The first criminal trial of a former US president has come to a close following four weeks of dramatic testimony in New York.
The so-called Trial of the Century saw Donald Trump charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 (£102,000) hush-money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels, over an alleged affair in 2006.Â
Prosecutors argued that he attempted to influence the 2016 election by having his former personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen pay to bury a story that Trump believed would cost him votes, and then "authorised an illegal reimbursement scheme" to Cohen to "cover it up", said the BBC. Trump denies the charges.
What did the prosecution say? Cohen was the prosecution's star witness. He claimed that Trump instructed him to "fix Stormy Daniels's account of an extramarital liaison", said The Guardian, and "personally signed cheques that reimbursed him" for the hush-money payment. Cohen admitted that he knew the payment violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. The implication was that Trump must also have believed the money violated election law.Â
What about the defence? Robert Costello, a lawyer called as the last witness by the defence, testified that Cohen had said "numerous times" that Trump knew nothing about payments to Daniels. Costello said Cohen had claimed he "did this on his own".Â
What might the jury decide? The case was "deprived of a big finish" when Trump declined to give testimony, said Sky News's US correspondent James Matthews. So while we "lurch towards a verdict that could brand the presumptive Republican nominee a felon", said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, there is a "strange sense of anticlimax".
Legal experts say the prosecution "did an efficient job", but a conviction is "far from guaranteed", said the BBC. "The pieces are all there," said former Brooklyn prosecutor Julie Rendelman. "But is it there beyond a reasonable doubt? I don't know." And "it only takes one juror", she added.
Nor would a conviction guarantee prison time for Trump. He would "inevitably appeal", said Goldberg, so there's "little chance" of him being incarcerated before the election. Ultimately, whether Trump "truly gets his comeuppance" isn't up to the jury – it is "up to the voters". |