Special recap: Both sides make summations in Donald Trump's New York criminal trial
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Closing arguments in the trial of Donald Trump. Are you working on a conviction? Tonight, the defense makes its case for reasonable doubt. Todd Blanch to the jury. Well, President Trump is innocent. The real argument was Michael Cohen cannot be trusted. Michael Cohen is the gloat, the greatest liar of all time. The judge's sharp rebuke to Trump's attorney. He was livid, right? He was livid as he was.

And the prosecution tells the story of a conspiracy to corrupt a presidential election.

Tonight, Rachel Maddow recaps the closing arguments with Lawrence O'Donnell, Alex Wagner, Jen Psaki, Andrew Weissman, Lisa Rubin, and Katie Fang, who are all inside the courthouse. Plus, Nicole Wallace, Chris Hayes, Joy Reid, Ari Melver, and Stephanie Ruhle. As special coverage of Trump on Trial begins now.

Thank you for joining us tonight. We know you have every option in the world for where to follow the news of this remarkable moment in American history. It makes us all the more glad that you are here with us.

I'm Rachel Maddow. I'm here with the great Chris Hayes and Nicole Wallace. The one and only Lawrence O'Donnell, who is in the courtroom today for closing arguments in the New York election interference, hush money, criminal trial of former President Donald Trump. Lawrence is going to be joining us any moment. He is still down at the courthouse. He's going to join us as soon as he can get to a camera, which we think will be momentito. But who knows?

Also here on set with us, Ari Melber is here and Katie Fang is here. Katie was in the overflow room at the courthouse as well today. We're going to be joined over the course of these next two hours by Joy Reed and Alex Wagner and Jen Psaki and Stephanie rule are legal experts. Andrew Weissman, uh,

Andrew Weissman is standing by here with us at MSNBC headquarters. We're going to be joining Lisa Rubin, I believe, at a camera just outside the courthouse moments from now. This has all been breaking as we have been discussing about it. There's a lot to get to.

We know that even though you know this is important news and this is history in the making, you also have a life, you have a job, you have school, you have childcare, you have lots of people have traveled to deal with today after the holiday weekend. We know you have stuff to do.

As this trial draws to a close, as the days in court get longer and longer tonight, them going until 8 p.m., until just moments ago, we know it is hard to follow it all in real time over the course of the day, but that is why you have us. So our aim tonight is to catch you up.

And let's do it. We're going to talk about the big picture of what happened today. We're going to talk about where we are in the overall process, when we are going to learn Trump's fate. We're going to talk about the main points made by both sides and their closing arguments today. We're going to talk about how those points are landing legally and more broadly. We're then going to try to answer some of the questions that came up today at trial, like, for example...

Why did the judge yell at Trump's defense lawyer as soon as he was done with his summation right when the jury went to lunch? Why did he say, I think that statement was outrageous, Mr. Blanche? We will try to answer that question tomorrow.

tonight and more. But we need to start with what has just happened in the last few moments, because the summation from the prosecution literally just ended within the last five minutes. So I'm just going to read you. We do not have an official transcript at this point. I'm going to read to you from our reporters updates on what has happened about the way the prosecution's summation concluded. Forgive me for this not being word for word perfect, but this is the best that we've got.

Joshua Steinglass is the prosecutor who's giving the prosecution's summation, a closing argument. He says, quote,

The defendant, meaning Trump, had an incentive to keep the conspiracy quiet and post election and post election. An effort to conceal pre-election is part of the same conspiracy and to prevent the catch and kill scheme from going public. He had every reason to continue to conceal his election fraud. And as Cohen tells you, at the end of 2017, he had already announced his intention to run again. Any single one of the things I just mentioned, those unlawful means is enough for you to conclude that.

that the Trump Tower conspiracy, meaning the conspiracy that Trump hatched with the company that owns the National Enquirer, the Trump Tower conspiracy violated New York state election law. And the judge will tell you, you don't have to agree, meaning you, the members of the jury, do not have to agree with one another, which unlawful means. The

The defendant's intent to defraud in this case cannot be any clearer. Why didn't he just pay Stormy Daniels directly one transaction? Instead, they devised this elaborate scheme, secret FedEx packages, an effort to conceal the truth. He didn't want anyone to find out about the conspiracy to steal the election. Everything was cloaked in lies, lies in the invoices, lies in the bank paperwork, lies in the 1099, meaning the tax forms that were filed with the IRS.

Lies in the bank transfers, the shell companies, the encrypted apps, misleading denials. The name of the game, Steinblas says, was, quote, concealment for the man who benefited most, former President Trump.

Now, our reporter notes in this moment, Steinglass is getting fired up at this point, speaking up and going rapid fire through the above remarks. Steinglass says to the jury, quote, you have been a remarkable group. I know this has been a really long summation. Boy, has it.

I apologize for trading brevity for thoroughness, but we only get one shot. The defendant has a constitutional right to a fair trial. He has a right to make us prove our burden. There are contracts, emails and texts that corroborate every bit of testimony. In this particular case, prosecutor says the evidence is, quote, literally overwhelming.

So now he's gotten that trial. He's had his day in court. And remember, as the judge will tell you, and as Mr. Blanche told you, meaning Trump's defense counsel, as Mr. Blanche told you, the law is the law. There is no special law for this defendant. Donald Trump cannot shoot someone on Fifth Avenue during rush hour and get away with it. Objection. No, Judge Mershon sustained.

prosecutor. You, the jury, have the ability to hold the defendant accountable. Remember, you are the ones who have the opportunity to hear every witness and see every document. Focus on the evidence and the logical inferences that can be drawn from that evidence. Use your common sense and follow the judge's legal instructions. Stinglass then says to the jury pointedly, quote, come back in here and say guilty.

Guilty of 34 counts of falsifying, counts to cover up a conspiracy to corrupt the 2016 election. And then he concludes, in the interest of justice and in the name of the people of the state of New York, I ask you to find the defendant guilty. Thank you. And he wrapped at 757.

p.m. Eastern Time, whereupon Judge Mershon told the court and told the jurors we will get started tomorrow at 10 a.m. Now, why would they be getting started tomorrow at 10 a.m. after the closing arguments just concluded? It's because a very, very, very important thing is about to happen next. We now know what will happen tomorrow, 10 a.m., with the jury. It will be the judge instructing the jury about

how to deliberate. And that sounds like, oh, that must be a boilerplate thing. That sounds like that must be, you know, the sort of, you know, do your job, don't be biased kind of generic patriotic instructions they always get. No, the instructions to the jury is very much a contested matter. It has been hotly fought over by both sides. Judge Marchand started today's proceedings by saying essentially to the prosecution and to the defense that he had heard them out.

in terms of what they wanted from his jury instructions. And he had made his decision. He asked them if they had further comment on what his instructions should be. Neither of them said they did. And so he announced at the beginning of today's proceedings, okay, then, effectively, you know what my jury instructions will be. It is final. That will happen when you are done with the summations. He said that at the very start of what ended up being a very, very long day in court today, starting in the 9 a.m. hour,

Not ending until just now. We have so much to talk about. It was such a big day. Let's start by going right to the courthouse. Let's bring in MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin. She has been at the courthouse for the entire trial. She has been earning her kibble today.

Lisa, thank you so much for sticking it out for the whole day. Thank you for joining us from outside. Right now, I have to ask your just your big picture take overall on how the two sides did with their summation and what you think it's most important for the country to understand about the way this trial concluded today.

I think the way this trial concluded today, Rachel, was with a very exhausted group of people upstairs. Let's start there. And not only the jury, but for example, all the court officers who have been protecting us, protecting this trial, they work as long as the judge says that the jury and the trial is going on. I asked them, well, at what point do you change shifts? And one of them looked at me and said,

I'm here until the trial closes today. So you're looking at a group of people from reporters to the jury who are all a little bit tired. That having been said, my big takeaway at the end of the day is I feel a little bit like Goldilocks still in search of the right bed. And that's because if Todd Blanch's closing was very light on detail and long on hyperbole, you got the exact opposite.

opposite from Josh Stein glass in four plus hours of excruciating detail where he ping ponged between call records and text messages and every single contact that could be used to corroborate the witness that they didn't want the jury to think this whole case rests on Michael Cohen. They said Michael Cohen many, many, many fewer times than the defense did. If you were to listen to Josh Stein glass today, the star witnesses here were David Pecker, Hope Hicks, and

of the records from business records, meaning the 34 business records that are part of the felony counts here to call records, text messages, emails. And Josh did a very thorough exegesis of the timeline here starting in August of 2015 at that Trump Tower meeting where the conspiracy was formed and going all

all the way through the end of 2018 with Michael Cohen's plea to two counts of election violations, one involving AMI's payment to Karen McDougal, the other involving his own payment to Stormy Daniels. And in between, you got everything from Madeleine Westerhoutz talking about how

Trump signed things in the White House, to details about Jeff McAnee and Deborah Tarasov and the Trump Organization in terms of how they process business records and anything and everything you can imagine in between. So I feel a little bit whiplashed right now having witnessed both of these closings because one was so remarkably short on details and evidence and just all about sort of poking little holes and cherry picking evidence.

including some really obvious cherry picking of the testimony that the prosecution was able to refute. And then you've got Stein glass who in four plus hours went through every possible piece of evidence and maybe didn't make the sort of selective and judicious choices that somebody who has a little bit more distance would

would have made in trying to convince a jury who's been sitting here for six weeks that they can convict on something less than every single bit of the evidence. And just to underscore to you how detailed his closing was, at one point I looked up at the slides that he was showing. These are demonstratives that sort of encapsulate or summarize evidence.

