The testimony from attorney Keith Davidson is seen as a vital building block for the prosecution’s case that Trump and his allies schemed to bury unflattering stories in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. He is one of multiple key players expected to be called to the stand in advance of prosecutors’ star witness, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer.

Prosecutors are seeking $1,000 fines for each of four comments by Trump that they say violated a judge’s gag order barring him from attacking witnesses, jurors and others closely connected to the case. Such a penalty would be on top of a $9,000 fine that Judge Juan M. Merchan imposed on Tuesday related to nine separate gag order violations that he found.

It was not immediately clear when Merchan might rule on the request for fresh sanctions, but the prospect of further punishment underscores the challenges Trump the presidential candidate is facing in adjusting to the role of criminal defendant subject to rigid courtroom protocol that he does not control. It also remains to be seen whether any rebuke from the court will lead Trump to adjust his behavior given the campaign trail benefit he believes he derives from painting the case as politically motivated.

During a one-day break from the trial on Wednesday, Trump kept up his condemnation of the case, though stopped short of comments that might run afoul of the gag order.

“There is no crime,” he told supporters in Waukesha, Wisconsin. “I have a crooked judge, is a totally conflicted judge.”

Donald Trump Apr 30

Judge raises threat of jail as he holds Trump in contempt, fines him $9,000 in hush money trial

The trial, now in its second week of testimony, has exposed the underbelly of tabloid journalism practices and the protections, for a price, afforded to Trump during his successful run for president in 2016.

The case concerns hush money paid to squelch embarrassing stories, including from a porn actor and a former Playboy model, and reimbursements by Trump that prosecutors say were intentionally fraudulent and designed to conceal the true purpose of the payments and to interfere in the election.

The former publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, testified last week that he offered to be the “eyes and ears” of the Trump campaign and described in detail his role in purchasing a sordid tale from a New York City doorman that was later determined to not be true as well as accusations of an extramarital affair with former Playboy model Karen McDougal.

The goal was to prevent the stories from getting out, a concern that was especially pointed in the aftermath of the disclosure of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which he was heard describing grabbing women without their permission.

A separate $130,000 payment was made by Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, to porn actor Stormy Daniels, to prevent her claims of a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump from surfacing.

Trump’s company then reimbursed Cohen and logged the payments to him as legal expenses, prosecutors have said in charging the former president with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — a charge punishable by up to four years in prison.

Returning to the stand Thursday will be Keith Davidson, a lawyer who represented both Daniels and McDougal in their negotiations with the National Enquirer and Cohen.

He testified that he arranged a meeting at his Los Angeles office during the summer of 2016 to see whether the tabloid’s parent company American Media, Inc. was interested in McDougal’s story. At first, they demurred, saying she “lacked documentary evidence of the interaction,” Davidson testified.

But the tabloid at Pecker’s behest eventually bought the rights, and Davidson testified that he understood — and McDougal preferred — it would never be published. One reason for that, he said, is that there was an “unspoken affiliation” between Pecker and Trump and a desire by the company that owned the Enquirer to not publish stories that would hurt Trump.

The morning will begin with another gag order hearing. The four statements at issue were made by Trump before Merchan warned on Tuesday that additional violations could result in jail time.

They include comments to reporters and in interviews assailing Cohen’s integrity.

Prosecutors had alleged 10 violations, but New York Judge Juan M. Merchan found there were nine. Trump stared down at the table in front of him as the judge read the ruling, frowning slightly.

It was a stinging rebuke of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s insistence that he was exercising his free speech rights and a reminder that he’s a criminal defendant subject to the harsh realities of trial procedure. And the judge’s remarkable threat to jail a former president signaled that Trump’s already precarious legal standing could further spiral depending on his behavior during the remainder of the trial.

Merchan wrote that he is “keenly aware of, and protective of,” Trump’s First Amendment rights, “particularly given his candidacy for the office of President of the United States.”

“It is critically important that defendant’s legitimate free speech rights not be curtailed, that he be able to fully campaign for the office which he seeks and that he be able to respond and defend himself against political attacks,” Merchan wrote.

Still, he warned that the court would not tolerate “willful violations of its lawful orders and that if necessary and appropriate under the circumstances, it will impose an incarceratory punishment.”

With that statement, the judge drew nearer the specter of Trump becoming the first former president of the United States behind bars.

“This gag order is totally unconstitutional,” Trump said as court adjourned after a day that included testimony from a Hollywood lawyer who negotiated two of the hush money deals at issue in the case. “I’m the Republican candidate for president of the United States … and I’m sitting in a courthouse all day long listening to this stuff.”

Donald Trump Apr 26

Trump's lawyers seek to discredit testimony of former National Enquirer publisher in hush money trial

Donald Trump Apr 25

Ex-National Enquirer publisher testifies he scooped up possibly damaging tales to shield Trump

Trump is used to having constant access to his social media bullhorn to slam opponents and speak his mind. After he was banned from Twitter following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters, Trump launched his own platform, where his posts wouldn’t be blocked or restricted. He has long tried to distance himself from controversial messages he’s amplified to his millions of followers by insisting they’re “only retweets.”

But he does have experience with gag orders, which were also imposed in other legal matters. After he was found to have violated orders in his civil fraud trial, he paid more than $15,000 in fines.

Trump also is subject to a gag order in his federal criminal election interference case in Washington. That order limits what he can say about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses in the case and about court staff and other lawyers, though an appeals court freed him to speak about special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the case.

Tuesday’s ruling in New York came at the start of the second week of testimony in the historic case, which involves allegations that Trump and his associates took part in an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 presidential campaign by purchasing and then burying seamy stories. The payouts went to a doorman with a torrid yarn; ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal, who had accusations of an affair; and to porn performer Stormy Daniels, who alleged a sexual encounter with Trump. He has pleaded not guilty and says the stories are all fake.

Trump deleted, as ordered, the offending posts from his Truth Social account and campaign website and has until Friday to pay the fine. The judge was also weighing other alleged gag-order violations by Trump and will hear arguments Thursday. He also announced that he will halt the trial on May 17 to allow Trump to attend his son Barron’s high school graduation.

Of the 10 posts, the one Merchan ruled was not a violation came on April 10, a post referring to witnesses Michael Cohen and Daniels as “sleaze bags.” Merchan said Trump’s contention that he was responding to previous posts by Cohen “is sufficient to give” him pause on whether the post was a violation.

Merchan cautioned that the gag order “not be used as a sword instead of a shield by potential witnesses” and that if people who are protected by the order, like Cohen, continue to attack Trump “it becomes apparent” they don’t need the gag order’s protection.

Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, has said he will refrain from commenting about Trump until after he testifies. On Tuesday, he said in a text message to The Associated Press: “Judge Merchan’s decision elucidates that this behavior will not be tolerated and that no one is above the law.”

In other developments, testimony resumed Tuesday with a banker who helped Cohen open accounts, including one used to buy Daniels’ silence. Trump’s attorneys have suggested that the payments were aimed at protecting his name and his family — not influencing the outcome of the presidential election.

Jurors also began hearing from Keith Davidson, a lawyer who represented McDougal and Daniels in their negotiations with the National Enquirer and Cohen. He testified that he arranged a meeting at his Los Angeles office during the summer of 2016 to see whether the tabloid’s parent company American Media, Inc. was interested in McDougal’s story. At first they demurred, saying she “lacked documentary evidence of the interaction,” Davidson testified.

“One explanation I was given is they were trying to build Karen into a brand and didn’t want to diminish her brand,” he said. “And the second was an unspoken understanding that there was an affiliation between David Pecker and Donald Trump and that AMI wouldn’t run this story, any story related to Karen, because it would hurt Donald Trump.”

As for Daniels, the October 2016 leak of Trump’s 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape — in which Trump bragged about grabbing women sexually without asking permission — had “tremendous influence” on the marketability of her story. Before the video was made public, “there was very little if any interest” in her claims, Davidson told jurors.

A deal was reached with the tabloid for Daniels story, but the Enquirer backed out. Though Pecker testified that he had agreed to serve as the Trump campaign’s “eyes and ears” by helping to squelch unflattering rumors and claims about Trump and women, he drew the line with Daniels after paying out $180,000 to scoop up and sit on stories. Davidson began negotiating with Cohen directly, hiked up the price to $130,000, and reached a deal.

But Daniels and Davidson grew frustrated as weeks passed and instead of the money, she got excuses from Cohen about broken computers, Secret Service “firewalls” and the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

“I thought he was trying to kick the can down the road until after the election,” Davidson said.

While Cohen never explicitly said he was negotiating the deal on Trump’s behalf, Davidson felt the implication was clear.

“Every single time I talked to Michael Cohen, he leaned on his close affiliation with Donald Trump,” Davidson said. Plus, he figured that Trump “was the beneficiary of this contract.”

The GOP presidential hopeful is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with the hush money payments. The detailed evidence on business transactions and bank accounts is setting the stage for testimony from Cohen, who went to federal prison after pleading guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and other crimes.

The trial — the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to come before a jury — is expected to last for another month or more.

Long reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Zeke Miller in Washington and Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.

Just ask a hardy band of mostly amateur Wall Street investors who have collectively made tens of millions of dollars over the past month by betting that the stock price of his social media business — Truth Social — will keep dropping despite massive buying by Trump loyalists and wild swings that often mirror the candidate’s latest polls, court trials and outbursts on Truth Social itself.

