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The stories that matter on money and politics in the race for the White House
Donald Trump has been found guilty of conspiring to buy the silence of a porn actor days before the 2016 election and covering his tracks in business records, becoming the first former US president to be convicted of a crime as he seeks a second term in office.
The unanimous verdict in the Manhattan “hush money” case came at just after 5pm local time on Thursday afternoon, after almost two days of deliberation by the seven men and five women of the jury.
Over the course of the five-week trial, jurors had heard from one-time prominent figures in Trump’s orbit, who outlined a “catch and kill” scheme to suppress a story of an alleged extramarital encounter with Stormy Daniels, after she threatened to go public with her tale.
Trump sat with his eyes closed while the verdict was read. Sentencing is set for July 11.
The criminal trial, which Trump was forced to attend in person, was the first against any former US president. The 34 counts on which he was convicted carry a maximum prison sentence of four years each, but as a first-time offender, he is unlikely to be incarcerated.
Trump is also likely to appeal against the verdict to New York’s higher courts, but that process would take several months and would not prevent him, if elected, from going down in history as the first convicted felon to be the US’s commander-in-chief.
The conviction in Manhattan is a vindication for Democratic district attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought the case last year after it had been abandoned by his predecessor and by the usually aggressive federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
The district attorney’s office fought off multiple attempts by Trump to delay the trial or disqualify testimony, ultimately calling 20 witnesses including former aide Hope Hicks, former tabloid publisher David Pecker, and former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, now his avowed foe.
Cohen, who paid $130,000 to adult entertainment star Daniels in the days before Trump first won the White House, said he had conspired with the then-candidate to fraudulently disguise the reimbursements for that sum as payments for legal services.
Prosecutors argued that this amounted to an attempt to “corrupt” the election by a candidate who was already damaged by the release of the Access Hollywood tape, in which he was heard bragging about grabbing women’s genitals, and was fearful of how voters would react to the revelation of an extramarital sexual encounter with Daniels.
Trump’s defence had maintained that there was “no evidence” their client was aware of the alleged scheme. The 77-year-old’s lawyers also poured scorn on Cohen, a Trump acolyte turned arch-enemy who was the only witness to tie Trump directly to the repayment scheme.
Trump attorney Todd Blanche told the jurors during closing arguments on Tuesday that they could not convict his client purely on the testimony of Cohen, a convicted perjurer and fraudster who he claimed had “raised his right hand and . . . lied to each of you” and who he said was the “human embodiment of reasonable doubt”.
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