In the bottom right-hand corner, they have numbers on them that I noticed were ticking up with each time their trial tech or their trial technician or paralegal pressed a button to further animate or further the slides. At the last count, when I left the courtroom, they were on slide 420. So that might give you a sense of how much detail was packed in there and why it's hard in many respects to see that forest from the trees because we were just right in the woods with him today.

Lisa, thank you for that. I want to I know we're going to be speaking with Lawrence as well, who was also just in there. I want to put what you just said to our lawyers who are also here on the panel with us. Katie and Ari, you were both in the courtroom as well today. What Lisa is describing there about two very different approaches to closing mirrored in a little

in some ways by the difference between the openings. I was there for opening statements and my feeling about the prosecution's opening statement versus the defense's opening statement was that the defense's opening statement was hard to follow, very emotional, sort of emotionally unpredictable, like why are you yelling now? I don't know where this is coming from. And also just not very linear. Whereas the prosecution's was calm, linear, and not as exciting in part because it wasn't as weird.

It sounds like there was a little bit of that in the closing today. This may just be the style of these two legal teams. But how do, as a non-lawyer, I don't know how to translate that style into effectiveness for the jury. What Lisa was describing there makes me worry for the prosecution's sake that maybe they just gave them too much to chew on. What did you think, Art? Okay.

I thought it was a strong day for the prosecution because it was voluminous. It was so thorough and you kind of felt that and that helped them deal with the Cohen issue. But if you're asking me straight up, it was too long. It didn't need to be this long. And that may or may not matter in the end. But it was longer than it needed to be. I think that's a fair statement. Was the defense...

which was first, was it also too long? Was it too short? Obviously that was like three hours, roughly a sign glass of prosecution went for four plus hours. What did you think of the length of the defense? The defense also could have been shorter because it's still meandered, but it, it,

still hammered what it wanted to about Cohen and poking holes for reasonable doubt. I thought the prosecution today reminded everyone why you don't need Cohen. And this is a records case. And there's all of these records. I also would remind everyone, and I know sometimes we are repeating ourselves, but, you know, if this were a cooking show, it's not like both contestants have to make a great meal.

The prosecution has to have a five course perfect meal with every ingredient. And if the defense is able to serve an edible hot dog, that might be reasonable doubt. So I remind everyone at home if sometimes because, again, we've talked about this. It's sort of like, wait, why are we being so nice to the defense? We're not being nice. The defense has to do less. If they can poke reasonable doubt for one juror more, they could get a mistrial. Reasonable doubt for something that matters.

Yeah, reasonable doubt on an element of the crime. But yeah, being down there today and watching, I think that it was clear to the extent that anything changed. It's clear that the prosecution realized we may have a bigger Cohen problem than we even thought, even though we prepared for it. And the sign of that was they opened their...

They're big closing arguments. And you just remind everyone how important it is by saying, OK, first, let's talk about Cohen. We already told you he can lie. Here's more than one way to interpret these things. Here's the other things that support what he said. They basically said, if you want to throw this guy out, you can still convict him.

And that's fine. I think those are all true legal statements. But it showed you that by at least the end of the defense's summation, they were at least concerned enough to want to punch back on that. And then they did their business. Lawrence has just walked out of the courtroom. And so I want to go I want to go to him next. And then, Katie, I want to get your take on this as well. And we hear from him. Lawrence, you had a very, very, very long day in the courtroom today. I know you've just been able to get out to the camera. So I want to get your instant reaction.

Your take, your overall take on what you saw, how things went today, and what you think was important for people to understand about how the summations unfolded.

Longest day I've ever had in a courtroom, Rachel, thanks to the prosecution closing, which I think everyone's going to agree was much longer than it had to be. However, however, the assistant district attorney is a very compelling speaker. He's very easy to listen to. And so you could be two and a half hours into it and not feel as if you were two and a half hours into it.

By the time you were four hours into it, you knew you were four hours into it, as was inevitable. He had some really, really powerful moments. He did his own imagined version of

of the 90-second phone call that's in dispute in this case where, according to Michael Cohen, he called Keith Schiller. He spoke to Keith Schiller about some harassment he was suffering, and then he spoke to Donald Trump for the remainder of the 90 seconds. And we saw the assistant DA basically come up with an entire version of that conversation and how that could have gone

in 49 seconds. So it was one of those moments in a courtroom that was very impressive, very, very, very effective. But, sorry, he, you know, this is the kind of, he's the kind of student who,

really fills up the exam paper, you know, doesn't leave anything out. And oddly enough, it did not feel that repetitive. That's the funny thing about it. But the essence of it was basically, look, this was in fact a reimbursement. In fact, there was a moment there where he rattled off all of the reasons why this was a reimbursement to Michael Cohen and not a big paycheck. And at the end of all

all of the reasons he gave for it being a reimbursement and then going to the Trump position that it's not a reimbursement. His loudest moment in the courtroom today was saying, does anyone believe that?

And I think he's right. There's no one on the jury who does not believe that that was indeed a reimbursement arrangement for Michael Cohen. And the question here for this jury is just, is Donald Trump guilty in a falsifying business records scheme that was that was entered into in order to corruptly affect an election?

And that may be for the jury a complicated question.

Lawrence, can I just ask you, in terms of Todd Blanche's summation, a lot of reporters today described that as hard to follow, as being because he wasn't going chronologically the way the sort of exhaustive summation from the prosecution went. That Blanche's summation was it was sometimes hard to know what he was getting at, what point he was trying to make other than going liar, liar, liar at Michael Cohen and trying to make

The fact that Michael Cohen has been proven to lie is something that should be fatal to the case. What was it, in fact, hard to follow? Well, listen, I've watched an awful lot of criminal lawyers in my life trying and struggling to defend a guilty client.

That's what it looks like. There's no good way. There's no easy way. I don't see how Todd Blanch could have done any better, actually, in his summation today, given the facts that he's loaded down with, given the complexities that he failed to deal with. And the DA pointed out this point that I've been making steadily about the defense argument, which is that it's an argument in conflict with itself, because the defense argument is...

Michael Cohen was paid this big paycheck in 2017, and it had nothing to do with reimbursement of the $130,000 to Stormy Daniels.

But we know and the defense knows that the calculation of how much he would be paid was based on a document handwritten by Allen Weisselberg that includes $130,000 to Stormy Daniels. That's never been explained by the defense. Not at any point did that get explained. And then the DA made this point when he got up to speak saying, look, you can't accuse Michael Cohen

of stealing in the reimbursement scheme if you're also saying he was never reimbursed. And so that's the central problem that the defense has, is that it has theories crashing into each other. And in one side of their theory, they are fully adopting the prosecution case, which is Michael Cohen was reimbursed.

But when the defense adopts the idea that Michael Cohen was reimbursed, they then say that in the formula for the reimbursement, Michael Cohen lied and he managed to steal $30,000. So you cannot, as the DA said, you cannot accuse him of stealing.

and then say he wasn't reimbursed. You cannot have that both ways. And so that was one of those things, you know, as a trial develops, you sit there and you wait. When there's something really tough for one side, you just should sit there and wait to hear that side address the most difficult thing they have. And the most difficult thing the defense has is that number, $130,000, written in Allen Weisselberg's handwriting.

on that document. And the defense has never explained it. They've never come close to explaining it. And the prosecution made that very, very clear today, that they've never explained that difficult thing. The difficult challenge for the prosecution today laid out to them by the defense argument was Michael Cohen's a liar.

You cannot convict Donald Trump on the testimony of Michael Cohen. And it is only Michael Cohen's testimony that says Donald Trump knew and approved the payment of Stormy Daniels before the election. That evidence comes only from Michael Cohen. And the defense insisted you cannot convict him.

you cannot find Donald Trump guilty based on that testimony from Michael Cohen. And so the prosecution did a lot of work on that very point and did an awful lot of work on corroborating Michael Cohen as much as they possibly could on that very point. And so the prosecution was not afraid to go after the most difficult challenge posed by the defense, but the defense never came close.

to the most serious challenges posed by the prosecution. Yeah, we had the prosecution. That was clearer to me in the transcript than anything else that I have seen in terms of the heart of the case and the fight between the prosecution and the defense is that the prosecution is able to say, here are two documents that are smoking gun documents. And yes, they have something to do with Michael Cohen getting paid. But the reason that we have these documents is that they have been corroborated by officers

other Trump organization personnel. And that is why they are in evidence. And there is no contrary explanation from the defense as to what these smoking gun documents might mean. And that just feels to me to be the sort of unassailable, unassailable core of where we are. And for all of the time that Joshua Steinglass spent talking today, I mean, that was that was my biggest takeaway. We've got smoking guns that you can't say anything about and you haven't.