Several of these investors interviewed by The Associated Press say their bearish gambles using “put” options and other trading tools are driven less by their personal feelings about the former president (most don’t like him) than their faith in the woeful underlying financials of a company that made less money last year than the average Wendy’s hamburger franchise.

“This company makes no money. … It makes no sense,” said Boise, Idaho, ad executive Elle Stange, who estimates she’s made $1,300 betting against Trump Media & Technology stock. “He’s not as great a businessman as he thinks. A lot of his businesses go belly up, quickly.”

South Dakota Apr 27

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem admits to killing her dog in new book: ‘I hated that dog'

news Apr 26

Trump trial second week concludes with testimony from former secretary and banker

Says Seattle IT security specialist Jeff Cheung, “This is guaranteed to go to zero.”

As of Friday’s close, a month since Trump Media’s initial public offering sent its stock to $66.22, it has dropped to $41.54. An AP analysis of data from research firms FactSet and S3 Partners shows that investors using puts and “short selling” have paper profits so far of at least $200 million, not including the costs of puts, which vary from trade to trade.

Still, amateur traders, mostly risking no more than a few thousand dollars each, say the stock is too volatile to declare victory yet. So they are cashing in a bit now, letting other bets ride and stealing a glance at the latest stock movements in the office cubicle, at the kitchen table or even on the toilet.

There have been plenty of scary moments, including last week when DJT, the ex-president’s initials and stock ticker, jumped nearly 40% in two days.

“I don’t know which direction the stock is going,” says Schenectady, N.Y., day trader Richard Persaud while checking his iPhone amid the surge. “It’s so unbelievably overvalued.”

Many who spoke to the AP say knowing their bets have helped slash the value of Trump’s 65% stake in half is an added political benefit. If some of their predictions are right, they may able to someday push it to zero, making it impossible for him to tap it to pay his hefty legal bills or finance his GOP presidential campaign.

They have a long way to go. Trump’s stake is still worth $4 billion.

Normally, investors betting a stock will fall, especially a gutsy breed of hedge fund traders called “short sellers,” will do plenty of homework. They’ll pore over financial statements, develop expertise in an industry, talk to competitors, and even turn to “forensic accountants” to find hidden weaknesses in the books.

No need in Trump Media’s case. It’s all there in the Sarasota, Florida-based company’s 100-page financial report: A firehose of losses, $58 million last year, on minuscule revenue of $4 million from advertising and other sources.

The losses are so big, as Trump Media’s auditor wrote in the report, they “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”

A short seller’s dream? Or is it a nightmare?

Amateur trader Manny Marotta has two computer screens at home, one for work, the other showing DJT stock’s movements where he can gauge how much he’s up or down.

It wasn’t looking so good earlier this week.

The legal writer from suburban Cleveland had been up about $4,000 on “put” options purchased over the past few weeks. But the screen that morning was showing investors, presumably rich ones, buying large volumes of DJT shares, pushing up the stock once again.

“My options are worth less with every passing minute,” says Marotta, adding about DJT: “It’s being manipulated. It’s insane.”

Waiting for the stock to drop is especially painful to “short sellers,” who pay a fee to borrow shares owned by others. The idea is to quickly sell them on a hunch they will be able to buy the same number of them later for much cheaper before having to return them to the lender. That allows short sellers to pocket the difference, minus the fee, which is usually nominal.

In DJT’s case, the fee is anything but nominal.

It was costing 565% a year at one point earlier this month, meaning short sellers had only two months before any possible profits would be eaten up in fees, even if the stock went to zero. It’s a rate so off the charts, that only three other stocks in recent memory have exceeded it, according to data from Boston University’s Karl Diether and Wharton’s Itamar Drechsler, who have studied short selling back two decades.

Add in massive buying by Trump supporters who see it as a way to support their candidate, and losses could multiply fast.

“It’s scary,” says Drechsler, who likens buyers of Trump’s stock to unwavering sports fans. “It is everything that you hope that the stock market is not.”

Trump Media spokeswoman Shannon Devine said the company is in a “strong financial position” with $200 million in cash and no debt, and said the AP was “selecting admitted Trump antagonists.”

Another danger to the stock is a “short squeeze.” If the price rises sharply, it could set off a rush by short sellers who fear they’ve bet wrongly to return their borrowed shares right away and limit their losses. And so they start buying shares to replace the ones they borrowed and sold, and that very buying tends to work against them, sending the price higher, which in turn scares other short sellers, who then also buy, setting off a vicious cycle of price hikes.

“If DJT starts rallying, you’re going to see the mother of all squeezes,” says S3 Partners short-selling expert Ihor Dusaniwsky, who spent three decades at Morgan Stanley helping investors borrow shares. “This is not for the faint of heart.”

And if that wasn’t enough, there is a final oddball feature of DJT stock that could trigger an explosion in prices, up or down.

“Lock up” agreements prohibit Trump and other DJT executives from selling their shares until September. That leaves the float, or the number of shares that can be traded each day by others, at a dangerously tiny 29% of total shares that will someday flood the market. That means a big purchase or sale on any day that would barely move a typical stock can send DJT flying or crashing.

The float is smaller than that of most other notoriously volatile stocks. At their smallest levels, AMC, GameStop and Shake Shack each had more than double the float.

Seattle trader Cheung sees DJT’s freak characteristics as a reason to bet against the stock, not shy away. When the lock-up period ends, he predicts, the ex-president will indeed sell his shares, spooking the market and sending the price down sharply. And even if he doesn’t, other insiders whose lock-ups expire will fear he will do so and will move fast to get a good price before it falls.

“The first one to sell out is going make to most, ” Cheung says. “Everyone is going to sell.”

Still, he doesn’t want to lose money in the interim, so Cheung is offsetting some of his “put” bets with the purchase of “calls.” The latter are also derivatives, but they do the opposite, paying off when the stock rises. Cheung hopes that whichever makes money, the puts or the calls, he will make enough with one to more than make up for the loss of the other.

If all of this seems too complicated, there is a far simpler way to make money betting against Trump.

Offshore, casino-style betting sites are taking wagers on the 2024 election, and some have even made President Joe Biden the favorite.

___

Returning to the witness stand for a fourth day, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker was grilled about his memory and past statements as the defense tried to poke holes in potentially crucial testimony for prosecutors in the first criminal trial of a former American president.

Two other witnesses followed Pecker as prosecutors built the foundation of their case involving a hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels, who alleged a sexual encounter with Trump. Trump’s longtime executive assistant told jurors she recalled seeing Daniels in a reception area of Trump Tower, though the date of the visit wasn’t clear.

Pecker’s testimony provided jurors with a stunning inside look at the supermarket tabloid’s “catch-and-kill” practice of purchasing the rights to stories so they never see the light of day. He’s believed to be a key witness to bolster prosecutors’ theory that Trump sought to illegally influence the 2016 race by suppressing negative stories about his personal life.

Donald Trump Apr 25

Ex-National Enquirer publisher testifies he scooped up possibly damaging tales to shield Trump

Donald Trump Apr 22

Key takeaways from the opening statements in Donald Trump's hush money trial

Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing, slammed the prosecution as he left the courthouse Friday after spending most of the week in his role as criminal defendant instead of political candidate. Trump seized on President Joe Biden’s remarks Friday that he’s willing to debate Trump. Trump told reporters he’s up for it anytime, anywhere.

Under cross examination, Trump’s lawyers appeared to be laying the groundwork to make the argument that any dealings Trump had with Pecker were intended to protect Trump, his reputation and his family — not his campaign. The defense also sought to show that the National Enquirer was publishing negative stories about Trump’s 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, long before an August 2015 meeting that is central to the case.

During that meeting, Pecker said he told Trump and then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen he would be the “eyes and ears” of the campaign, and would notify Cohen if he heard negative stories about Trump so they could be killed.

Under questioning by Trump lawyer Emil Bove, Pecker acknowledged there was no mention at that meeting of the term “catch-and-kill.” Nor was there discussion at the meeting of any “financial dimension,” such as the National Enquirer paying people on Trump’s behalf for the rights to their stories, Pecker said.

Bove also confronted Pecker with statements he made to federal prosecutors in 2018 that the defense lawyer said were “inconsistent” with the former publisher’s testimony.

Pecker told jurors that Trump thanked him during a White House visit in 2017 for his help burying two stories. But according to notes Bove read in court, Pecker told federal authorities that Trump did not express any gratitude to him during the meeting.

“Was that another mistake?” Bove asked Pecker.

Pecker stuck to the account that he gave in court, adding: “I know what the truth is.”

Prosecutors challenged the defense’s contention that Trump’s arrangement with the National Enquirer wasn’t unusual. Under questioning from a prosecutor, Pecker acknowledged he had not previously sought out stories and worked the company’s sources on behalf of a presidential candidate or allowed political fixers close access to internal decision-making.

“It’s the only one,” Pecker said.

The second witness called to the stand was Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime executive assistant. Graff, who started working for Trump in 1987 and left the Trump Organization in April 2021, has been described as his gatekeeper and right hand.

Graff testified that she believed she was the one who added contact information for Daniels and Karen McDougal to the Trump Organization’s computer system. The women’s listings were shown in court, with Daniels named in the system simply as “Stormy.” Graff later noted that Trump never used computers.

The two women were paid to prevent them from coming forward during Trump’s 2016 campaign with claims of sexual encounters with Trump. He says those claims were lies.

