New York State Criminal Case Against Trump (71543-23)

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Echoing Trump, Calls Manhattan Case Politically Motivated

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      The independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the Manhattan district attorney’s prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump shortly after it ended in a conviction on Thursday, describing it as a politically motivated and “profoundly undemocratic” case that would only strengthen Mr. Trump’s support.“The Democratic Party’s strategy is to beat President Trump in the courtroom rather than the ballot box,” Mr. Kennedy said in a statement on X. “This will backfire in November.”His response echoed many of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies, who have for months described the charges against him as a partisan “witch hunt.”In recent weeks, Mr. Kennedy has amplified his criticism of Mr. Trump, focusing particularly on his Covid-19 policies and his “coziness” with corporate America. Mr. Trump, in turn, has attacked him, with recent polling indicating that Mr. Kennedy could draw voters equally from Mr. Trump and President Biden in swing states.But Mr. Kennedy has stayed largely silent on Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, occasionally appearing to suggest that the Justice Department under Mr. Biden has been used to political ends. In April, Mr. Kennedy questioned the motivations of the federal prosecutors who had brought charges against Trump supporters who participated in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Trump has been charged in a federal case related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, a case entirely separate from the one brought in Manhattan.In his statement on X on Thursday evening, Mr. Kennedy said that he was also “running against President Trump in this election,” adding, “The difference is I’m challenging him on his record.”Earlier, shortly after the verdict came down, Mr. Kennedy was speaking at a cryptocurrency conference in Austin, Texas, where he was asked about the conviction.“I think this is probably the weakest case that people brought against him,” Mr. Kennedy told the audience. “My belief is that it will end up helping President Trump among a large part of the American public, who believes that the judicial system and the enforcement system have been weaponized politically.” More

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      ¿Cuáles son las penas que Trump podría enfrentar si es condenado?

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      Cada uno de los 34 cargos conlleva la posibilidad de hasta cuatro años de prisión, pero el encarcelamiento no es un hecho: el juez podría optar por imponer una pena de libertad condicional, sin pasar tiempo en prisión.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]Si Donald Trump es declarado culpable, le corresponderá al juez Juan Merchan decidir si su pena incluye el ingreso a prisión.Trump está acusado de 34 cargos de falsificación de registros comerciales relacionados con el encubrimiento de un pago de 130.000 dólares a la actriz porno Stormy Daniels en los días previos a las elecciones de 2016.Todos los cargos son delitos graves de clase E, que es la categoría más baja de delito grave en el estado de Nueva York.Cada cargo conlleva la posibilidad de hasta cuatro años de prisión. Pero si Trump es condenado por más de un cargo, Merchan probablemente impondría una sanción de manera concurrente, lo que significa que el expresidente tendría que cumplir penas de prisión por cada uno de los cargos simultáneamente.El encarcelamiento no es un hecho: Merchan podría optar por imponer una pena de libertad condicional, sin tiempo de prisión. Trump tendría que presentarse periódicamente ante el Departamento de Libertad Condicional de Nueva York. También podría ser encarcelado si cometiera delitos adicionales.Es muy probable que el juez Merchan dicte la sentencia de Trump varias semanas después del veredicto de culpabilidad. Pero existe la posibilidad de que cualquier sanción se retrase.Trump, quien es el virtual candidato presidencial republicano, apelará sin duda cualquier condena, un largo proceso que podría llevar meses o más y que probablemente no se resolvería antes del día de las elecciones. En ese caso, probablemente seguiría en libertad hasta que se resolviera la apelación.Aún no ha habido ningún indicio de lo que Merchan decidiría, aunque ha hecho saber que se toma en serio los delitos de cuello blanco. Trump lo ha atacado continuamente calificándolo como “parcial” y “corrupto”.Kate Christobek cubre los casos civiles y penales contra el expresidente Donald Trump para el Times. Más de Kate Christobek More

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      Judge’s Instructions Will Be a Road Map for Jury Weighing Trump’s Fate