Yeah. And the defense doesn't have any comparable so-called smoking gun. There's no there's nothing comparable to that on the defense side of the case. Lawrence O'Donnell, I know you need to leave where you are standing in order to come sit with us. So please travel safely. We'll see you as soon as you get here.

All right. Katie, on that point, in terms of the overall scope of what each side tried to do, but also the salient points that the jury will be able to both remember and may be decisive to them, do you agree with Lawrence's take there?

I want to disagree with everybody's take to some extent, and I want to kind of bring everybody grounded back into what the realities are. This jury never stayed past 430 until now, and this trial has taken a lot... It's taken less time than before. So this was a long thing, but this is real life. This is how real trials go. When you have closings, they go long. That being said...

Trump is a style over substance guy. So I'm not surprised that his lawyers are style over substance. And you would think that's

that somebody like Todd Blanche, having the experience that he does, would be able to deliver something that was more compelling. So it would be irrelevant if he took two hours or 10, if it was going to be compelling. And that's where he loses out to the prosecution. So the prosecution not only has the style from Joshua Stein glass being compelling, clear and concise, but he also has the substance. And that's why. So when you have,

When you have Todd Blanche get up and say, Michael Cohen is the MVP of lies or the globes, the greatest liar of all time. Maybe he was the greatest lawyer of all time for Donald Trump, right? But when you hear that, you're like, yeah, you snicker a little bit. Maybe you chuckle, but that's all you got. And that's really what it is. And so I...

take umbrage with the idea that this was too long. The prosecutor made it clear this is his only shot. And the jurisdiction is very important to clarify as well. In Florida, for example, if you're the prosecution, you get the sandwich. You go prosecution, defense, prosecution, rebuttal. You don't get that here.

So you get the defense to go first and then the prosecution. And so, you know, Steinglass had it prepared, but he also had to pivot a little bit based upon what he heard or maybe what he didn't hear during the defense's closing argument. And so that is why I think you saw it a little bit longer. But you knew it was going to be meaty because you saw it in the openings. And Lawrence, very quickly, when he when he noted that 49 second reenactment,

There is a power in being able to stand up in front of a jury. And I've done this in trials that I've done before when timing is in dispute and there's no way that you could ID the defendant victim because you only saw the defendant for 15, 20 seconds. And what you do is you stand there in silence.

for 15, 20 seconds. And so when you had Joshua Stein glass today reenact and not in a rushed manner, the call that they remember Blanche spent so much time during his four day cross on this October, 2016 call and Stein glass got up and in 49 seconds, he dismantled the entirety of that. So that's the substance, the substance that's going to no pun intended,

Trump any style they may come from the defense. Nicole? It was also their choice to stay. I mean, Judge Marchand stopped at four and five and he kept giving them off ramps. If they were tired or done, they could have left. He said at the beginning of the day, it will be entirely up to them. So the length of the day was not Marchand's decision. It wasn't Steinckloss' decision. It was the jury's decision.

I bring zero expertise to the legal front, except getting picked up in a juror. And I had Ken Burns on today and I'm just so sort of hostage to the story piece of it. And I think, you know, to sort of steal Ari's analogy, you know, one person has to write like Shakespeare, the other one like like a Trump tweet. Right. But I don't even think they did that. And what the prosecution had going for it today was the ability to say, take the sex,

Sex happened in 06. Why do you think they paid for it two weeks before election day? Right. On every element of what they're trying to prove. And they said there were only three. I mean, the three were, you know, if the records were fraudulent, if Trump inspired them to be fraudulent, and if the, you know, election was an additional criminal element. I mean, they're asking

them to decide three pretty narrow things. Was this about the election? Were the records false? And did Trump cause them to be made? And he didn't even have to write them or sign them. Is he the cause of it? And I think as a story that was told, that was told through every witness. And look, I have no

no idea what the jury is going to do. We have no idea how they experienced any single witness, any single day, any single direct, any single cross. But if they have to process a story, I don't know what story they were told about Trump's experience. And I don't know what they stitched together based on the fact that the one witness Trump's side put out was an absolute home run for the prosecution. Chris.

The phrase that Steinblatt closed on when he said two things, listen to the instructions, which suggests a little bit of a tip of the hat there. They've already seen, they have seen the instructions. The finals. He's happy with them, right? So he said, listen to the instructions.

And here's your common sense. And I have to say, following this all day, it's like to me again, not as a lawyer, it's does this is what happened exactly what it appears to be based on the testimony and all of the evidence? Or was there some magical other thing that happened here? And that magical other thing that happened was that Donald Trump was just sort of out of it and didn't get in the weeds of like who he's paying money to.

Boy, I don't know. Like, and I, again, this is maybe overly literal for me or the way that I think, but I have found myself, if I'm looking for reasonable doubt as a juror in good faith, I do need some alternate theory that, that I can hang on a little bit, just a little bit to be like, okay,

Or not an all-encompassing theory, but also an explanation for the events as presented, at least in its individual atomized way. Yes. And the Cohen stuff. And again, I think the point that Lawrence made of like the one piece of evidence is the testimony that links him directly before the election is the testimony from Michael Cohen. But again, it's like, well, if you zoom out a little bit, like there's just a lot of paper on this and a lot of testimony. And again, I don't know what the jury is going to do. But in the end, when he says, use your common sense,

It really does come down to and the copious rehearsal of the testimony and evidence is like, is this exactly what it looks like? Yeah, probably. It's probably exactly what it looks like. And we're going to talk about this tonight in terms of the prosecution. I mean, excuse me, the defense's gamble.

to put its own credibility with the jury on the line by saying Trump didn't have sex with Stormy Daniels. And the Access Hollywood tape was no big deal. And Michael Cohen was an esteemed lawyer for Donald Trump. And that's why he randomly was paid this weird way for that one year and then never otherwise paid for it. They did make a lot of claims that they didn't they didn't have to make any of those claims.

They made all of those claims, none of which are central to disproving the prosecution's case or provoking a sense of reasonable doubt in the jury. They nevertheless made those claims to the jury. They're all very, very much in contrast with what you think would be a common sense take on the matter. We're going to talk about why they may have done that. We're also going to give you that moment from the transcript that Katie was just telling us about when the prosecutor said,

acted out the phone call that the defense made central to their case. We have so much more to cover tonight. We'll have that moment from the transcript for you coming up next. Stay with us.

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. When I was working in the Senate, I didn't realize that it's the perfect training for the job that I have now. Covering government, covering politics, the complexity of it all. Mastering the detail is crucial to being able to present anything that happens in Senate buildings or any of the other news centers that we have to focus on every day. The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, weeknights at 10 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC.

Today's news requires more facts, more context and more analysis. The world's never been harder to understand. That's why it's never been more important to try MSNBC. Understand more. One dramatic moment in today's closing arguments, today's summations from the from the defense and then the prosecution happened fairly early on in the prosecution summation. The prosecutor said,

acted out for the jury a phone call between Michael Cohen and Donald Trump, a phone call as it could have happened. This is an important phone call because the defense had sort of hung a big part of its case on the idea that Cohen, Michael Cohen, was lying about a phone call that he said he had with Donald Trump about Stormy Daniels because that phone call was very short. That phone call was only, I believe, a minute and 36 seconds long.

Cohen also in that time says he spoke to Trump's bodyguard. He had to speak to Trump's bodyguard, Keith Schiller, and say, hey, will you put Trump on? And then he spoke with Trump about Stormy Daniels. The defense claimed that if it was only a minute and 36 seconds, that just wasn't enough time.

for Cohen to have had any substantive discussion with Trump about Stormy Daniels and about this alleged hush money plot. They said the length of that call, which they had from phone records, effectively disproved that that conversation between Cohen and Trump could have gone the way Cohen said. So this is from today's court transcript. This is the prosecutor, Joshua Steinblas, acting, sort of recreating that call

And timing himself doing it so the jury could experience in real time how long it might reasonably have taken for Cohen and Trump to have the conversation that Michael Cohen says they had. Joshua Steinglass, the prosecutor. And that brings us to the phone call on October 24th at 8.02 p.m. in which Cohen testified that he called to speak with Mr. Trump.

And it turns out that at first he was speaking to Keith Schiller about getting harassing phone calls. And of course, the defense says, aha, that's perjury. The only interpretation of that is that he's lying. That's the only interpretation that they want you to consider. To them, that is the big lie. But that's not the only interpretation. Steinglass says, forgive me for a minute, but let's try a little experiment. I will be Cohen.

Hey, Keith, how's it going? It seems like this prankster might be a 14-year-old kid. If I text you the number, can you call and talk to his family? See if you can let them know how serious this is. It's not a joke. Uh-huh. Yeah. All right. Thanks, pal. Hey, is the boss near you? Can you pass him the phone for a minute? I'll wait just a couple of seconds.