Trump spoke briefly to Graff as she left the witness stand. He appeared to reach out to her with his hand as an officer guided her away from the witness stand past the defense table. Trump’s lawyers were at the bench, talking with Judge Juan Merchan, when Trump stood up and engaged with Graff.

The case will resume Tuesday with the third prosecution witness, Gary Farro, a banker. Farro testified Friday about helping Cohen form a bank account for the limited liability company he used to facilitate the Daniels payment. Farro said Cohen led him to believe the firm, Essential Consultants LLC, would be involved in real estate consulting.

Friday’s testimony caps a consequential week in the criminal cases the former president faces as he vies to reclaim the White House in November.

At the same time jurors listened to testimony in Manhattan, the Supreme Court on Thursday signaled it was likely to reject Trump’s sweeping claims that he is immune from prosecution in his 2020 election interference case in Washington. But the conservative-majority high court seemed inclined to limit when former presidents could be prosecuted — a ruling that could benefit Trump by delaying that trial, potentially until after the November election.

In New York — the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with the hush money payments.

The charges center on $130,000 that Trump’s company paid to Cohen on Trump’s behalf to keep Daniels from going public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the encounter ever happened.

Over several days on the witness stand, Pecker described how the tabloid parlayed rumor-mongering into splashy stories that smeared Trump’s opponents and, just as crucially, leveraged his connections to suppress seamy stories about Trump.

Trump’s attorney zeroed in on a nonprosecution agreement in 2018 between the federal government and American Media Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer.

The company admitted to engaging in the “catch-and-kill” practice to help Trump’s campaign, and prosecutors agreed to not prosecute the company for paying $150,000 to McDougal for the rights to her story about an alleged affair with Trump.

Trump’s attorney repeatedly suggested that Pecker may have felt pressured to accept an agreement in order to finalize a deal to sell his company to the newsstand operator Hudson News Group for a proposed $100 million.

“To consummate that deal, you knew you had to clear up the investigations,” Bove said.

After pausing for several seconds, Pecker replied in the affirmative. But Pecker also said he felt “no pressure” to finalize the nonprosecution agreement to complete the transaction.

In the end, the deal didn’t go through.

But when it came to the seamy claims by porn performer Stormy Daniels, David Pecker, the tabloid’s longtime publisher, said he put his foot down.

“I am not paying for this story,” he told jurors Thursday at Trump’s hush money trial, recounting his version of a conversation with Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen about the catch-and-kill scheme that prosecutors alleged amounted to interference in the race. Pecker was already $180,000 in the hole on other Trump-related stories by the time Daniels came along. “I didn’t want to be involved in this from the beginning.”

Pecker’s testimony was a critical building block for the prosecution’s theory that their partnership was a way to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors are seeking to elevate the gravity of the history-making first trial of a former American president and the first of four criminal cases against Trump to reach a jury.

Trump’s lawyers also began their cross-examination of Pecker, using the time to question his memory of years-old events and to suggest his account had evolved over time.

But the hush money trial was just one of the consequential legal matters facing the Republican presidential candidate on Thursday.

The U.S. Supreme Court also heard arguments over whether Trump should be immune from prosecution in a federal case over his efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden. The high court justices appeared likely to reject his immunity claim.

Trump’s many legal problems were colliding this week. The hush money case includes a looming decision on whether he violated a gag order and should be held in contempt. His former lawyers and associates were indicted in a 2020 election-related scheme in Arizona. And a New York judge rejected a request for a new trial in a defamation case that found Trump liable for $83.3 million in damages.

But Trump has a long history of emerging unscathed from sticky situations — if not becoming even more popular. The high court arguments made it seem possible that he could benefit from a lengthy trial delay, possibly beyond November’s election.

Donald Trump Apr 22

Key takeaways from the opening statements in Donald Trump's hush money trial

Donald Trump Apr 23

David Pecker describes arrangement to use National Enquirer to help Trump during 2016 race

The high court’s decision will have lasting implications for future presidents, because the justices were seeking to answer the never-before-asked question of whether and to what extent does a former president enjoy immunity from prosecution for conduct during his time in office.

Trump had asked to skip his New York criminal proceedings for the day so he could sit in on the Supreme Court’s special session, but that request was denied by Judge Juan M. Merchan, who is overseeing Trump’s trial on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with the hush money payments, which involved buying the rights to someone’s story but never publishing it.

“I think the Supreme Court has a very important argument before it today,” Trump said outside the courtroom. “I should be there.”

Instead, he sat at the defense table in a Manhattan courtroom with his lawyers, listening intently to Pecker testify how he and his publication parlayed rumor-mongering into splashy stories that smeared Trump’s opponents and, just as crucially, leveraged his connections to suppress unflattering coverage.

Trump has maintained he is not guilty of any of the charges, and says the stories that were bought and squelched were false.

“There is no case here. This is just a political witch hunt,” he said before court in brief comments to reporters.

As Pecker testified in a calm, cooperative tone about risque tales and secret dealings, the atmosphere in the utilitarian 1940s courtroom was one of quiet attentiveness. Two Secret Service agents were stationed in the first row of the courtroom gallery directly behind Trump. Ten court officers stood around the room. Jurors intently listened, and some took notes.

Pecker recalled that the publication bought a sordid tale from a New York City doorman and purchased accusations of an extramarital affair with former Playboy model Karen McDougal to prevent the claims from getting out. There was some talk of reimbursement from Trump’s orbit, but Pecker was ultimately never paid.

The breaking point came with Daniels, who was eventually paid by Cohen to keep quiet over her claim of a 2006 sexual encounter with Trump. The ex-president denies it happened.

Pecker recalled to the jury that he was dining with his wife the night after the public learned of the infamous 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump discussed grabbing women sexually without permission, when then-editor Dylan Howard called with an urgent matter.

Howard said he heard from Daniels’ representatives that she was trying to sell her story and that the tabloid could acquire it for $120,000, Pecker told jurors. Pecker was tapped out; he told Cohen as much.

At the same time, Pecker advised that someone — just not him — should do something to prevent the story from going public.

“I said to Michael, ‘My suggestion to you is that you should buy the story, and you should take it off the market because if you don’t and it gets out, I believe the boss will be very angry with you.’”

Cohen followed his advice.

Pecker testified that Trump later invited him to a White House dinner in July 2017 to thank him for helping the campaign. The ex-publisher said Trump encouraged him to bring anyone he wanted, recounting that the then-president told him, “It’s your dinner.”

Pecker said that he and Howard, as well as some of his other business associates, posed for photos with Trump in the Oval Office. Pecker said others at the dinner included Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and press adviser Sean Spicer.

At one point during the evening, Pecker said Trump asked him for an update on Karen McDougal.

“How’s Karen doing?” he recalled Trump saying as they walked past the Rose Garden from the Oval Office to the dining room.

“I said she’s doing well, she’s quiet, everything’s going good,” Pecker testified.

But months later, in March 2018, the president became furious when McDougal gave an interview to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Pecker testified.

“I thought you had and we had an agreement with Karen McDougal that she can’t give any interviews or be on any TV channels,” Trump told Pecker by phone, the former National Enquirer publisher said.

He said he explained to the then-president that the agreement had been changed to allow her to speak to the press after a November 2016 Wall Street Journal article about the tabloid’s $150,000 payout to McDougal.

“Mr. Trump got very aggravated when he heard that I amended it, and he couldn’t understand why,” Pecker told jurors.

Later, Trump defense attorney Emil Bove opened his cross-examination by grilling Pecker on his recollection of specific dates and meanings. He appeared to be laying further groundwork for the defense’s argument that any dealings Trump had with the National Enquirer publisher were intended to protect himself, his reputation and his family — not his campaign.

In other developments, prosecutors argued Trump again violated a gag order, all while waiting to hear whether he would be held in contempt on other suspected violations. Merchan has barred the GOP leader from making public statements about witnesses, jurors and others connected to the case. He set a hearing for next Thursday on the new claims.

Trump was dismissive about the looming decision. When asked by reporters if he would pay fines if ordered, he replied, “Oh, I have no idea.” He then said, “They’ve taken my constitutional right away with a gag order.”

A conviction by the jury would not preclude Trump from becoming president again, but because it is a state case, he would not be able to pardon himself if found guilty. The charge is punishable by up to four years in prison — though it’s not clear if the judge would seek to put him behind bars.

___

Long reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.

The testimony from David Pecker was designed to bolster prosecutors’ assertions of a decades-long friendship between Trump and the former publisher of the National Enquirer that culminated in an agreement to give the candidate’s lawyer a heads-up on negative tips and stories so they could be quashed.

Pecker is the first witness in Trump’s history-making hush money trial in Manhattan, where he faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with payments meant to prevent harmful stories from surfacing during the final days of the 2016 campaign.

The effort to suppress unflattering information was designed to illegally influence the election, prosecutors have alleged in seeking to elevate the gravity of the first trial of a former American president and the first of four criminal cases against Trump to reach a jury.

With Trump sitting just feet away in the courtroom, Pecker detailed his intimate, behind-the-scenes involvement in Trump’s rise from political novice to the Republican nomination and then the White House. He explained how he and the National Enquirer parlayed rumor-mongering into splashy tabloid stories that smeared Trump’s opponents and, just as crucially, leveraged his connections to suppress seamy stories about Trump, including a porn actor’s claim of an extramarital sexual encounter a decade earlier.

Pecker traced the origins of their relationship to a 1980s meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and said the friendship bloomed alongside the success of the real estate developer’s TV show “The Apprentice” and the program’s subsequent celebrity version.