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      Within about an hour, a Manhattan jury will begin a discussion of historic import: determining whether Donald J. Trump is guilty of 34 felonies.But before the jurors begin to deliberate, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, will deliver legal instructions that will help guide the 12 New Yorkers who will hash out Mr. Trump’s fate.Justice Merchan will describe the legal meaning of the word “intent” and the concept of the presumption of innocence. He will remind the jurors that they pledged to set any biases aside against the former president before they were sworn in, and that Mr. Trump’s decision not to testify cannot be held against him.Then, according to a person with knowledge of the instructions that Justice Merchan plans to deliver, he will explain the 34 charges of falsifying business records that Mr. Trump faces. It will likely be the most important guidance that the judge offers during the trial. And it is no simple task.In New York, falsifying records is a misdemeanor, unless the documents were faked to hide another crime. The other crime, prosecutors say, was Mr. Trump’s 2016 violation of state election law that prohibited conspiring to aid a political campaign using “unlawful means.”Those means, prosecutors argue, could include any of a menu of other crimes. And so each individual false-records charge that Mr. Trump faces contains within it multiple possible crimes that jurors must strive to understand.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Hush-Money Case Heads to the Jury: Takeaways From Closing Arguments

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      As the criminal trial of Donald J. Trump began its seventh week, the prosecution and the defense made their final pitches to jurors, sending the landmark case into deliberations on Wednesday.A defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, spent three hours Tuesday hammering Michael D. Cohen, the prosecution’s star witness, including accusing him of perjury. He attacked Stormy Daniels, the porn star whose account of a tryst with Mr. Trump in 2006 set in motion the charges the former president faces.The prosecution countered with an even longer, more detailed summation, pushing into the evening. A prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, guided jurors through reams of evidence they had introduced and elicited, including testimony, emails, text messages and recordings.Mr. Trump, 77, is charged with falsifying 34 business records to hide Mr. Cohen’s reimbursement for a $130,000 hush-money payment he made to Ms. Daniels. Mr. Trump has denied the charges and the sexual encounter.Once deliberations begin Wednesday, no one knows how long they will take. If convicted, Mr. Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — could face prison or probation.Here are five takeaways from closing arguments and Mr. Trump’s 21st day on trial.‘Michael Cohen is a liar’ was a refrain. It may be the defense’s best bet.“The human embodiment of reasonable doubt.”The Links Between Trump and 3 Hush-Money DealsHere’s how key figures involved in making hush-money payoffs on behalf of Donald J. Trump are connected.The Donald Trump Indictment, AnnotatedThe indictment unveiled in April 2023 centers on a hush-money deal with a porn star, but a related document alleges a broader scheme to protect Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Here’s What the Prosecution in Trump’s Trial Said in Its Closing Argument

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      Over more than five hours on Tuesday, a Manhattan prosecutor made his final case to the jury in Donald J. Trump’s criminal hush-money trial that the former president had orchestrated “a conspiracy and a coverup” to help him win the 2016 presidential election.The prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, argued that 20 witnesses called to the stand and evidence presented during six weeks of testimony had shown that Mr. Trump was guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. The charges stem from his repayment, made on the eve of the 2016 election, of hush money that silenced a porn star’s account of a sexual encounter a decade earlier.Mr. Steinglass wove a sweeping story of how Mr. Trump, with help from The National Enquirer and his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, among others, sought to bury negative news stories about Mr. Trump in the days and months before the election. One effort included the catch-and-kill operation to buy the silence of Stormy Daniels, the porn star, which Mr. Steinglass said kept the American public from knowing about her account when they voted.“This scheme, cooked up by these men, at this time, could very well be what got President Trump elected,” Mr. Steinglass said. “This was overt election fraud, an act in furtherance of the conspiracy to promote Mr. Trump’s election by unlawful means.”A deal with Ms. Daniels took on extra urgency, he said, following the leak in October 2016 of an “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Mr. Trump bragging about grabbing women’s genitals.Mr. Steinglass started his closing argument by countering the statements by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche earlier in the day. He said that the Trump team’s closing argument — which claimed that Mr. Trump was a victim of extortion — did not change the underlying facts of the case. And, Mr. Steinglass noted, extortion is not a defense for falsifying business records.Mr. Steinglass acknowledged to the jurors that some of the witnesses had biases. Both Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels have talked publicly about wanting to see Mr. Trump convicted, and Mr. Cohen admitted on the stand that he stole money from the Trump Organization. But he said their testimony was credible and often corroborated by others who took the stand.“I’m not asking you to feel bad for Michael Cohen,” Mr. Steinglass told the jury. “He made his bed.”At the end of the marathon day, just before 8 p.m., Mr. Steinglass said that while the former president is a former president, the law applies to him the same as it does to everyone else. More