Hey, boss, I know you're busy, but I just wanted to let you know that this other thing is moving forward with my friend Keith Davidson and the other party that we discussed. It's back on track. I'm going to try one last time to get our friend David, our friend David Pecker to pay. But if it's not, it's going to be on us to take care of it. Yeah. All right. Good luck in Tampa. Bye.

And then just Stein glass says 49 seconds. So Katie was just describing this, having been there in court with this type of a moment when the defense has said a minute and 36 seconds. That's so fast. Can't get anything done in that time. And then you walk through the jury through something that takes significantly less than that time and say that didn't seem like it was me screaming through it. That's so fast.

That seems viable, doesn't it? It's so impactful because it leans into the common sense that the judge is actually going to read as a part of a jury instruction tomorrow to them, that they can rely on their common sense to be able to make decisions in this case during the course of the deliberations. And so when you have the prosecutor get up in a very relatable way

have this reenactment, I'll put it in quotes because it definitely wasn't based on a transcript, but it sounded totally credible the way that you just read it. And it took only 49 seconds. That's the real life application of what makes it grounded in their sense of common sense, right? And when you have a myriad of

during the course of the closing arguments. Lawrence talked about it as well. How can you say that he didn't get reimbursed, but then you say that he stole it because it was legal services rendered, so he really got legal fees? You can't steal your legal fees, can you? I mean, it's things like that that you're like, as a jury, you're like, oh, yeah, you can't do that, right? So... I mean, for me, if you're the jury...

The defense has offered, to Chris's point, has offered a few alternate explanations for the fact pattern that's been presented. One of the most compelling, surprising, memorable moments was when the defense said, hey, you know that call that Michael Cohen described where he said he had to get Keith Schiller to get Trump on the phone? Let me tell you what else is in Michael Cohen's phone records around there. Let me tell you about this 14-year-old child's

That was harassing Michael Cohen. You didn't know about that. This is a rabbit I'm pulling out of the hat. This is a whole new interpretation of this fact pattern. And the reason this is important is not only because it's memorable and it's going to stick in your mind as something the prosecution didn't tell you, but it also disproves that that call with Trump ever could have happened. And so even if that was the one most compelling, most memorable thing that the defense produced,

Joshua Steinglass today essentially said, wipe that off the balance sheet in terms of whether or not you think you've got a contrary explanation of the facts that punctures the believability of the prosecution's case. Yeah, I mean, and that I always thought the sort of refutation of that seemed a bit excessive in the in the actual in the cross that they did. Blunt like hanging on that phone call, partly because, again, the totality of the evidence seems so unbiased.

That one phone call from Cohen to Trump isn't the most important thing. Right, yeah, you take it away and maybe there's a credibility issue, but you still got a lot of other stuff you got to deal with. But to the point that Ari was just making...

Again, it's all about just giving people enough. Like, there's just like, is there someone there you're giving enough to just be like, no, I don't know. Like, what about X? What about Y? What about Z? As ammunition for a hung jury. Yeah. Right. And you just I'm not going to say what you said to me during the commercial break, because I thought it was a really smart point. You should actually make it on air. But like, how's that? How's that for a tease? I was tempted to steal it. But the point that you made about Australia.

A strategy for an acquittal versus a strategy for a hung jury. Just talk about that, because I think it actually helps me make sense to Rachel, your point of what they're trying to do, because what I find is there's no alternate theory here for what happens. So then what?

Yeah, and I think that's why this sometimes sounds like a lot of silly and meandering arguments. Many people have observed that the Trump approach from his lawyers during the case and in today's closing were meandering. I think they're meandering because it's only a strategy to get a hung jury, which means one or two holdouts is good enough. You don't get...

a verdict that's hung jury and they probably don't retry the case. So that plays as Trump skates. And that's different than an acquittal strategy. If you remember OJ, you say there's really bad evidence. There's even DNA evidence. The acquittal strategy is a completely alternative theory. Some might call it a conspiracy theory, but it's one that touches all the evidence. So you say, yeah, no, there is bad DNA evidence of blood.

because they planted his blood on the scene and you have this full theory. There's nothing like that here. There's way too many open questions. There's way too many obvious things that they have not even tried, the defense lawyers for Trump, to explain. They literally haven't. All they're doing is this strategy of questions, reasonable doubt, hung jury, get one or two people. And so earlier we were talking as well about

It's pretty bonkers bananas, not believable to say that the Access Hollywood tape was not a problem for the campaign. We checked. I mean, many of us have done our homework. It's the only time we could find a public apology ever uttered by Donald Trump. The only time he said not, I'm sorry, you feel bad. I'm sorry, you're terrible. No, he actually said, if you go back in the tape.

I said these things. I was wrong. I'm sorry. It's also the only time the jury heard him speak in the trial. So he doesn't testify. But one of the only times they saw him on camera speaking is in the C-SPAN trial.

into evidence where the C-SPAN archivist came up and they entered the tape of Trump to camera at a podium saying, this is going to cost me thousands of female votes. This is going to poison me in the mind of the voters after Access Hollywood. So the only thing that the jury has heard Trump say in five weeks is that the Access Hollywood tape is going to kill him with women voters. That's all they've heard.

And so it's not I wouldn't call it believable, even by the most fair standard. But for a hung jury to get one juror to say, you know, I don't remember it all that well. People say all sorts of things. I don't think this was for the campaign. I don't even think it was that bad for the campaign. That's what the lawyer said. I think this was all about his family. And then if you start projection, which is not the best thing jurors aren't supposed to project, they're supposed to use the evidence. But a person says.

projecting their own life might say, I could understand that not wanting that to come out. I've never run for office. And now we're now what are we talking about? We're talking about the reasonable doubt of somebody's theories about family and not a campaign. So this this we're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, we're going to talk about exactly this point, because this was a really important moment, especially, I think, for those of us who are not lawyers watching this, because you get to a point which is not about the law.

And it is a little bit about history, about what actually happened during the campaign. But it is also something that all of the jurors will personally remember. And so when your defense counts on telling the jurors what you think you lived through, what you think you remember didn't really happen that way. Let me tell you a different way it went. That is when you are playing with people's psychology in a way that is very unsettling to the non-lawyers among us. And we're going to talk about that in detail when we come back. Stay with us.

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Todd Blanch, Trump defense lawyer. The Access Hollywood tape was released October 7th, 2016, a month before the election. The tape itself was from 2005, 11 years earlier. And as you heard from witnesses, this was an extremely personal event for President Trump. Nobody, and again, I'm just going to state the obvious, nobody wants their family to be subjected to that sort of thing.

But the government wants you to believe that the release of that tape from 2005 was so catastrophic to the campaign that it provided a motive, a motive for President Trump to do something criminal.

Again, this is Trump's defense counsel quote. But there is no evidence of that. President Trump did not react to the Access Hollywood tape in any way the government is suggesting. You heard the politicians reacted negatively to the Access Hollywood tape. They didn't testify. You heard that there was even talk about something consequential for President Trump, who was a Republican nominee. But none of that happened. None of that is true.

You heard that President Trump and his campaign got ready for the debate, responded to the allegations and continued campaigning. So there were a couple of days of frustration and consternation, but that happens all the time in campaigns. And we know that this access, the Access Hollywood tape is being set up in this trial to be something that it is not. It was one of many stressful stories and issues that came up during the 2016 campaign. It was not a doomsday event.

President Trump, as you saw, addressed it in a video that was addressed to the release to the American public. He addressed it in a debate a couple of days later. He never thought it was going to cost him to lose the campaign. And indeed, it didn't. It was not a doomsday event. That was from Trump defense counsel Todd Blanch today in his summation to the jury, claiming that the Access Hollywood tape note was no big deal. And obviously, you can argue about whether or not it makes sense for Trump's defense counsel

to try to make this claim that there was no new sense of urgency around Trump's various creepy sex scandals in October 2016, right before the election, right after that tape came out. The strategic importance of making this claim is not, at least to me, particularly obvious on its face.

But this is a factual claim, right, from the Trump defense. The factual record about whether or not that tape was a big deal, that is an empirically observable thing. That is a thing we can check. Did it matter at the time? We were all alive and sentient when it happened. We can remember. We can check.

Trump tape bombshell. Donald Trump caught on a hot mic months after marrying Melania, making vulgar comments about groping women, saying when you're a star, they let you do it. Notice the hurricane graphic at the very beginning of that going away. No, it's this thing.

When the Access Hollywood tape came out just a month before the 2016 election, it did knock hurricane news out of the news cycle. It was what NBC News' Lester Holt described at the time as a bombshell. Not only did Trump's comments about grabbing straight for women's genitals make front page news across the country, the news really did in real life lead to an avalanche of Republicans calling for Trump to drop out of the race.