Their ties were solidified during a pivotal August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower involving Trump, his lawyer and personal fixer Michael Cohen, and another aide, Hope Hicks, in which Pecker was asked what he and the magazines he led could do for the campaign.

Pecker said he volunteered to publish positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents. But that wasn’t all, he said, telling jurors how he told Trump: “I will be your eyes and ears.”

“I said that anything I hear in the marketplace, if I hear anything negative about yourself, or if I hear about women selling stories, I would notify Michael Cohen,” so that the rights could be purchased and the stories could be killed.

“So they would not get published?” asked prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked.

“So they would not get published,” Pecker replied.

To illustrate their point, prosecutors displayed for the court a screenshot of various flattering headlines the National Enquirer published about Trump, including: “Donald Dominates!’ and “World Exclusive: The Donald Trump Nobody Knows.” The jury was also shown disparaging and outlandish stories about Trump’s opponents in the race, including the surgeon Ben Carson and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.

Pecker painted Cohen as a shadow editor of the National Enquirer’s pro-Trump coverage, directing the tabloid to go after whichever Republican candidates was gaining in momentum.

Donald Trump Apr 22

Key takeaways from the opening statements in Donald Trump's hush money trial

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Trump trial: Court adjourns with ex-National Enquirer publisher David Pecker set to resume testimony

“I would receive a call from Michael Cohen, and he would direct me and direct Dylan Howard which candidate and which direction we should go,” Pecker said, referring to the tabloid’s then-editor.

Pecker said he underscored to Howard that the agreement he struck with the Trump operation was “highly, highly confidential.” He said he wanted the tabloid’s bureau chiefs to be on the lookout for any stories involving Trump and said he wanted them to verify the stories before alerting Cohen.

“I did not want anyone else to know this agreement I had and what I wanted to do,” the ex-publisher added.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges related to his role in the hush money payments. He was once a confidant of Trump’s, but their relationship has deteriorated in spectacular fashion. Cohen is expected to be a star government witness, and he routinely posts profane broadsides against Trump on social media.

Trump’s lawyers are expected to make attacks on Cohen’s credibility a foundation of their defense, but in opening with Pecker, prosecutors hope to focus attention on a witness with a far less volatile backstory.

Pecker’s resumption of testimony Tuesday followed a hearing earlier in the day in which prosecutors urged Judge Juan Merchan to hold Trump in contempt and fine him $1,000 for each of 10 social media posts that they say violated an earlier gag order barring attacks on witnesses, jurors and others involved in the case.

Merchan did not immediately rule, but he seemed skeptical of a defense lawyer’s arguments that Trump was merely responding in his posts to others’ attacks and had been trying to comply with the order.

Pecker’s testimony began Monday after opening statements that offered the 12-person jury — and, just as important, the voting public — radically divergent roadmaps for a case that will unfold against the backdrop of a closely contested White House race in which Trump is not only the presumptive Republican nominee but also a criminal defendant facing the prospect of a felony conviction and prison.

Prosecutors allege that Trump sought to illegally influence the 2016 race through a practice known in the tabloid industry as “catch-and-kill” — catching a potentially damaging story by buying the rights to it and then killing it through agreements that prevent the paid person from telling the story to anyone else.

In this case, that included a $130,000 payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels to silence her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter that Trump denies.

Defense lawyers have said Trump is innocent and that Cohen cannot be trusted.

Prosecutors also described other arrangements, including one that paid a former Playboy model $150,000 to suppress claims of a nearly yearlong affair with the married Trump, which Trump also denies.

In another instance, Pecker recounted a $30,000 payment from the National Enquirer to a doorman for the rights to a rumor that Trump had fathered a child with an employee at Trump World Tower. The tabloid concluded the story was not true, and the woman and Trump have denied the allegations.

As Pecker described receiving the tip in court, Trump shook his head.

Pecker said upon hearing the rumor, he immediately called Cohen, who said it was “absolutely not true” but that he would look into whether the people involved had indeed worked for Trump’s company.

“I made the decision to purchase the story because of the potential embarrassment it had to the campaign and to Mr. Trump,” Pecker said.

In response to the prosecutor’s question about who he understood the boss to be, Pecker replied: “Donald Trump.”

Explaining why he decided to have the National Enquirer foot the bill, Pecker testified: “This was going to be a very big story. I believe it was important that this story be removed from the marketplace.”

If he published the story, Pecker said it would be “probably the biggest sale of the National Enquirer since the death of Elvis Presley.”

Trump’ s 34 felony counts of falsifying business records arise from reimbursements that prosecutors say Trump’s company made to Cohen over the hush money payments.

The charges punishable by up to four years in prison — though it’s unclear if Merchan would seek to put him behind bars. A conviction would not preclude Trump from becoming president again, but because it is a state case, he would not be able to pardon himself if found guilty. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

___

Lawyers presented dueling narratives as jurors got their first glimpse into the prosecution accusing Trump of falsifying business records as part of a scheme to squelch negative stories about him during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Still to come are weeks of what’s likely to be dramatic and embarrassing testimony about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s personal life as he simultaneously campaigns to return to the White House in November.

Here’s a look at some key takeaways from opening statements:

Election fraud vs. ‘bookkeeping’ case

Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying internal Trump Organization business records. But prosecutors made clear they do not want jurors to view this as a routine paper case. Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo said the heart of the case is a scheme to “corrupt” the 2016 election by silencing people who were about to come forward with embarrassing stories Trump feared would hurt his campaign.

“No politician wants bad press,” Colangelo said. “But the evidence at trial will show that this was not spin or communication strategy. This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior.” He added: “It was election fraud, pure and simple.”

The business records charges stem from things like invoices and checks that were deemed legal expenses in Trump Organization records when prosecutors say they were really reimbursements to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels. Daniels was threatening to go public with claims she had an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump. He says it never happened.

Prosecutors’ characterizations appear designed to combat suggestions by some pundits that the case — perhaps the only one that will go to trial before the November election — isn’t as serious as the other three prosecutions he’s facing. Those cases accuse Trump of trying to overturn the 2020 election he lost to President Joe Biden and illegally retaining classified documents after he left the White House.

Trump, meanwhile, sought to downplay the accusations while leaving the courtroom on Monday, calling it all a “bookkeeping” case and “a very minor thing.” But he, too, has said it’s all about an election — the one this November. Trump has repeatedly claimed that the case is part of a sweeping Democratic attempt to harm his chances at reclaiming the presidency.

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Key players: Who's who at Donald Trump's hush money criminal trial

Trump’s defense comes into view

Trump’s attorney used his opening statement to attack the case as baseless, saying the former president did nothing illegal.

The attorney, Todd Blanche, challenged prosecutors’ claim that Trump agreed to pay Daniels to aid his campaign, saying Trump was trying to “protect his family, his reputation and his brand.”

Blanche indicated the defense will argue that after all the very point of a presidential campaign is to try to influence an election.

“It’s called democracy,” Blanche told jurors. “They put something sinister on this idea, as if it was a crime. You’ll learn it’s not.”

Blanche also portrayed the ledger entries at issue in the case as pro forma actions performed by a Trump Organization employee. Trump “had nothing to do with” the allegedly false business records, “except that he signed the checks, in the White House, while he was running the country,” Blanche said. And he argued that the records’ references to legal expenses weren’t false, since Cohen was Trump’s personal lawyer at the time.

Prosecutors aim to put Trump at the center

The 34 counts in the indictment are related to the payment to Daniels. But prosecutors plan to introduce evidence about a payoff to another woman — former Playboy model Karen McDougal — who claimed a sexual encounter with Trump, as well as to a Trump Tower doorman who claimed to have a story about Trump having a child out of wedlock. Trump says they were all lies.

Prosecutors said they will show Trump was at the center of the scheme to silence the women, telling jurors they will hear Trump in his voice talking about the plan to pay McDougal. Cohen arranged for the publisher of the National Enquirer supermarket tabloid to pay McDougal $150,000 but not print the story in a practice known as “catch-and-kill.”

Colangelo told jurors that prosecutors will play for them a recording Cohen secretly made during a meeting with Trump weeks before the 2016 election. In the recording, which first became public in 2018, Trump is heard saying: “What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?”

Trump “desperately did not want this information about Karen McDougal to become public because he was worried about its effect on the election,” Colangelo said.

Cohen’s credibility in the spotlight

The defense’s opening statement previewed what will be a key strategy of the defense: trying to discredit Cohen, a Trump loyalist turned critic and expected star witness for the prosecution. Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money payments in 2018 and and served prison time.

Whether jurors believe Cohen, who says he arranged the payments to the women at Trump’s direction, could make or break the case for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.

Trump’s lawyer highlighted Cohen’s criminal record, describing him as a serial liar who turned against Trump after he was not given a job in the administration and found himself in legal trouble. Blanche said Cohen’s “entire financial livelihood depends on President Trump’s destruction,” noting he hosts podcasts and has written books bashing his ex-boss.

“He has a goal and an obsession with getting Trump,” Blanche said. “I submit to you that he cannot be trusted.”

Anticipating the defense attacks on Cohen, the prosecution promised to be upfront about the “mistakes” the former Trump attorney has made. But Colangelo said “you can credit Michael Cohen’s testimony” despite his past.

“I suspect the defense will go to great lengths to get you to reject his testimony precisely because it is so damning,” the prosecutor said.

