Live Updates: Prosecutor Says Trump Tried to ‘Hoodwink the American Voter’ (2024)

A prosecutor in the criminal case against Donald J. Trump asserted on Tuesday that Mr. Trump had engaged in a fraud against the American people on the eve of the 2016 election by silencing a p*rn star’s account of a sexual encounter with him. The prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, told jurors in his closing argument that the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels was part of a conspiracy that “could very well be what got President Trump elected.”

Prosecutors say Mr. Trump falsified business records to conceal his reimbursem*nt of his onetime fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who testified that he was acting on orders from Mr. Trump when he paid Ms. Daniels. Mr. Cohen, the self-described “designated thug” who became the prosecution’s star witness, testified that Mr. Trump confirmed the plan to reimburse him during an Oval Office meeting.

Joshua Steinglass has moved the action to January 2017, the month that Trump was inaugurated. He is describing a meeting between Michael Cohen and Allen Weisselberg, then the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, who Cohen testified had made the arrangements to reimburse Cohen for the hush-money payment. “Right on the bank statement, Weisselberg and Cohen calculated all the money that was owed to Cohen,” Steinglass says.

As we start up again, Joshua Steinglass moves on from what prosecutors say was the conspiracy to influence the election. He says that Trump, after getting elected, still had to ensure that no one found out about the conspiracy. “But here’s the problem,” Steinglass says. “Michael Cohen was out $130,000.”

Steinglass says that Trump could not just write Cohen a check, and that jurors should make no mistake: While Cohen wanted a head pat from his boss, “he also wanted his money back.”

Trump hasn’t spoken publicly since entering court this morning. But during this most recent break, he posted “BORING!” on Truth Social with no context. The timing suggests he is not so energized by Joshua Steinglass’s closing argument, which started more than 3 hours ago.

Joshua Steinglass, the prosecutor who is delivering the hourslong closing argument in the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump, is an assistant district attorney who has served in the role in Manhattan since 1998.

He is part of an accomplished team compiled by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, that includes former white-collar criminal defense lawyers and veteran prosecutors who have extensive experience going up against Mr. Trump.

Justice Merchan thanks the jurors for their patience and flexibility as he dismisses them for a 20-minute break. Then, after they leave the room, he tells the lawyers, “they look pretty alert to me” and says that he will seek to finish closing arguments today — likely sometime in the evening.

“And then, on Nov. 8, the defendant was elected president,” Joshua Steinglass says. He notes that some of the players in the drama he just described were conscious of the roles they had played in Trump's election. “What have we done?” Stormy Daniels’s lawyer texted a National Enquirer editor as the results came in.

Steinglass says that “we’ll never know if this effort to hoodwink the American voter” made the difference in 2016. But he reminds jurors that prosecutors don’t have to prove that it did — they just have to show that Trump was a part of a conspiracy to aid his victory.

As Joshua Steinglass describes a lot of documents related to Michael Cohen, one point worth making: Todd Blanche tried to demolish Cohen’s credibility, and the collective impact of his various lies was key to the final moments of Blanche's summation.

But Blanche didn’t ultimately get what he wanted with Cohen, which was to get under his skin. Cohen had a rough few days on the stand, but largely held it together and didn’t lose his temper. And that may matter to the jury.

Ever since I started covering courts, I’ve been shocked at the amount of time that prosecutors’ closings take up. They stuff every last piece of evidence into these summations. And a closing argument as long as the one Steinglass is currently delivering will always have moments of tedium, natural ebbs and flows as time passes.

But Steinglass, after slowing down while describing the Karen McDougal deal, is now back in an energized mode and the jurors appear to be paying close attention to the evidence he is showing them about the aftermath of the Wall Street Journal article.

We're now hearing about Nov. 4, 2016, four days before the election, the day that The Wall Street Journal — with a reporting team that included our colleague Michael Rothfeld — broke a story about The National Enquirer’s deal with Karen McDougal on Trump’s behalf.

A lot of the back-and-forth about who called who around the Stormy Daniels payoff felt dizzying, but the jurors have generally seemed quite engaged. And Joshua Steinglass landed his argument by saying that while the sex between Daniels and Trump allegedly took place in 2006, the payoff wasn’t until 2016 because his concern wasn’t actually his family, as his lawyers have suggested, but the election.

It’s a simple deductive point that the jurors can likely understand easily.

And now we hear that on Oct. 27, the money was sent, and on Oct. 28, just 11 days before the election, Stormy Daniels signed the non-disclosure agreement.

On Oct. 26, one day before making the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels's lawyer, Michael Cohen talks to Trump on the phone twice.

