Donald Trump was found guilty Thursday of falsifying New York business records to cover up a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in a conspiracy to defraud the voting public in 2016, a historic verdict labeling him a felon and making him the first American president to face the indignity of a criminal conviction.
The former president and presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s election sat still and stone-faced as he learned his fate just after 5 p.m. on the 15th floor of Manhattan’s storied 100 Centre St. courthouse, shaking his head as the foreman stood and declared him guilty on all 34 counts — each tied to his reimbursement to his former fixer Michael Cohen for paying off the adult film actress to stay silent about a seedy sexual encounter in a Lake Tahoe hotel room a decade prior.
“Members of the jury, listen to your verdict as it stands recorded. You and each of you say through your foreperson that you find the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, guilty of all 34 counts charging falsifying business records in the first degree, and so say you all. Is this the verdict?” state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan addressed the twelve jurors.
“Yes,” the panel of seven men and five women said in unison.
The 77-year-old Trump could face up to four years in prison at his sentencing on July 11 — the eve of the Republican National Convention — or a term of probation.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg declined to say whether his office planned to request Trump serve time behind bars for his crimes when asked by the Daily News at a press conference following the stunning verdict, saying the prosecution’s plans would be revealed when the former president returns to court.
“While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial and ultimately today at this verdict in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors: by following the facts and the law and doing so without fear or favor,” the DA said in his remarks.
Trump aggressively shook his son Eric’s hand after being found guilty before darting out of the courtroom with his entourage. He decried the case outside.
“This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial,” Trump told reporters. “This was a rigged, disgraceful trial. The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people, and they know what happened here.”
The verdict came as something of a shock. About 20 minutes before Merchan said the jury had reached a decision, he told the court he intended to send jurors home, with all in attendance expecting to return for a third day of deliberations Friday. Trump, cracking jokes with his lawyers, stiffened up upon hearing the change of plan, which the judge announced just after 4:30 p.m.
Following the verdict, Merchan swiftly denied a motion from his attorney, Todd Blanche, requesting a judgment of acquittal based on Cohen’s testimony, “knowing” that he committed perjury.
“I’m sure you misspoke when you said ‘knowing.’ You’re not suggesting that I ‘know’ anybody committed perjury; right?” the judge asked Trump’s lawyer.
“Correct,” Blanche said.
The verdict caps the first of four criminal cases facing the 45th U.S. president — the only one expected to resolve before the election in November — and determines he committed felonies after his last successful bid for the White House. Immediately after the verdict came down, New Yorkers flooded Collect Pond Park across the street, silently watching as TV crews broadcast the news worldwide.
The anonymous jury, which got the case just before 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, took less than 12 hours to render their decision over two days, requesting portions of Pecker and Cohen’s testimony.
They heard from 22 witnesses during the trial that began April 15, hearing extensive testimony from Trump loyalists and dissidents about a plot to corrupt the 2016 election devised at a meeting just over a year before at Trump Tower between the newly-minted candidate, Cohen, and David Pecker, the former chairman of American Media, Inc., or AMI.
The jury heard lurid details of the alleged Lake Tahoe tryst from Daniels, who described it as consensual but unwanted sex with a man “probably as old or older than my father.” She said it happened after she was invited to have dinner with Trump and he ambushed her in his boxers after she went to use the restroom.
Of the “catch-and-kill” scheme, prosecutors alleged the front-page stories lauding the presidential candidate with input from Trump’s campaign that ran in the AMI-run National Enquirer were part of the ruse to boost Trump’s candidacy and hit jobs maligning his opponents.
Pecker, the media magnate friendly with Trump for decades, during four days on the stand told the court he agreed to keep an eye out for stories that could harm his chances with voters, leading to payoffs silencing Daniels, former Playboy model Karen McDougal, and a doorman at Trump Tower about a series of alleged sex scandals — the latter two handled by AMI.
Cohen, who took the stand as the state’s last and star witness, told the jury of how, after AMI backed out of a deal with Daniels, he hastily arranged the $130,000 payoff to her in the waning days of the 2016 race at Trump’s behest with the assurance from his longtime boss and mentor that he’d be reimbursed. Trump’s defense team doggedly sought to undermine his credibility by highlighting his perjury conviction and infamously bitter feud with Trump.
The jury heard that the bombshell release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump boasted about sexually molesting women, served as the catalyst for the hush money payoff to Daniels, with the Trump campaign fearing her allegations would tip him over the edge with female voters.
Just take care of it,” Cohen recalled Trump saying. “This was a disaster, a f–king disaster. Women will hate me.”
In a statement to The News, Cohen — who served a stint in federal prison after pleading guilty to the payoff in 2018 and other crimes and lost his law license — said it was “an important day.”
“While it has been a difficult journey for me and my family, the truth always matters,” Cohen said.
In the state’s closing argument, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked the jury to hold the ex-president to the same standard as every citizen and find him legally accountable for causing the filing of bogus business records to disguise a conspiracy to hide information from voters, including the effective illegal campaign contribution paying off Daniels, in violation of New York election law.
“A lot of people say this: Who cares? Who cares if Mr. Trump slept with a porn star 10 years before the 2016 election? Plenty of people feel that way, as I said. But it’s harder to say that the American people don’t have the right to decide for themselves whether they care or not, that a handful of people sitting in a room can decide what information gets into those voters’ hands,” Steinglass said.
“There is no special standard for this defendant. Donald Trump can’t shoot someone during rush hour on Fifth Ave. and get away with it.”
Trump chose not to testify in his defense and was placed under a gag order for public comments about witnesses, jurors and Merchan’s own daughter, which the judge deemed a security risk. He pleaded not guilty to the charges brought in April 2023 and vehemently denied knowledge of the false entries documenting his bloated payback to Cohen or ever cheating on his wife, Melania Trump, who did not attend the trial.
Jurors saw his infamous Sharpie signature on monthly $35,000 checks to Cohen that were falsely logged in the books as compensation for legal services in a payment plan Cohen said was dictated by Trump’s convicted ex-finance chief Allen Weisselberg.
Blanche, in his final statements to the jury, denied the existence of the “catch and kill” scheme to influence the election or that his client knew about internal bookkeeping practices at the Trump Organization.
“Campaigns want to amplify the good things about their candidate and expose the bad things about their opponents. Again, this is a campaign. This is an election. This is not a crime,” Blanche said.
Trump still faces 54 felonies in three cases in Washington, D.C., Fulton County, Ga., and Fort Pierce, Fla., which respectively allege he plotted to overturn Biden’s 2020 win, subvert the results of that election in Georgia, and mishandled highly sensitive classified documents and thwarted efforts by law enforcement to recover them. He’s pleaded not guilty to all counts.
After the verdict, Trump went to his namesake property on Fifth Ave., left to attend a fundraiser, then came back and appeared to call it a night around 9:30 p.m.
He waved to a small group of supporters as he entered Trump Tower’s E. 56th St. entrance.
With Kerry Burke