But up first: David Pecker

Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker is the first witness for prosecutors, who say that Trump’s alleged scheme to conceal potentially damaging information from voters began with a 2015 Trump Tower meeting among the then-candidate, Pecker and Cohen. Pecker took the witness stand Monday before court broke for the day and his testimony is expected to continue Tuesday.

At the meeting, Pecker — a longtime Trump friend — agreed to aid Trump’s campaign by running favorable pieces about him, smearing his opponents, scouting unflattering stories about him and flagging them to Cohen for “catch-and-kill” deals. Those included the claims made by Daniels, McDougal and the former Trump Tower doorman, Dino Sajudin, prosecutors say. Trump says all were false.

Pecker will likely be asked about all the alleged efforts made by the Enquirer’s then-owner, American Media Inc., on Trump’s behalf. Federal prosecutors agreed in 2018 not to prosecute American Media in exchange for its cooperation in a campaign finance investigation that led to Cohen’s guilty plea, and the Federal Election Commission fined the company $187,500, calling the McDougal deal a “prohibited corporate in-kind contribution.”

Pecker’s brief turn on the stand Monday was mainly just about his background and other basic facts, though he did say the Enquirer practiced “checkbook journalism” — paying for stories — and that he had the final say on any story about a famous person.

‘The defendant’ or ’President Trump’?

The prosecutor referred to Trump during his opening statement as “the defendant.” Trump’s lawyer took a different tack, calling him “President Trump.”

“We will call him President Trump, out of respect for the office that he held,” Blanche said. At the same time, Trump’s lawyer sought to portray Trump as an everyman, describing him as a husband, father and fellow New Yorker.

“He’s, in some ways, larger than life. But he’s also here in this courtroom, doing what any of us would do: defending himself,” Blanche said.

Trump sat quietly while listening to opening statements, occasionally passing notes to his lawyers and whispering in their ears. But outside of the courtroom, he continued his pattern of trying to capitalize politically on the case that will require him to spend his days in a courtroom rather than on the campaign trail.

“This is what they’re trying to take me off the trail for. Checks being paid to a lawyer,” Trump said.

A defense lawyer countered by saying that Trump was “innocent” and by attacking the integrity of the onetime Trump confidant who’s now the government’s star witness.

The opening statements offered the 12-person jury — and the voting public — a roadmap for viewing the allegations at the heart of the case and Trump’s expected defenses. The attorneys previewed weeks of salacious and potentially unflattering testimony in a trial that will unfold against the backdrop of a closely contested White House race. Trump is not only the presumptive Republican nominee but also a defendant facing the prospect of a felony conviction and prison.

Prosecutors at the outset sought to emphasize the gravity of the case, the first of four criminal prosecutions against Trump to reach trial, by framing it as about election interference. The depiction seemed intended to rebut criticism that the case lacks the grievous allegations that define Trump’s other three cases, including plotting to overturn an election and illegally hoarding classified documents.

“The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again,” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo told jurors.

The opening statements also served as an introduction to the colorful cast of characters that comprise the tawdry saga, including a porn actor who says she had a sexual encounter with Trump; the lawyer who prosecutors say paid her to keep quiet about it; and the tabloid publisher who agreed to function as the campaign’s “eyes and ears.”

Former National Enquirer publisher and longtime Trump friend David Pecker took the stand as the first witness for the prosecution. Prosecutors say Pecker met with Trump and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, at Trump Tower in August 2015 and agreed to help Trump’s campaign identify negative stories about him.

Pecker testified about the publication’s use of “checkbook journalism,” a practice that entails paying a source for a story. Pecker said he “gave a number to the editors that they could not spend more than $10,000” on a story without getting his approval.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — a charge punishable by up to four years in prison — though it’s not clear if the judge would seek to put him behind bars. A conviction would not preclude Trump from becoming president again, but because it is a state case, he would not be able to attempt to pardon himself if found guilty. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Donald Trump Apr 21

Key players: Who's who at Donald Trump's hush money criminal trial

Donald Trump Apr 17

A lawyer, a banker and a speech therapist: Meet the 12 jury members of Trump's hush money trial

The case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg revisits a chapter from Trump’s history when his celebrity past collided with his political ambitions and, prosecutors say, he scrambled to stifle stories that he feared could torpedo his campaign.

In his opening statements, Colangelo traced the origins of the effort to the emergence late in the 2016 campaign of the 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump could be heard boasting about grabbing women sexually without their permission.

“The impact of that tape on the campaign was immediate and explosive,” Colangelo said, recounting for jurors how prominent Trump allies withdrew their endorsements and condemned his language.

The prosecutor said evidence will show the Republican National Committee even considered whether it was possible to replace Trump with another candidate.

Within days of the “Access Hollywood” tape becoming public, Colangelo told jurors that The National Enquirer alerted Cohen that porn actor Stormy Daniels was agitating to go public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006.

“At Trump’s direction, Cohen negotiated a deal to buy Ms. Daniels’ story to prevent American voters from hearing that story before Election Day,” Colangelo told jurors.

The prosecutor described other payments as well that were part of what’s known in the tabloid industry as a “catch-and-kill” ploy — catching a potentially damaging story by buying the rights to it and then suppressing or killing it through agreements that prevent the paid person from telling the story to anyone else.

Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels.

Colangelo also talked about arrangements made to pay a former Playboy model $150,000 to suppress her claims of a nearly yearlong affair with the married Trump. Colangelo said Trump “desperately did not want this information about Karen McDougal to become public because he was worried about its effect on the election.”

He told jurors they will hear a recording Cohen made in September 2016 of himself briefing Trump on the plan to buy McDougal’s story. The recording was made public in July 2018. Colangelo told jurors they hear Trump in his own voice, saying: “What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?”

Arguing that Trump did nothing illegal when his company recorded the checks to Cohen as legal expenses, defense lawyer Todd Blanche challenged the notion that Trump agreed to the Daniels payout to safeguard his campaign. Prosecutors say the payments were veiled reimbursements meant to cover up Cohen’s payments to Daniels.

While the money changed hands close to the election, Blanche characterized the transaction as the then-candidate trying to squelch a “sinister” effort to embarrass him and his loved ones.

“President Trump fought back, like he always does, and like he’s entitled to do, to protect his family, his reputation and his brand, and that is not a crime,” Blanche told jurors.

Trump arrived at the courthouse shortly before 9 a.m., minutes after castigating the case in capital letters on social media as “election interference” and a “witch hunt.”

The trial will require him to spend his days in a courtroom rather than on the campaign trail, a reality he complained about Monday when he lamented to reporters that he was “here instead of being able to be in Pennsylvania and Georgia and lots of other places campaigning, and it’s very unfair.”

Trump has nonetheless sought to turn his criminal defendant status into an asset for his campaign, fundraising off his legal jeopardy and repeatedly railing against a justice system that he has for years claimed is weaponized against him.

Hearing the case is a jury that includes, among others, multiple lawyers, a sales professional, an investment banker and an English teacher. As court began Monday, Judge Juan Merchan disclosed that one of the jurors selected for the case had conveyed reservations about participating, apparently because of the intense media attention. The juror was questioned privately but will remain on the case.

The case will test jurors’ ability to set aside any bias but also Trump’s ability to abide by the court’s restrictions, such as a gag order that bars him from attacking witnesses. Prosecutors are seeking fines against him for alleged violations of that order.

To convict Trump of a felony, prosecutors must show he not only falsified or caused business records to be entered falsely, which would be a misdemeanor, but that he did so to conceal another crime.

The allegations don’t accuse Trump of an egregious abuse of power like the federal case in Washington charging him with plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, or of flouting national security protocols like the federal case in Florida charging him with hoarding classified documents.

The trial’s first witness is also expected to take the stand, though cross-examination is likely to take place later in the week.

Attorneys on both sides will present their opening statements after the judge delivers instructions to the 12-person jury and six alternates, NBC News reported.

Prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office are expected to lay out what they’ve called an “illegal conspiracy” designed “to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”

They allege Trump worked with his then-attorney Michael Cohen and executives at the National Enquirer to suppress scandalous stories, including from adult film star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. Daniels says she slept with Trump in 2006, and McDougal says she had a 10-month sexual relationship with Trump that ended in April 2007. Trump has denied sleeping with either woman.

Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet, while Enquirer publisher AMI paid McDougal $150,000. After he was elected president, Trump repaid Cohen in a series of payments that prosecutors argue were fraudulently labeled as legal expenses. Trump has acknowledged repaying Cohen, but maintains the payments were legitimate and he didn’t do anything wrong.

Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records related to the hush money payment to Daniels, which was made in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign. The former president, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, could face up to four years in prison if convicted.

Cohen, Daniels and McDougal, as well as former AMI head David Pecker, are expected to testify during the trial, which is estimated to take six weeks.

It’s unclear who will be delivering opening statements for the prosecution on Monday. The DA’s office declined comment Friday.

Todd Blanche will deliver the opening statement for the defense. He’s expected to argue that Trump didn’t commit any wrongdoing and that the jurors can’t trust what Cohen and Daniels tell them because both have axes to grind against the former president.

The jury consists of seven men and five women. The final day of jury selection, on Friday, was particularly intense, as some potential jurors broke down in tears and said they were too anxious to be seated on the jury. They were excused. The day also saw a man set himself on fire outside the courthouse.