This is The New York Times. Lewd Donald Trump tape is a breaking point for many in the GOP. This is The Washington Post. Three dozen Republicans have now called for Donald Trump to drop out. Here's the local view from Swing State, Michigan. State Republican leader Ronna Romney McDaniel says Trump's talk about women is disgusting. This was the headline of Politico. Republican women are done with Trump.

That all happened not that long ago in our living memory. Today, in closing arguments, Trump's defense tried to argue that the Access Hollywood tape was just a normal day on the campaign trail with no real consequences. Trying to tell the jury that even though the timing of the evidence makes it look like Trump's side suddenly got motivated to quash the Stormy Daniels story days after the tape, well, that can't really be right because Trump had no reason to worry about the impact of that tape. It had no impact.

Why make an argument like that? That is so easily disprovable, even by people's own living memories, right? All these jurors, you know, these jurors are not junior high school students. They were all old enough in 2016 to have lived through it and to remember it. Even if they did forget living through it, in her testimony in court this month, Hope Hicks, the Trump campaign press secretary when the tape came out, described the release of the Access Hollywood tape by saying this. She said, quote, I had

I had a good sense to believe this was going to be a massive story. Quote, I think there was a consensus among all of us that the tape was damaging and that this was a crisis. Hicks also went on to describe how it pushed hurricane news out of the news, making this claim to the jury, Nicole, that what you lived through and what you must remember about this moment didn't happen. Yeah. And I think that's why the prosecution has reason to feel

decently confident that they've made a strong case on the underlying piece, right? And if you're a student of Trump's social media posts, you can smell his panic. They're not worth platforming on a program like this. But I think that Blanche's need to address Access Hollywood speaks to the strength of the part of the prosecution case that we don't talk about

quite as much. You know, we get lost in the exhibits and the cross and the direct. But what they've established, obviously, in a way that made Todd Blanch nervous enough to say something on its face ludicrous, because, again, the only time this jury has seen Trump talk talk

was when he was saying the things that Lester was covering there, that this is going to poison me in the minds of women. And the thing that no one will ever know, the piece that's lost to history because they pay Stormy Daniels to stay quiet ahead of the 2016 election is whether that would have tipped it over, right? Whether Access Hollywood plus Stormy would have done what Trump was afraid it would do. The other piece, I quoted it already, is Steinglass says in his summation today, the sex happens in 06. Stormy doesn't get a dime today.

Until two weeks before Election Day. Right. They're not interested in paying to make this go away until Access Hollywood happens and the election's about to happen and they know that that's the fatal moment. Right. And I mean, the other piece about the timeline and what the jury saw before Michael Cohen ever was introduced to the jury as a walking, talking human being who kind of didn't blow, right? He was demeaned by almost every witness. I mean, there was a sideswipe from Pecker who said he couldn't do anything. He had a very short leash. There was Hopek saying he wouldn't do anything without getting credit.

he takes, before he takes the stand, what you know is that he was instrumental. He helped Hope Hicks write the denial in the Access Hollywood tape concept. Right, because they needed to because it was catastrophic for them. Yes. All right. Much more of our recap of today's closing arguments in the Trump trial ahead. Many more questions to get here tonight. Stay with us.

Welcome back to our recap of the criminal trial of Donald Trump on what was a critical and very, very long day in that trial today. Closing arguments from both sides. I'm joined now by my colleagues Ari Melber and Joy Reed. Great to have you here, Joy. Also, Alex Wagner, Jen Psaki. You guys have had an enormously long day today. I really appreciate you being here. You just finished your show. Ari, Jen, Alex, you guys were all in the courtroom today. We have so much to talk about.

But let's take the big picture view just so we can situate ourselves in context here. With the closing arguments concluding tonight, let's just take a look at where we are, what is going to happen next. In terms of the overall scope of this criminal proceeding, Trump was indicted 14 months ago in March of last year. He was arraigned a few days after that. It then took a year to

Before jury selection started, jury selection started. That was six weeks ago, April 15th, 2024. Opening statements were a week later, April 22nd. And then we were off to the races. The prosecution took 15 and a half days in court to present their case. The defense took a day and a half to present theirs.

And that is how we arrive today at summations, at closing statements, which means we are not at the end, but we are getting close. The defense gave its closing statement first. That's the rule in New York state criminal proceedings. Trump defense lawyer Todd Blanch said his summation today would take two or two and a half hours, ended up taking three hours. Then the prosecution started to give its closing statement. They said it would be four to four and a half hours later.

By the time they took a break around five o'clock, the prosecution was already two and a half hours into it. The judge asked to keep going until seven. He was apparently hoping to keep both summations on the same day and in their entirety. Prosecution was still not done by seven. They ended up staying until eight. They both just went on and on and on for much longer than expected.

But both are finished. And Judge Marchand had said strategically, as a matter of the way he likes to run his court, he likes both sides to get their summation in on the same day. And by making the day extraordinarily long, he was able to do that today. What's going to happen next is that the court will reconvene tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern. We put that graphic back up at the timeline.

All right. Now that both sides are finally done with their summations, there is still more to go. When they convene tomorrow at 10 a.m., the judge is going to give his instructions to the jury as to how they are supposed to deliberate.

Now, this is technical and sensitive. It can often be sort of impenetrable to onlookers and non-lawyers and people who haven't followed every second of the trial. But it's a really important phase of the trial. It'll be a long process. Judge Marchand says to expect that those jury instructions will take about an hour. And that's just the judge speaking to the jury about how they should think about the evidence.

Judge Marchand opened today's proceedings by noting that he has notified both sides of what his jury instructions are going to be. They are done arguing about what those instructions can be. The instructions are now set. We will hear him deliver them to the jury tomorrow. Now, the closing arguments, summations are over. The judge will give those instructions starting tomorrow, 10 a.m. to roughly 11 a.m.,

And then the jury gets the case and they deliberate amongst themselves. They've been taking in all this information from both sides, but not deliberating about it yet. The jury is not allowed to talk amongst themselves about what they have been seeing until deliberations officially start. That deliberation will only start after they get their instructions tomorrow from the judge. He'll tell them what to consider and what not to consider.

As for how long the deliberations are going to take before we get a verdict, we have no idea on earth. We will watch and wonder and bite our fingernails and pace around the office and eat weird and wait.

And that is where we are logistically in this case, in terms of the big picture for the overall scope of things. Now, in terms of how the summations went in court today, we've been talking about that already for an hour tonight. And your mileage may vary. It is a very subjective thing, your perceptions of who did well and who didn't. The only real audience that matters, obviously, is the jury. In

In the broadest strokes, there were big stylistic differences between how the two sides summed up their case for the jury today. In keeping with Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche's style from the very start of this case, I think it's fair to say that most observers described his closing argument today as some version of...

Hard to follow. Scattershot, not 100 percent incoherent, but also not a coherent story, not a story really overall. It was not chronological. It did not tell a single tale. As Ari Melber was noting last hour, it did not tell an alternate version of whodunit that explained this conspiracy in this pattern of facts as if somebody other than Donald Trump participated in this conspiracy while he didn't.

I should also note, in keeping with Todd Blanch's style throughout the trial thus far, today's summation from him did involve quite a bit of unpredictable shouting. And again, your mileage may vary as to whether or not you find that persuasive.

In contrast, the prosecution's summation by prosecutor Joshua Steinglass has been largely described as pretty non-emotional, linear, chronological, and coherent. It did tell a story. It walked the jury through from the beginning of the case through to the end. But it also made every single local stop along the way an exhaustive treatment of the evidence. It went on and on and on and on. Now, who knows which style the jury will prefer?

The transcript reflects, I think most observers have said today, that the choice that the jury had stylistically between the two sides was sort of random and veering all over the place and somewhat confusing from the defense or methodical and exhaustive and exhausting from the prosecution. I think, to be fair, it is hard to say which one of those does a better job on 12 jurors. Neither one of those sound like much of a good time, if you ask me. But this is what it's all coming down to.

And so over the course of this recap tonight, the special coverage, we've been talking about some of the major points made on each side. And we still have some of these to get to. The prosecution describing these two documents as the, quote, smoking guns of this alleged crime scene. This Trump organization employees writing down in their own handwriting what Michael Cohen was going to be paid and for what. And it was not that he was being paid a legal retainer. He was being paid back for the hush money payment

to Stormy Daniels on Trump's behalf. The prosecution also today focusing on this tweet from Donald Trump in which Trump publicly admitted that

that the payments to Michael Cohen were reimbursement and not income, which means, according to the prosecution, that Trump knew when these payments were instead booked on his files as if they were income and not reimbursement. Trump must have known that was false. We'll also be talking about these exchanges between two people involved in the scheme to hush up negative stories about Trump.

Text between Dylan Howard and Keith Davidson as they were finalizing one of the hush money payments on Trump's behalf. One jokes, good, quote, throw in an ambassadorship for me, LOL. I'm going to make make I'm going to make Australia great again. Another on the night of the election when it became clear Trump would win. Again, this is among people involved in the hush money schemes to help Trump. Quote, what have we done?