“This is damning, right?” Joshua Steinglass says, using a conversational tone as he points toward these records and arguing to the jurors that Cohen was getting a final sign-off from Trump before he initiated the sequence of financial transactions that would conclude with him wiring $130,000.

The jurors are not exactly rapt, but they appear engaged with just over 20 minutes to go before a long break. Joshua Steinglass is now onto evidence from Oct. 25, 2016, two days before the hush-money payment was made.

“There’s this crazy flurry of phone activity among the co-conspirators here,” Steinglass points out, and then rattles off the proper names — Michael Cohen to David Pecker, Pecker to Cohen, Cohen to Keith Davidson — to illustrate just how much phone activity there was in the course of half an hour.

This closing is proceeding so neatly — and yes, slowly — through the timeline that we can tell you exactly what day in October 2016 Joshua Steinglass is talking about during any given moment. Right now, in the courtroom, it’s Oct. 23, 2016. Which, if you’re keeping track, is four days away from when Michael Cohen actually sent $130,000 to a lawyer for Stormy Daniels.

One thing Joshua Steinglass has to do — and I assume he will do it in a focused way in the next several hours — is show the jurors that the alleged Trump Tower conspiracy between David Pecker, Michael Cohen and Trump involved using “unlawful means” to aid Trump’s election.

Steinglass just pulled out one of the potential unlawful means, a document called a business information overview that Cohen created as he sought to obtain the cash to pay Stormy Daniels.

This portion of Joshua Steinglass's closing argument is weedsy and detailed about calls between David Pecker and Michael Cohen, with Hope Hicks mentioned periodically. But it serves to remind the jurors just how enmeshed Cohen was during all this and how much he was talking to the campaign.

To believe the defense’s version of events, jurors will have to take Todd Blanche’s word that Michael Cohen was freelancing and Trump had no knowledge of what was happening with Stormy Daniels.

But Blanche's closing argument as much reflected the defense's theory of the case — that Cohen is an unreliable liar — as it did what Blanche's client wanted to see, which is Cohen get roughed up in court.

Todd Blanche, during his closing argument for the defense, sought to convince the jury that the prosecution’s case relied entirely on Michael Cohen. Joshua Steinglass took that argument on directly. But he is also taking it on indirectly. As he moves slowly through the case’s timeline, showing every piece of documentary evidence the prosecution has, he is reinforcing just how much of this narrative relies not on Cohen, but on the testimony of witnesses who are friendly to Trump and on phone records with which it would be difficult to argue.

In Case You Missed It

To catch you up, Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, has been delivering the prosecution’s closing argument for about two hours, portraying Donald J. Trump as having orchestrated a conspiracy to influence the outcome of the 2016 election by silencing a p*rn star’s account of a sexual encounter with him. Steinglass said a short time ago that he was about a third of the way through his closing argument.

Steinglass told the jury that the first criminal trial of an American president centered on “a conspiracy and a cover-up,” which stemmed from a $130,000 hush-money payment made in the days before the 2016 election to the p*rn star, Stormy Daniels, who said she'd had sex with Trump a decade earlier. Steinglass acknowledged that some of the witnesses who testified during the trial had biases, and noted that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, has lied in the past about his interactions with him. But while on the stand, Steinglass said, they provided truthful testimony, much of which had been corroborated by other witnesses.

Earlier on Tuesday, a lawyer for Trump, Todd Blanche, delivered the defense’s closing argument, repeatedly attacking Cohen's credibility and calling him a liar who had extorted his boss.

And now, having painted a picture of just how desperate the Trump campaign was as it spun the “Access Hollywood” tape, Joshua Steinglass reintroduces the jurors to Stormy Daniels. “During the exact same month that the defendant was desperately trying to sell the distinction between words and actions, he was negotiating to muzzle a p*rn star who was preparing to go public,” the prosecutor says.

Joshua Steinglass is walking jurors through testimony from Hope Hicks describing what a disaster Trump understood the “Access Hollywood” tape to be, because she was “in the room where it happened.” In real time, the day it came out and the weekend that followed were distinct crises within the Trump campaign, according to accounts given later by people who were directly involved.

Joshua Steinglass is showing the jurors video clips of Trump himself acknowledging that the “Access Hollywood” tape and its aftermath could swing a very tight election. “If 5 percent of the people think it’s true, and maybe 10 percent,” Trump says in one clip, “we don’t win.”

As Joshua Steinglass describes the Trump campaign’s reaction to the “Access Hollywood” tape, he notes that the Trump campaign responded publicly that his words on the tape were “locker-room talk,” while quietly scrubbing the internet for anything that might be damaging to him. He notes that Hope Hicks did not exactly avoid Michael Cohen, who she said had a tendency to go “rogue.” Instead, Steinglass says, she relied on him to use his media contacts as they fought back against negative press.