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      Robert De Niro and the Biden Campaign Trolls Trump Outside Courthouse

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      After first ignoring former President Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial, then beginning to make sly insinuations about how he was “free on Wednesdays,” the court’s day off, President Biden’s campaign has jumped in with a stunt designed to emphasize the unprecedented situation of a major party’s presidential candidate awaiting a felony verdict.The Biden campaign on Tuesday dispatched Robert De Niro, the actor whose voice narrates the campaign’s latest ad, along with Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, two former U.S. Capitol Police officers who have since become spokesmen for the Democratic effort to attack Mr. Trump over his role in the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, to hold a news conference outside the courthouse in Manhattan where Mr. Trump’s trial was concluding.“This is not a threat,” Mr. De Niro said of the prospect that Mr. Trump could return to the White House. “This is a reality.” The news conference was the sort of thing the Trump campaign would have done from the beginning if the political situation were reversed.The Biden campaign has for weeks kept to the letter of the president’s directive to not address the criminal charges Mr. Trump faces or offer commentary on the trial, but its decision to dispatch surrogates to the Manhattan courthouse while the former president’s lawyer was delivering his closing argument was hardly subtle.Though Mr. De Niro and the two former police officers did not address Mr. Trump’s Manhattan trial — he is charged with falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to a porn star before the 2016 election — they sought to draw attention to his actions that led to the events of Jan. 6, which are the subject of another federal criminal case pending against Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump has sought to tie together all four of his criminal cases and has argued baselessly that Mr. Biden is behind them all. In addition to the Manhattan trial, he is charged in separate federal cases over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, along with a Georgia case related to his push to reverse that year’s results.Mr. Trump’s loudest supporters quickly jumped on the Biden news conference as evidence that the four cases against Mr. Trump are connected and that Mr. Biden is the hidden hand behind them all.“In case you needed more evidence that all of these BS cases were quarterbacked by Team Biden to interfere in the 2024 election, the Biden campaign is now showing up in NYC to explicitly cheerlead the political prosecution of my father,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote on social media. More

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      How the Media Is Covering Justice Merchan in Trump’s Criminal Trial

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      Conservative media has been preoccupied for weeks with Justice Juan M. Merchan, the New York judge presiding over the Manhattan criminal trial against former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump has long attacked Justice Merchan and his family in social media posts and on his campaign website. But Justice Merchan did not earn a starring role in conservative media until after he issued a formal gag order against the former president, forbidding attacks against various people involved in the trial, including jurors and witnesses.Since then, right-wing commentators, most prominently on Fox News, have condemned the judge nearly daily in their coverage of the trial. They have painted Justice Merchan’s rulings as biased, decried small donations he made to Democrats in 2020 and suggested that his connection to his daughter, a Democratic political consultant, made him unfit to oversee the case. Liberal outlets have focused less on Justice Merchan, instead centering their coverage of the trial on the charges against Mr. Trump and the figures in his orbit. But some smaller outlets have praised Justice Merchan for clamping down on Mr. Trump.Here’s how it has played out:FROM THE RIGHTBreitbartIn addition to covering the trial as straight news, Breitbart has devoted significant attention to what Republicans see as Justice Merchan’s pro-Democratic bias.Justice Merchan donated $35 to groups that supported Democrats during the 2020 election, including $10 to a group called “Stop Republicans.” That, along with his daughter’s role as a consultant for Democratic candidates, has prompted Mr. Trump to call on the judge to recuse himself. (A state ethics panel last year dismissed a complaint against Justice Merchan with a warning over his donations. Justice Merchan has denied any wrongdoing.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More