These two exchanges showing that the people who were involved in the hush money payment schemes knew that what they were doing had as its object the election of Donald Trump. Oh, we're going to finalize this payment to Karen McDougal. Can I also get my ambassadorship since this is how we're going to elect Trump? Oh, Trump's been elected. Oh, dear. We were the hush money team. What have we done? We apparently just got this guy elected. They're not talking about how happy they were to be saving Melania Trump from marital upset.

We will talk about Trump's defense lawyer today saying it would be crazy for Trump to have entered into an agreement with the National Enquirer to try to help his campaign. Quote, the idea that sophisticated people like Trump and David Pecker believed that positive stories in the National Enquirer could influence the 2016 election is preposterous. This is preposterous. They didn't think it would have any effect what they were doing. That's why they spent so much time doing it.

We'll talk about the prosecution's direct opposite assertion against that. Quote, the value of this corrupt bargain forged at this Trump Tower meeting cannot be overstated. It turned out to be the it turned out to be one of the most valuable contributions anyone ever made to the Trump campaign. When you put all of these components together, this scheme cooked up by these men at this time could very well be what got President Trump elected.

We also need to try to answer why the defense went out of its way to praise David Pecker as truthful. The defense went out of their way to praise David Pecker as truthful when David Pecker pretty bluntly testified that, in fact, he participated in an illegal hush money scheme with Donald Trump to influence the election. Why would you praise that witness who gave that testimony?

We'll try to answer why the prosecution didn't object when Trump's lawyer repeatedly claimed that Trump wasn't the bad guy here. He was the victim here. He was the victim of an extortion scheme. They did not object to that use that word being used over and over and over in court today. We'll try to answer why the defense claimed that Trump did not actually have sex with Stormy Daniels. Is there a legal reason why they feel the need to say that?

And whatever they're getting for making that repeated assertion doesn't balance out whatever it's costing them in terms of their credibility with the jury. We'll try to answer if it matters that the defense claiming that the payments to Michael Cohen were not reimbursements when Trump stated publicly that they were reimbursements.

There's so much that was covered today, which is why we're so glad that you are here with us. But as I said, Joy and I are joined here by three of our colleagues at the table who are all in the room today.

Alex, those are some of just the moments that stood out to me, both as outstanding questions, but also as big points in the summations. What stood out to you? Many things. The first I will tell you is having gone to court today for the first time and hearing the voices of the lawyers was actually something. You know, we obviously don't have audio of this trial, but hearing Todd Blanche, who had a scattershot defense, a scattershot closing arguments defense,

He does not vocally command the room. He does not speak with great authority. He looks like a tough guy, but he talks like Jared. It's like Jared Kushner. And I you know, it was notable that when he finally finished his argument, he sat down and he's sitting right next to Donald Trump next to him, Rachel. And Trump is looking that way. And Blanche is looking this way. Right. That's not the body language at the end of his summation. And Trump is looking that way.

And Blanche is looking this way. That is not the body language of someone who's necessarily happy with the job their lawyer has done. And remember that at the end of Blanche's closing argument, there was a lot of back and forth with Judge Marchand about Todd Blanche's plea to the jury not to send Donald Trump to jail. That was something that was stricken from the record. It was a kind of a whole kerfuffle. So that was not great for Todd Blanche. In addition to a series of fairly wild assertions, some of which you pointed out,

My one of my favorite ones was the excuse that there was no other way to categorize an invoice from a lawyer to the president than other other than a legal expense. It was a drop down menu. It was the only choice that they had at the Trump organization. That's all they could do, which clerically may make a lot of sense legally. I'm not sure.

Their assertion that every campaign is a conspiracy here in the United States, Rachel, something I did not know. It's a group of people working together to help someone win all all

all campaigns are conspiracies. Tell the Biden campaign, um, the access Hollywood thing was no big deal. Quote, this stuff happens all the time in campaigns. It's not a doomsday event. Sure. Felt like it to those of us watching on the outside. And then of course, um, catch and kill as business as usual. This is not a crime. This is what happens in the media. Um,

And the National Enquirer, as you pointed out, is really just a zine. Nobody really reads the thing. It has no effect on an election. The idea that every grocery store, I mean, these sophisticated men, they it would be preposterous for them to think the National Enquirer would have an effect on the world. That's why he's the guy

guy who owns the company that runs the National Enquirer. He knows it's pointless. Which is in every grocery store everywhere you go across America, too. I mean, I was also struck because this is my first time sitting in the overflow room as well by the voices. And Judge Mershon, who everybody who is who's gone to the courtroom has described as very calm. He's a very soothing voice. I found even when he was telling Todd Blanche that he was outrageous and when he suggested that the jury could not find him.

Trump guilty and send him to prison, which is, of course, way out of the bounds of what you're supposed to do as a lawyer. He was very calm. It was a little escalated, but he was quite calm. What struck me, not a lawyer, we'll leave that to you, Laurie, was kind of the storytelling. You've been talking about this over the last hour of the kind of and the contrast between that in many ways. It invited and reminded me a little bit of like Trump versus the Democrats and how they communicate about things, because

The Todd Blanchess closing was very Trumpy in my view. I mean, as you said, Alex, it was basically like everything you think is wrong is totally normal. Yeah. Every election is a conspiracy. Everybody's working with media to, you know, to pay money to people who have bad stories about the candidates. Everybody is doing this. This is just common. He even said retainer is just a word. Right. These are it's just. And so it's a drop down menu drop.

So you wonder, and to me it sounded, it reminded me of Crooked Joe and, you know, or Crooked Joe and Crooked Hillary, I mean, and Corrupt Joe, right? This kind of message of like, everybody's bad, everybody's corrupt. We all do this stuff. Now, whether or not that's going to work with a jury of 12 men and women, that's a question none of us know the answer to. On the other side, you had Josh Steinglass, who was like, I want to be in a study group with him, first of all.

But it was very methodical. It was very meticulous. It was maybe too detailed, as I already said before. There were moments where sitting in there, you were kind of zoning in and zoning out. They were like, it's time and dimension. Are we still there? Were there moments when he looked essentially at his preparer's material and were like, let's skip this part. You guys are getting the point. I'm losing you. It felt like an hour and a half.

But he did say earlier in the day that it was going to be four to four and a half hours. Right. And it was course longer. It was four hours and 40 minutes. Four hours and 40 minutes. But he was on the top end of that. On a lighter note, tell them about when they when he said it's only a third done.

Oh, that's when I fainted. So I don't remember. One of the interesting things also sitting in the room with so many legal experts was that when he said four to four and a half hours, there was an audible gasp in the room of the length of that, of how long that would be. Now they can be as long as you want in state court. So he has every right to do that. And then when he said I'm a third of the way through, there was another like, you

In the room as well. When he'd already been going for hours. When he'd been going for two hours at that point in time. In terms of, Joy, talking about some of the points that these guys raised, I'm kind of stuck on the drop-down menu. So the drop-down menu was like, let me just tell me. It's hard to actually tell. I was obsessed with the explanation. I looked at this part of the transcript, and it's sort of hard to tell from the transcript. So my impression from it, correct me if I'm wrong because you guys were there to hear it, was that they were saying,

Effectively, yes, we may have booked these expenses at the Trump Organization in a way that was technically false, but we had no choice because the software was designed in such a way that it made us falsify. Our hands are tied. Sure, conveniently.

I think the line that, you know, and so this was all happening toward the end, halfway through my show, they were finishing. So we just kept on reading whatever was coming through the Google doc that we're so blessed to have. And we're sort of reading it in real time with the wonderful Katie Fang there. And the line that really stood out to me from Joshua Steinglass, who seems to have done a fantastic job. This was a really strong prosecution team. I think we can all agree that they each were really good at the storytelling piece.

But Joshua Steinglass says, use your common sense. The drop down menu thing is a use your common sense moment because the challenge and even the day I was there, this was a challenge I had with Todd Blanche is that Todd Blanche is kind of all over the place. He's kind of Muppety and he's kind of Muppetizing all over the place. And he doesn't seem to be even satisfying Donald Trump with his lack of storytelling ability. Meaning he's just flailing around like Kermit the Frog. I can almost see his string arms going as he's talking. He's string arming. You know, it doesn't make sense.

And it's very all over the place. But the prosecution, to me, has done a good job overall in all of these days of this trial of telling you a very simple story. Does it make sense to you? I think Mr. Steinglass was saying that cheap, micromanaging Donald Trump.

would pay Michael Cohen, who the other side says is a lying, lying liar and a horrible person, just give him $35,000 because there's a drop-down menu that says the only way he can explain that is that it's a reimbursement. Say it's an NDA, but not really know any of that is happening and be completely unaware of it during a campaign to become president of the United States. He knew nothing about it, even though he's a micromanager and cheap, and he gave away all that money, and

And then they've never really explained that other exhibit, which I think is the most damning exhibit, which is the handwritten notes. How do you explain why those pieces of those numbers are on that paper? There's no defense explanation for those papers. And they've never tried. And the thing that's been sort of shocking to me, and I know Todd Blanch is an experienced prosecutor, but as a defense attorney, they never even tried to explain that.