Trial proceedings on Monday will be slightly abbreviated. Judge Juan Merchan has said the court will adjourn at 2 p.m. ET on Monday and Tuesday because of the Passover holiday.

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said in court Friday that the DA’s office plans to call one witness Monday, with direct testimony expected to take up the rest of the day after opening statements. Trump attorney Susan Necheles on Friday asked for the witness’ identity, but Steinglass refused to disclose it, noting that Trump has attacked witnesses, including Cohen, in social media posts despite a partial gag order forbidding such action.

The judge called Steinglass’ position “understandable” and said he would not order prosecutors to reveal the witness before Sunday.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

• All the players in Trump’s hush money trial: Judge Juan Merchan, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels and more
• Video of a Colorado Rockies coach sitting in cockpit during team flight prompts FAA probe
• Chinese runner’s win is revoked after investigation into Beijing Half Marathon

The trial centers on allegations the former president falsified his company’s internal records to obscure the true nature of reimbursement payments to his former fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen, who arranged hush money payments to bury negative stories about him during his 2016 presidential race.

The witnesses include a porn actor, a former tabloid publisher and Cohen, who went to federal prison for his role in the hush money matter and for other crimes, including lying to Congress. Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass forewarned prospective jurors that they have “what you might consider to be some baggage.”

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Man sets himself on fire outside Trump trial courthouse in New York

Here’s a look at the key players in the historic first criminal trial of a former U.S. president:

DONALD TRUMP — The former president of the United States and the presumptive Republican nominee, who parlayed his success as reality television star and celebrity businessman and won the presidential election in 2016, becoming America’s 45th president. The trial involves allegations that he falsified his company’s records to hide the true nature of payments to Cohen, who helped bury negative stories about him during the 2016 presidential campaign. He’s pleaded not guilty.

MICHAEL COHEN — Trump’s former lawyer and fixer. He was once a fierce Trump ally, but now he’s a key prosecution witness against his former boss. Cohen worked for the Trump Organization from 2006 to 2017. He later went to federal prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations relating to the hush money arrangements and other, unrelated crimes.

STORMY DANIELS — The porn actor who received a $130,000 payment from Cohen as part of his hush-money efforts. Cohen paid Daniels to keep quiet about what she says was a sexual encounter with Trump years earlier. Trump denies having sex with Daniels.

KAREN MCDOUGAL — A former Playboy model who said she had a 10-month affair with Trump in the mid-2000s. She was paid $150,000 in 2016 by the parent company of the National Enquirer for the rights to her story about the alleged relationship. Trump denies having sex with McDougal.

DAVID PECKER — The National Enquirer’s former publisher and a longtime Trump friend. Prosecutors say he met with Trump and Cohen at Trump Tower in August 2015 and agreed to help Trump’s campaign identify negative stories about him.

HOPE HICKS — Trump’s former White House communications director. Prosecutors say she spoke with Trump by phone during a frenzied effort to keep allegations of his marital infidelity out of the press after the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape leaked weeks before the 2016 election. In the tape, from 2005, Trump boasted about grabbing women without permission.

ALVIN BRAGG — A former civil rights lawyer and law professor, Bragg is a Democrat in his first term as Manhattan’s district attorney. He inherited the Trump investigation when he took office in 2021. He oversaw the prosecution of Trump’s company in an unrelated tax fraud case before moving to indict Trump last year.

MATTHEW COLANGELO — A former high-ranking Justice Department official who was hired by Bragg in 2022 to lead the Trump investigation. They previously worked together on Trump-related matters at the New York attorney general’s office.

JOSHUA STEINGLASS — A Manhattan prosecutor for more than 25 years, he has worked on some of the office’s more high-profile cases, including the Trump Organization’s tax fraud conviction in 2022, and cases involving violent crimes.

SUSAN HOFFINGER — The chief of the district attorney’s Investigation Division, she returned to the office in 2022 after more than 20 years in private practice with her sister, Fran. She worked with Steinglass on the Trump Organization tax fraud prosecution.

TODD BLANCHE — A former federal prosecutor, Blanche previously represented Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in a mortgage fraud case — and got it thrown out. Blanche successfully argued that the case, brought by the same prosecutor’s office now taking on Trump, was too similar to one that landed Manafort in federal prison and therefore amounted to double jeopardy.

SUSAN NECHELES — A former Brooklyn prosecutor, Necheles is a respected New York City defense lawyer who represented Trump’s company at its tax fraud trial last year. In the past she served as counsel to the late Genovese crime family underboss Venero Mangano, known as Benny Eggs, and defended John Gotti’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, in the early 90s.

EMIL BOVE — A star college lacrosse player, Bove was a veteran federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. He was involved in multiple high-profile prosecutions, including a drug-trafficking case against the former Honduran president’s brother, a man who set off a pressure cooker device in Manhattan and a man who sent dozens of mail bombs to prominent targets across the country.

JUAN M. MERCHAN — The judge presiding over the case. He was also the judge in the Trump Organization’s tax fraud trial in 2022 and is overseeing a border wall fraud case against longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon. Merchan has twice denied requests by Trump’s lawyers that he step aside from the case. They contend he is biased because his daughter runs a political consulting firm that has worked for Democrats, including President Joe Biden. Merchan has said he is certain of his “ability to be fair and impartial.”

___

Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

The person, identified as Maxwell Azzarello, set himself aflame after walking into Collect Pond Park around 1:30 p.m. Friday, in the designated protest area across the street from the courthouse in lower Manhattan where Trump’s trial is taking place, according to NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey.

He started shuffling around his clothes and opened a backpack, taking out pamphlets and throwing them around the small park. Azzarello then took out a cannister, poured a liquid accelerant on himself, and lit himself on fire, Maddrey said. Police believe the accelerant was a type of alcohol-based substance used for cleaning.

He was able to take a few steps while on fire and walked into a police barrier, then fell down, according to Maddrey. Video appeared to show the moments after the self-immolation, as Azzarello laid on the ground burning, at times seemingly seizing.

There was already a heavy NYPD presence already outside the building due to the high-profile nature of the trial, and officers rushed to get what appeared to be a fire extinguisher to douse the flames, while others tried to use jackets to cover the fire. Their first attempt to put out the blaze was unsuccessful, and video appeared to show the man trying to sit up as onlookers shrieked in shock.

The fire was ultimately put out minutes later after police and FDNY brought a larger extinguisher, leaving a smoky scene outside court as a gaggle of reporters and horrified witnesses looked on.

The man was taken away by EMS to a burn unit at NewYork-Presbyterian Cornell Medical Center in critical condition, the FDNY said. He was later declared deceased by hospital staff, the NYPD said. No time of death was given by police.

Six other first responders, including at least three NYPD officers and a court officer, also suffered minor injuries while responding to the incident, according to the fire department.

The bomb squad swept the park after the incident looking for any possible devices. Nothing was found, police said.

It came as a full jury of 12 people and six alternates had been seated in the case against Trump, the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president. Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The trial will place Trump in a Manhattan courtroom for weeks, forcing him to juggle his dual role as criminal defendant and political candidate against the backdrop of his tightly contested race against President Joe Biden.

For more coverage of the Trump trial, click here.

Who is the man who set himself on fire?

Maxwell Azzarello, a 37-year-old from St. Augustine, Florida, came to New York City earlier in the week, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at a press conference. While it wasn’t clear when exactly he arrived in the city, police said he was in Florida as recently as April 13.

His family was unaware he had traveled to NYC, Kenny said. Azzarello is originally from Long Island.

Police said it is believed he walked over from Leonard Street, adjacent to Collect Pond Park, and set himself on fire soon after. It was not immediately clear if he drove to the area of lower Manhattan or had taken some form of public transit.

“This gentleman did not breach security protocols. The park was opened to the public. But, of course, we’re going to take a look at everything and with the magnitude of what’s going on around right here, we’ll reassess our security with our federal partners,” said Maddrey.

Azzarello was said to have thrown pamphlets around before self-immolating. According to Kenny, the pamphlets were “propaganda-based” and involved a conspiracy theory “in regards to Ponzi schemes.” They also contained theories that about local educational institutes and the Mafia.

Police said it did not appear Azzarello carried out the incident with any intention of targeting Trump supporters or protesters, and didn’t seemingly have any intentions beyond promoting the conspiracy theories detailed in the pamphlets.

It was not clear whether Azzarello said anything before lighting himself on fire, but police didn’t have any information leading them to believe he did. The department did comb through his social media and found he posted something online in advance that was connected to the incident, which shared more information about the conspiracy theories the pamphlets touted.

The vast conspiracy theory he described online involved the American government, a university, political figures and major financial players. His actions did not appear to be a clear direct response to what the Trump trial going on inside inside the courtroom, but rather were done at that particular place and time in order to draw media attention to his conspiracy claims.

Kenny said it did not appear Azzarello had any criminal history in New York. Police records show he was arrested on four misdemeanor charges including criminal mischief, property damage, disturbing the peace in Florida in Aug. 2023

The panel of New Yorkers who will decide the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president took final shape after lawyers spent days quizzing dozens of potential jurors on whether they can impartially judge Trump in the city where he built his real estate empire before being elected in 2016.

The trial thrusts Trump’s legal problems into the heart of his hotly contested race against President Joe Biden, with Trump’s opponent likely to seize on unflattering and salacious testimony to make the case that the presumptive Republican nominee is unfit to return as commander in chief.

Trump, meanwhile, is using the prosecution as a political rallying cry, casting himself as a victim while juggling his dual role as criminal defendant and presidential candidate.

