, and the more legal tumult he endures, the more his supporters revere him. Trump’s lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, also sought to play down the importance of the case, deriding the false records as mere “pieces of paper.”Yet the verdict is a career-defining victory for Bragg, who had cast the fakery as an affront to New York, the financial capital of the world.
Blanche argued that the records were accurate — Cohen, after all, was a lawyer who had expenses — but the prosecution showed that the expenses and the retainer were both fictional. Blanche also sought to minimise the election plot, asserting that “every campaign in this country is a conspiracy.” But Bragg argued that the American people were victims, deprived of important information about the candidate, and that the tactics of Trump’s 2016 campaign were not only distasteful, but unlawful.
After the election, Pecker testified, Trump summoned him to Trump Tower. There, the president-elect, having just met with the head of the FBI, thanked Pecker for burying the stories. Daniels said that when she asked Trump about his wife, he told her not to worry, that they didn’t even sleep in the same room — testimony that prompted Trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter “bullshit” to his lawyers. His outburst was loud enough that it later drew a rebuke from Merchan, who called it “contemptuous.”
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