There was also all these documents. I mean, there's this PowerPoint that was very poorly put together. Not that I'm a PowerPoint expert, but they had handwritten notes and a lot of these PowerPoint slides. The defense did? Which they didn't explain. I mean, you didn't, they kind of flashed through. So you didn't see what was in each of them, but there were some of them that had a few handwritten notes on them as they went through the slides of the presentation. And you just skipped over them. And they're asking the jury to sort of digest them without

Well, I think you're assuming that he was explaining each slide. He was not. There were exhibits placed for us to see. For us to see.

The jury was not walked through them, which I don't think is a particularly effective defense strategy. And I've never obviously, you know, I've never gotten through. I want to be on a jury so badly, but for some reason, judges don't want me. But I've been on a grand jury and I can say in that kind of a situation, it may feel over explained what Mr. Steinglass did with four hours. But I found that even in that kind of a process, the more detail, the better. And so I think the advantage the prosecution is going to have is when they explain the law,

Your feelings about Michael Cohen, you know, they've now met Michael Cohen. He seemed perfectly reasonable on the stand and he followed that. He was respectful to the judge. They're going to be on the judge's side. The judge is your therapist. That's his voice. Right. So. So I think the challenge is, is that when you get all that detail and then the judge explains the law.

All that jury is going to do in that room is they're going to compare the details that they've gotten from both of both the two sides to the law. And I have not I still cannot tell you what the defense is against the actual legal claims against Donald Trump, because if.

The first witness, Mr. Pecker, which is the day I was there, I was there for one of the two days of Mr. Pecker. He admitted it was a scheme to impact the election. Michael Cohen is on tape and admitted it was a scheme to impact the election and went to jail for that scheme. There has been no explanation of how Donald Trump could have not known that and how it was not a scheme. So the problem is when they look at the law and they look at the facts,

I don't know where the defense is going to—they just need somebody to nullify, and I don't know how they do that. Yeah, well, as Ari was arguing before, it is a hung jury approach from the defense rather than an acquittal approach. So they just need to get somebody to get stuck on one piece of the evidence. As a legal matter, though, there was a really, really, really dramatic moment with both of you guys just mentioned right before lunch where the judge—hold on. Oh, I just lost it. Uh—

Where the judge said, I think that statement was outrageous, Mr. Blanche. Someone who's been a prosecutor as long as you have and a defense attorney as long as you have. It's simply not allowed, period. Very dramatic moment. We've got Andrew Weissman joining us next to talk about that and explain why the judge was so mad. That's next. Stay with us.

So this was a moment right before lunch today, right when the defense, Trump's defense lawyer, was ending his summation. So basically the climax of Trump's final case to the jury, Judge Mershon seemed to get quite mad at Trump's defense counsel. Judge Mershon is not a man who is like easily ired. But what happened in front of the jury was an objection from the prosecutor,

At the end of Trump's closing statement, the prosecutor objected. Judge Marchand sustained the objection. But then the jury was sent out of the room. And what happened after the jury was out of the room was a thing. It was a notable confrontation. It was a notable admonition to Trump.

Trump's lead defense counsel. And it led to the jury being told something sort of unexpected after they were brought back in after lunch. So it was kind of a big drama involving Judge Marchand of the day. And here's how it went. Todd Blanch, Trump defense counsel.

I'm going to end this summation the same way, the same way I told you a few minutes ago, that you know you cannot rely on him, meaning Michael Cohen, which is that all those lies, lies under oath, lies to his family, lies when it matters, lies when it doesn't matter, all those lies, put them aside for just a moment. That's alone enough to walk away. But then he came in here, again, meaning Michael Cohen, he raised his right hand and he lied to each of you repeatedly, repeatedly. You cannot, you cannot send somebody to prison. You cannot convict somebody. You cannot convict somebody.

Steinglass, the prosecutor, objection. Judge Mershon, sustained. Trump's defense counsel, Blanche, you cannot convict somebody based upon the words of Michael Cohen. So thank you for paying attention.

I know it was a long morning. We went through a lot of evidence, but it's important. It's important to President Trump. It's important, of course, to his family. And I meant what I said in the beginning. It's clear that you all have been paying very close attention for the past five weeks, and that matters. That's very important. You know this isn't a referendum on your views of President Trump. This is not a referendum on the ballot box, who you voted for in 2016, 2020, or who you plan on voting for in 2024. That's not what this is about. The verdict that you are going to reach is

has to do with the evidence you heard here in this courtroom and nothing else. Nothing else that you knew or thought about President Trump or about any of the other folks that testified, but just the evidence that you heard from the witnesses, the recordings, and the documents. If you do that, if you focus just on the evidence you heard in this courtroom, this is a very, very, very quick and easy not guilty verdict. Thank you.

That is the conclusion of Donald Trump's case to the jury. And then Judge Marchand says, thank you, jurors. We're going to take our luncheon recess at this time. I'll see you at 2 p.m. Enjoy your lunch. The court officer, all rise. Everybody rises. Jury exits. And the judge says, after the jury's gone, the judge says, you may be seated, meaning nobody else is going anywhere, even though the jury is.

And then Mr. Steinglass, the prosecutor, says we would like a curative instruction for that ridiculous comment that Mr. Blanche made at the end of his summation about sending the defendant to prison. There is no requirement of prison. Punishment is something that's explicitly that the jurors are told not to consider. And that was a blatant and wholly inappropriate effort to cull sympathy for their client. Judge Mershon then says to Trump's defense counsel, let me hear your comment about prison.

Todd Blanche. Pardon? The judge. Let me hear you about your comment about prison. Todd Blanche. I mean, your honor, there is already an instruction that you're going to give as part of the charge on that. And so we don't think there needs to be a curative instruction. Judge Marchand. I'm going to give a curative instruction. And then Judge Marchand says this, quote, I think that saying that was outrageous, Mr. Blanche.

Please have a seat. For someone who has been a prosecutor as long as you have and a defense attorney as long as you have, you know that making a comment like that is highly inappropriate. It is simply not allowed, period. It is hard for me to imagine how that was accidental in any way. I will give a curative instruction. I will ask the people in the prosecution to draft one up and I will give it. See you at two o'clock. Prosecutor Mr. Steinglass. Thank you.

And then the luncheon recess is taken. Everybody goes away for lunch. And then this is what happens after lunch. The prosecutors now, so the defense has finished. They have stopped their case. This is it. They're done. Prosecutors are about to start their closing argument. And this is how it starts. The judge says, let's get the jury, please. Sergeant says, all rise. Jury entering. Jury enters.

Judge Marchand says, you may be seated. The clerk says, case on trial continued. All jurors are present and properly seated. And then the judge immediately says this, jurors, before we hear the people's summation, there is an instruction that I wanted to give you. During the defense summation, you heard Mr. Blanch asking in substance that you not send the defendant to prison.

That comment was improper and you must disregard it. In your deliberations, you may not discuss, consider, or even speculate about matters relating to sentence or punishment. If there is a verdict of guilty, it will be my responsibility to impose an appropriate sentence. A prison sentence is not required for the charges in this case in the event of a guilty verdict.

And then he says, people, meaning prosecution. It's time to get started. Mr. Steinglass, the prosecutor, says, thank you, your honor, counsel, members of the jury. Good afternoon. What did Todd Blanch do so wrong that it evinced that at this crucial moment from Judge Marchand? Joining us now is former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman. He was also at the courthouse today for today's closing arguments. Andrew, what happened there?

So this is totally taboo. You do not, and everyone knows, you do not raise, as Jen said, the issue of punishment. You do not raise the issue of going to jail. And I think one of the best ways to understand what's going on here is the reality of the fact that this is the former president of the United States and what Todd Blanch was doing here. And then I'm going to turn for a moment to what

Josh Steinblas did in his at the end of his summation, because I think they're rooted in the same way. I think that what's happening here is this was a way of trying to raise the burden on the state to really say to the jury, are you really sending this person to jail? The former president and maybe the future president of the United States.

Totally improper argument. It is absolutely clear that the judge was right to give the curative instruction. One thing to note is it was so clear that the defense actually agreed, made no objection to the curative instruction that was given, the one that was drafted up that you just read. They were given an opportunity to object and they didn't. And it's

it's because, you know, the bell was rung, the jury heard it. And frankly, even getting the curative instruction kind of again reinforces it. So the defense was really trying to raise the bar for the state. And the same way that I think that Josh Steinglass, in a way that was objectionable, but not sort of in the same category, where at the end of his summation, he was saying about Donald Trump, you know what, he cannot shoot somebody, as he has famously said, on Fifth Avenue and not

be held to account, where I think what he was getting at is the concern that the jury is going to hold the state to an even higher burden than beyond a reasonable doubt because he is the former president. And this was Abe saying, you know what? He's just like everyone else. He's got to be held to the same standard of complying with the law.