Judge Juan Merchan said lawyers will present opening statements Monday morning before prosecutors begin laying out their case alleging a scheme to cover up negative stories Trump feared would hurt his 2016 campaign. He has pleaded not guilty and says the stories were false.

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Donald Trump Apr 14

All the players in Trump's hush money trial: Judge Juan Merchan, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels and more

Donald Trump Apr 17

A lawyer, a banker and a speech therapist: Meet the 12 jury members of Trump's hush money trial

Despite the failure of repeated previous attempts to delay the trial, a Trump attorney was in an appeals court hours after the jury was seated, arguing that Merchan rushed through jury selection and that Trump cannot get a fair trial in Manhattan.

“To think an impartial jury could be found in that period of time, I would respectfully submit, is untenable,” attorney Clifford Robert said.

Justice Marsha Michael denied the request just minutes after a brief hearing.

Back in the trial court, Merchan expressed frustration as Trump’s lawyers pressed to revisit a litany of pretrial rulings.

“At some point, you need to accept the court’s rulings,” Merchan said. “There’s nothing else to clarify. There’s nothing else to reargue. We’re going to have opening statements on Monday morning. This trial is starting.”

Just after the jury was seated, emergency crews responded to a park outside the courthouse, where a man had set himself on fire. The man took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories and spread them around the park before dousing himself in a flammable substance and setting himself aflame, officials said. He was in critical condition Friday afternoon.

Trump has spent the week sitting quietly in the courtroom as lawyers pressed potential jurors on their views about him in a search for any bias that would preclude them from hearing the case. During breaks in the proceedings, he has railed against the case on social media or to TV cameras in the hallway, calling it a politically motivated “witch hunt.”

“This Trial is a Long, Rigged, Endurance Contest, dealing with Nasty, Crooked People, who want to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY,” he wrote Friday on social media.

Over five days of jury selection, dozens of people were dismissed from the jury pool after saying they didn’t believe they could be fair. Others expressed anxiety about having to decide such a consequential case with outsized media attention, even though the judge has ruled that jurors’ names will be known only to prosecutors, Trump and their legal teams.

One woman who had been chosen to serve on the jury was dismissed Thursday after she raised concerns over messages she said she got from friends and family when aspects of her identity became public. On Friday, another woman broke down in tears while being questioned by a prosecutor about her ability to decide the case based only on evidence presented in court.

“I feel so nervous and anxious right now,” the woman said. “I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t want someone who feels like this to judge my case either. I don’t want to waste the court’s time.”

As more potential jurors were questioned Friday, Trump appeared to lean over at the defense table, scribbling on some papers and exchanging notes with one of his lawyers. He occasionally perked up and gazed at the jury box, including when one would-be juror said he had volunteered in a “get out the vote” effort for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That man was later excused.

Trump spoke to reporters before Friday’s proceedings got underway, lambasting a gag order that prosecutors have accused him of violating. Merchan has scheduled arguments for next week on prosecutors’ request to hold Trump in contempt of court and fine him for social media posts they say defy limits on what he can say about potential witnesses.

“The gag order has to come off. People are allowed to speak about me, and I have a gag order,” Trump said.

Merchan also heard arguments Friday on prosecutors’ request to bring up Trump’s prior legal entanglements if he takes the witness stand in the hush money case. Trump has said he wants to testify, but he is not required to and can always change his mind.

Manhattan prosecutors have said they want to question Trump about, among other cases, his recent civil fraud trial that resulted in a $454 million judgment after a judge found Trump had lied about his wealth for years. He is appealing that verdict. Merchan said he would rule on the matter in the coming days.

The trial centers on a $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, made to porn actor Stormy Daniels to prevent her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the final days of the 2016 race.

Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of the payments in internal records when his company reimbursed Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2018 and is expected to be a star witness for the prosecution.

Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, and his lawyers argue that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He could get up to four years in prison if convicted, though it’s not clear that the judge would opt to put him behind bars. Trump would almost certainly appeal any conviction.

Trump is involved in four criminal cases, but it’s not clear that any others will reach trial before the November election. Appeals and legal wrangling have caused delays in the other three cases charging Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election results and with illegally hoarding classified documents.

What you need to know about Trump’s hush money case

____

Richer reported from Washington.

The court quickly turned to selecting alternate jurors, with the process on track to wrap up by the end of the week. Prosecutors could begin presenting their case early next week.

The jury of seven men and five women includes a sales professional, a software engineer, a security engineer, a teacher, a speech therapist, multiple lawyers, an investment banker and a retired wealth manager.

The first-ever trial of a former American president is unfolding in New York during this year’s race for the White House, meaning the presumptive Republican nominee will spend his days in court confronted by salacious and unflattering testimony about his personal life while simultaneously campaigning to reclaim the office he held for four years.

He’s made clear his determination to use his legal jeopardy, already a central issue in the race against Democratic incumbent Joe Biden, to his advantage. After a full day of jury selection, he complained to reporters that he should have been out campaigning but was in court instead for what he said was a “very unfair trial.”

“Everybody’s outraged by it,” he said. “You know the whole world’s watching this New York scam.”

Jury selection proceeded at a plodding pace earlier Thursday when two jurors were dismissed, one after expressing doubt about her ability to be fair following disclosure of details about her identity and the other over concerns that some of his answers in court may have been inaccurate.

But lawyers who began the day with only five jurors settled on the remaining seven in quick succession, along with one alternate. Judge Juan Merchan has said his goal is to have six alternates.

The process of picking a jury is a critical phase in any criminal trial but especially so when the defendant is a former president and the presumptive Republican nominee. Prospective jurors have been grilled on their social media posts, personal lives and political views as the lawyers and judge search for any bias that would prevent them from being impartial.

Inside the court, there’s broad acknowledgment of the futility in trying to find jurors without knowledge of Trump. A prosecutor this week said lawyers were not looking for people who had been “living under a rock for the past eight years.”

To that end, multiple jurors chosen for the panel acknowledged having personal opinions of Trump or his presidency.

One juror, a man who works in investment banking, earlier described himself as “ambivalent” about Trump, adding, “I might not like some of his policies, but there has been some good” for the country.

A woman picked for the jury said she thought Trump seemed “very selfish and self serving,” adding, “I don’t really appreciate that from any public servant.” Defense lawyers were out of peremptory strikes, which would allow them to dismiss a juror without giving a reason.

The trial centers on a $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, made to porn actor Stormy Daniels to prevent her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the final days of the 2016 race.

Prosecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of the payments in internal records when his company reimbursed Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2018 and is expected to be a star witness for the prosecution.

Trump has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels, and his lawyers argue that the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses.

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He could get up to four years in prison if convicted, though it’s not clear that the judge would opt to put him behind bars. Trump would almost certainly appeal any conviction.

Donald Trump Apr 17

A lawyer, a banker and a speech therapist: Meet the 12 jury members of Trump's hush money trial

Donald Trump Apr 16

First 7 jurors are chosen for Trump's hush money criminal trial; 11 more still needed

Trump faces four criminal cases, but it’s not clear that any others will reach trial before the November election. Appeals and legal wrangling have caused delays in the other three cases charging Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election results and with illegally hoarding classified documents.

The jury selection process picked up momentum Tuesday with the selection of seven jurors. But on Thursday, Merchan revealed in court that one of the seven, a cancer nurse, had “conveyed that after sleeping on it overnight she had concerns about her ability to be fair and impartial in this case.”

And though jurors’ names are being kept confidential, the woman told the judge and the lawyers that she had doubts after she said aspects of her identity had been made public.

“Yesterday alone I had friends, colleagues and family push things to my phone regarding questioning my identity as a juror,” she said. “I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision making in the courtroom.”

A second seated juror was dismissed after prosecutors raised concerns that he may not have been honest in answering a jury selection question by saying that he had never been accused or convicted of a crime.

The IT professional was summoned to court to answer questions after prosecutors said they found an article about a person with the same name who had been arrested in the 1990s for tearing down posters pertaining to the political right in suburban Westchester County.

A prosecutor also disclosed that a relative of the man may have been involved in a deferred prosecution agreement in the 1990s with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is prosecuting Trump’s case.

Because the juror was questioned Thursday at the judge’s bench, off-microphone and out of earshot of reporters, it was not known whether the man confirmed or denied that either instance was connected to him.

After dismissing from the jury the nurse who had already been selected, Merchan ordered journalists in court not to report prospective jurors’ answers to questions about their current and former employers.

“We just lost, probably, what probably would have been a very good juror for this case, and the first thing that she said was she was afraid and intimidated by the press, all the press, and everything that had happened,” Merchan said.

In other developments, prosecutors asked for Trump to be held in contempt over a series of social media posts this week.

The district attorney’s office on Monday sought a $3,000 fine for Trump for three Truth Social posts they said violated the judge’s gag order limiting what he can say publicly about witnesses. Since then, prosecutors said Trump made seven additional posts that they believe violate the order.

Several of the posts involved an article that referred to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen as a “serial perjurer,” and one from Wednesday repeated a claim by a Fox News host that liberal activists were lying to get on the jury, said prosecutor Christopher Conroy.

Trump lawyer Emil Bove said Cohen “has been attacking President Trump in public statements,” and Trump was just replying.

The judge already scheduled a hearing for next week on the prosecution’s request for contempt sanctions over Trump’s posts.

