(NewsReady.com) – Former President Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial is over. The jury heard closing arguments on May 28 and entered deliberations on May 29, which continued on May 30. Now, the verdict has been delivered.
Trump’s attorney, Todd Blanche, was up first during the closing arguments. He spoke to the jury for three hours and tried to convince them to acquit his client. Blanche said the prosecution’s star witness, former attorney Michael Cohen, was a liar who was “biased and motivated to tell [them] a story that [was] not true.”
Blanche called Cohen the greatest liar of all time. He went on to say the former attorney was the “human embodiment of reasonable doubt.” The former president’s lawyer said the prosecutors didn’t prove their case and didn’t have enough evidence to convict him. He accused prosecutors of trying to “inflame” the jury’s emotions and “did it to try to embarrass” the former president.
The attorney brought up the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape that prosecutors claimed caused the campaign to panic and try to keep stories that might anger women out of the press.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told the jury that the case was “about a conspiracy and a cover-up.” According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the former president falsified business records to disguise repayments to Cohen. The disgraced lawyer paid Stephanie “Stormy Daniels” Clifford $130,000 to keep her quiet about an alleged on-night stand with Trump while he was married.
Steinglass told the jury that they’d never know if Trump’s “effort to hoodwink voters made the difference in the 2016 election,” but they didn’t have to prove that. The prosecutor also said that everything the former president and his associates “did in this case was cloaked in lies.”
As for Cohen’s lies, prosecutors pointed out that they didn’t choose Cohen; Trump did.
At the close of business on Thursday, May 30, the jury found Donald John Trump guilty of all 34 counts in the case, making him the first former President to be convicted of a crime.
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