And so I think that's why you saw both lawyers trying to figure out a way to either play that to their advantage or to sort of raise the burden or to lower the burden to what it should be. So I think that's a real reality that's going on in the courtroom. Andrew, can I just ask you about whether they are taking on a level of risk in doing so? As you say, in both of those cases,

The objections were sustained in the first case when the defense did it. There was the judge explicitly told the jury basically right then and there, the next moment he was talking to them, do not consider what he just told you. That was wrong. You shouldn't have heard it. But in both cases, the bell was rung. The jury did hear it.

when lawyers do things like that in the courtroom, are they taking a risk? I mean, it sort of seems like if you want the jury to hear those things, just being told, oh, you shouldn't have said that, having the jury said, oh, you shouldn't have heard that, kind of doesn't feel like enough of a fix, enough of a cure.

So the answer is yes, they are taking a risk. The best thing I've ever heard a judge do is actually Judge Deary. The name may ring a bell because he was the special master in the Judge Cannon case, is when a lawyer did that the first time, he brought the lawyer over to the sidebar and said to him, with counsel only presence, saying, you do that again and I am going to cut your knees out from under you in front of

of the jury. Meaning if you think there's no cost to you in terms of the effect of ringing that bell, there will be a cost. And because it, you know, unfortunately, you know, lawyers will do things like that. They're not supposed to.

but sometimes they take their sort of zealous advocacy too far. I do think it's worth noting that what Josh Steinglass did, while the objection was sustained, it is a very different category. I don't think it was likely to be something that he was going to say that were there. I think he sort of suspected there would be an objection to be sustained, but it's not in the same category as talking about punishment where

everybody who is a prosecutor and defense lawyer knows that is absolutely off limits. Andrew Weissman, very, very helpful to have you on that. Thank you very much, my friend. All right, much more ahead in our recap of Trump's criminal trial in New York. Closing arguments, a very, very long day in court today. A lot happened. We've got more ahead. Stay with us. If he gets in, I can tell you right now, he will never leave. He will never leave. You know that.

He will never leave. Two-time Oscar winner Robert De Niro showed up outside Donald Trump's Manhattan trial today on behalf of the Biden campaign. It was interesting. He said, we are not here for what is going on in that courtroom. We are here because all of you media are here.

He spoke alongside former police officers Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn, who both risked their lives protecting the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. The three of them all talked about the way the Trumpist movement and Trump himself have used and stoked violence to get their way. Near the end of his remarks, De Niro was interrupted by a pro-Trump protester, which, of course, led to the world's most New York City moment possible.

Straight up. To the left. To the left.

You're not going to intimidate. That is what Trump does is try to intimidate. We're going to fight back. We're trying to be gentlemen in this world. Democrats, you are gangsters.

You are gangsters. Our friend Stephanie Rule joins us. Joined again by Alex Wagner, Joy Reed, Ari Melber. Steph, you had Ari. I had Ari Melber on TV. You had Robert De Niro on your show recently. I did. I just talked to him about an hour ago. He is speaking out because he truly believes our democracy is at risk. Right. He talked about it in 2016 because Robert De Niro is a true New Yorker who has been saying this guy's a fraud.

He's a con artist. The fact that America could ever look to elect a guy because he's a successful business guy. He not only went bankrupt six times. Look at the way. Look at this trial. Look at the way he ran his sham business. What's interesting about what De Niro is doing, he realizes he's going to get a huge amount of blowback. But he says, I'm going to get a huge amount of blowback.

I'm an 80 year old man and I'm worried about the generations ahead. And you heard him say it there. If Trump wins, he believes he's never leaving office. And tonight when I asked him, like, how did today go? And he said, if I impacted anyone, if I'm doing one ounce of small good, it's worth it. Our future's at risk. Can I just say that it, that it does appear that maybe the most influential person, uh,

in the presidential campaign is Plies, the rapper, because he's been trying to tell Democrats, get out there and get somebody in front of that courtroom because Trump is putting his props all dressed alike in front of there. And he was like, get out there. And it looks like they were listening to him. So Plies, well done. It was interesting. And I love Robert De Niro. I love it to see De Niro and Fanone and Harry Dunn all say we are not here to

For what is going on in that courtroom, we are not here basically to try to influence the course of this case. We are here because all the media is here. And then they talked about all of Trump's other legal problems. I mean, this was a Biden campaign event. This was essentially a Biden press conference. But even in so doing, they're doing it carefully to say we are not trying to influence this proceeding. We are only here because all these cameras. And the thing is, is that this has been the complaint that a lot of people, flies included, have had about the Democratic Party is that they don't fight like with like.

This is a media event. The reason Donald Trump is sending his clones out there dressed like him is because the media is there. And up to now, Democrats have not been playing that game with them. They need to get on the field because this is war. And I think you cannot find a more New Yorkie New Yorker or a better foil for Trump than an actual politician.

celebrity New Yorker, which is everything Trump ever wanted to be. And he wanted to be flanked by Fanon and Harry Dunn. Two heroes of January 6th. He considers them true patriots. It kills him that the Republican Party right now has hijacked the word and the concept of patriotism. And he wants people to remember what happened on January 6th and who was fighting for all

our democracy, it was guys like Harry Dunn and while Trump supporters were yelling at them that they were traitors today. And the substance of that is we just heard the summation about a 2016 campaign crime. The attempted reasonable doubt is, oh, Trump had other strange desires other than cheating in the election. But there's a lot of evidence of that cheating. The 2020 election

as alleged, Jan 6, have been punted and the Supreme Court's likely helping with that. And Donald Trump's two impeachments were about what? Going after Biden, who actually became president. So Trump had some feeling about about who the biggest risk was. And then, of course, what De Niro referenced, the refusal to have a peaceful transfer of power. Why would you expect someone who did that once to suddenly change gears? And so, again, he's presumed innocent in every court. But

What ties this all together is we're dealing with the trials of an individual who stands accused of election crimes every time he's been on the ballot and even when he lost. And in the bigger picture, it should be an asset for the Democrats campaign that they are running against somebody who is cloaking himself in criminality, not only in court, but in terms of the way that he is running right now. For him to be siding with the January 6th defendants while Democrats are saying we side with

with the cops who are trying to protect the Capitol from the January 6th defendants. That's a message that the Democrats, in my opinion, ought to be hitting every single day. All right. Our recap of this very big day in the Trump criminal trial continues. We'll be right back. He doesn't belong in my city. I don't know where he belongs.

but he certainly doesn't belong here. We make room for clouds, but not a person like Trump who will eventually run the country. That does not work. He'll use violence against anyone who stands in the way of his megalomania and greed. This is the time to stop him by voting him out once and for all.

The defense we heard today from Trump's lead defense lawyer is that there were no falsified business records, that Michael Cohen really was paid $35,000 a month in 2017 as a retainer for ongoing legal services. And anybody who says otherwise just isn't looking at the facts. In his closing, however, lead prosecutor Joshua Steinblas said claiming those 2017 payments to Michael Cohen were a retainer for legal services, in his words, makes no sense.

We do not have the official court transcript yet for that portion of the trial today. But these are our notes from the from our reporters in the courtroom. Steinglass says in 2018, Cohen continued to do legal work for Trump. Cohen probably did more legal work in the first three months of 2018 than he did in all of the previous year. And in 2018, he wasn't paid a nickel.

So if he was still doing legal work, why wasn't he paid a nickel in 2018? Quote, he was being reimbursed in 2017. And when the reimbursements were done, the payments stopped.

Prosecutor continues the testimony was that Cohen did less than 10 hours of legal work in 2017 while he was being paid $35,000 a month. Quote, Cohen spent more time being cross-examined in this trial than he did doing legal work for Donald Trump in 2017.

Alex, I want to put this moment to you because I feel like this is the defense kind of feebly trying to put forward the case like, oh, yeah, at the end, at the 11th hour, too. It was like no time was spent during this trial, even trying to suggest to the jury what Michael Cohen might have done to earn thirty five thousand dollars a month.

from a guy who had a problem spending 650 bucks on a Tiffany picture frame, right? None of it makes any sense. And then you couple it with the defense's logic or their argument that Michael Cohen was taking up his home equity loan because he was going rogue and really just wanted to appease Donald Trump so he could be made AG one day. None of it makes any sense. And that was actually a hallmark of the closing argument today. They would, you know, they would argue one thing and then argue its counter, you know, five minutes later. It was wild.

And I actually thought the strongest part of Stein Glass's closing today was outlining in three bullet points why Michael Cohen could not have gone rogue. Donald Trump was a micromanager. Cohen was and is a self-promoter. And the defendant, Donald Trump, was the beneficiary of this entire scheme. That's what he left them with. And it really just took apart all of this mishigas about Michael Cohen. And then he showed on the screen the tweet from Trump where Trump described what he paid Michael Cohen.

known as reimbursement. It's like, we have a great case to make a contrary case. Unfortunately, our client, the defendant publicly made the exact opposite assertion, but pay no mind. Okay. We are wrapping our part of our special recap of today's closing arguments.

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