Prosecutors and the defense team whittled down a pool of nearly 200 people to 12 jurors and an alternate after grilling them on their personal history, political views, social media posts, and ability to remain impartial despite any opinions they might have about the polarizing former president.

Seven people were sworn in Tuesday but two of them ended up being removed on Thursday for possible conflicts. Later Thursday, the remaining seven jurors were sworn in, plus one alternate.

The trial is expected to last as long as eight weeks.

The jurors in Trump’s New York criminal trial

Juror 1

A man who lives in West Harlem and works in sales. He is married, likes to do “anything outdoorsy,” and gets news from The New York Times, Fox News and MSNBC.

Juror 2

A man who works in investment banking, follows Twitter as well as Truth Social posts from Trump and said, “I don’t have any beliefs that might prevent me from being fair or impartial.”

Juror 3

A young man who has lived in Chelsea for five years, works as an attorney in corporate law, and likes to hike and run. He gets news from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Google.

Juror 4

A man who’s a security engineer and likes woodworking and metalworking.

Juror 5

A young woman who is a Harlem resident and works as a teacher. She lives with her boyfriend, loves writing, theater and traveling. She gets news from Google and TikTok and listens to podcasts on relationships and pop culture.

Juror 6

A young woman who lives in Chelsea and works as a software engineer. She gets news from The New York Times, Google, Facebook and TikTok.

Juror 7

A man who lives on the Upper East Side and works as attorney as a civil litigator. He enjoys spending time in the outdoors and gets his news from The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the Washington.

Juror 8

A man who’s retired but worked for a major wealth manager. He said he enjoys skiing, fly fishing and yoga.

Juror 9

A woman who is a speech therapist, gets news from CNN and likes reality TV podcasts.

Juror 10

A man who works in commerce, reads The New York Times and listens to podcasts on behavioral psychology.

Juror 11

A woman who works as a product development manager and watches late-night news and reads Google, business and fashion news.

Juror 12

A woman who is a physical therapist who likes running and tennis and listening to podcasts on sports and faith.

Alternate 1

A woman who works as an asset manager and likes to run, hang out with her friends and eat.

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The panelists who were selected are an information technology worker, an English teacher, an oncology nurse, a sales professional, a software engineer and two lawyers.

Eleven more people still must be sworn in before opening statements begin as early as next week in the first criminal trial of a former commander in chief. It’s a moment of reckoning for Trump, who has tried to put off his prosecutions until after the November election and casts himself as the victim of a politically motivated justice system.

The trial puts Trump’s legal problems at the center of his closely contested race against President Joe Biden. It’s the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to reach trial, and it may be the only one to return a verdict before voters decide whether to elect the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. Jury selection was to resume Thursday.

The methodical process unfolding in the Manhattan courtroom highlights the unprecedented challenge of finding people who can fairly judge the polarizing defendant in the city where he built his real estate empire before becoming president in 2016.

On his way out of the courthouse, Trump stopped in the hallway to rail against the case to reporters, accusing the judge of “rushing” the trial.

“We are going to continue our fight against this judge,” said Trump, who pushed unsuccessfully to have the judge removed from the case.

Over two days, dozens of potential jurors have been excused after saying they could not be impartial or because they had other commitments. Trump’s lawyers challenged a handful of people over social media posts, and one person was dismissed over a 2017 post about Trump that said “Lock him up!”

Several would-be jurors told the judge they believed they could decide the case fairly, no matter their feelings about Trump or his policies as president.

Trump looked on in the courtroom as his lawyers urged the judge to remove one potential juror for a social media post she made after his 2020 election loss. The judge admonished Trump at one point after he spoke loudly and gestured while the judge questioned the woman about her post.

“I don’t know what he was uttering, but it was audible and he was gesturing. And he was speaking in the direction of the juror,” Judge Juan Merchan said. “I won’t tolerate that. I will not tolerate any jurors being intimidated in this courtroom.”

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass took Trump’s notoriety head-on, telling would-be jurors that attorneys were not looking for people who had been “living under a rock for the past eight years.” They just needed to keep an open mind.

“This case has nothing to do with your personal politics … it’s not a referendum on the Trump presidency or a popularity contest or who you’re going to vote for in November. We don’t care. This case is about whether this man broke the law,” he said.

Donald Trump Apr 15

Trump's historic hush-money trial gets underway; 1st day ends without any jurors being picked

Donald Trump Apr 14

How will jury selection work in Donald Trump's hush money trial?

Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged effort to keep salacious — and, he says, bogus — stories about his sex life from emerging during his 2016 campaign.

With the trial expected to last for six weeks or more, several jury pool members brought up plans they have for Memorial Day and beyond.

One man was excused after saying he feared his ability to be impartial could be compromised by “unconscious bias” from growing up in Texas and working in finance with people who “intellectually tend to slant Republican.”

“I’m not sure that I can say beyond a reasonable doubt that I can be fair,” another potential juror told the judge. “I can try. But I’m not 100% sure I can be fair.” She was also dismissed.

One woman said she disagrees with Trump’s policies and sometimes finds herself frustrated by him. But she pledged to be fair and impartial, telling defense lawyer Todd Blanche that she would give her “level-headed best” if she were picked for the jury.

“I didn’t sleep last night thinking about could I do that,” she said.

Trump broke into a grin, nodding his head in an exaggerated manner, when another person said he had read two of the former president’s books, “The Art of the Deal” and “How to Get Rich.” The man, who said some of his wife’s family members are lobbyists for the Republican Party, said he didn’t think there was anything that would prevent him from looking at the case fairly.

“I feel that no one’s above the law,” he said.

The charges center on $130,000 in payments that Trump’s company made to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen. He paid that sum on Trump’s behalf to keep porn actor Stormy Daniels from going public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the encounter ever happened.

Prosecutors say the payments to Cohen were falsely logged as legal fees. The prosecution has described the money as being part of a scheme to bury damaging stories Trump feared could help his opponent in the 2016 race, particularly as Trump’s reputation was suffering at the time from comments he made about women.

Trump has acknowledged reimbursing Cohen for the payment and that it was designed to stop Daniels from going public about the alleged encounter. But Trump has said it had nothing to do with the campaign.

In court papers filed Tuesday, prosecutors urged the judge to fine Trump $3,000 over social media posts they say violated a gag order limiting what he can say publicly about witnesses. In the posts, Trump called Cohen and Daniels “two sleaze bags who have, with their lies and misrepresentations, cost our Country dearly!”

Prosecutors wrote that the judge should admonish Trump to comply with the gag order and warn him that further violations could be punished not only with additional fines but also jail time.

If convicted of falsifying business records, Trump faces up to four years in prison, though there’s no guarantee he will get time behind bars.

The day ended without any jurors being seated. The selection process was scheduled to resume Tuesday.

The first criminal trial of any former U.S. president began as Trump vies to reclaim the White House, creating a remarkable split-screen spectacle of the presumptive Republican nominee spending his days as a criminal defendant while simultaneously campaigning for office. He’s blended those roles over the last year by presenting himself to supporters, on the campaign trail and on social media, as a target of politically motivated prosecutions designed to derail his candidacy.

“It’s a scam. It’s a political witch hunt. It continues, and it continues forever,” Trump said after exiting the courtroom, where he sat at the defense table with his lawyers.

After a norm-shattering presidency shadowed by years of investigations, the trial amounts to a reckoning for Trump, who faces four indictments charging him with crimes ranging from hoarding classified documents to plotting to overturn an election. Yet the political stakes are less clear because a conviction would not preclude him from becoming president and because the allegations in this case date back years and are seen as less grievous than the conduct behind the three other indictments.

The day began with pretrial arguments — including over a potential fine for Trump — before moving in the afternoon into jury selection, where the parties will decide who among them might be picked to determine the legal fate of the former, and potentially future, American president.

After the first members of the jury pool, 96 in all, were summoned into the courtroom, Trump craned his neck to look back at them, whispering to his lawyer as they entered the jury box.

“You are about to participate in a trial by jury. The system of trial by jury is one of the cornerstones of our judicial system,” Judge Juan Merchan told the jurors. “The name of this case is the People of the State of New York vs. Donald Trump.”

Trump’s notoriety would make the process of picking 12 jurors and six alternates a near-herculean task in any year, but it’s likely to be especially challenging now, unfolding in a closely contested presidential election in the heavily Democratic city where Trump grew up and catapulted to celebrity status decades before winning the White House.

Underscoring the difficulty, only about a third of the 96 people in the first panel of potential jurors remained after the judge excused some members. More than half the group was excused after telling the judge they could not be fair and impartial. At least nine more were excused after raising their hands when Merchan asked if they could not serve for any other reason.

A female juror was excused after saying she had strong opinions about Trump. Earlier in the questionnaire, the woman, a Harlem resident, indicated she could be neutral in deciding the case. But when asked whether she had strong opinions about the former president, the woman answered matter-of-factly: “Yes.”

When Merchan asked her to repeat the response, she replied: “Yeah, I said yes.” She was dismissed.

Merchan has written that the key is “whether the prospective juror can assure us that they will set aside any personal feelings or biases and render a decision that is based on the evidence and the law.”

No matter the outcome, Trump is determined to benefit from the proceedings, casting the case, and his indictments elsewhere, as a broad “weaponization of law enforcement” by Democratic prosecutors and officials. He maintains they are orchestrating sham charges in hopes of impeding his presidential run.

news Apr 11

Trump is about to face trial on criminal hush money charges. Here's what to know

Donald Trump Apr 14

All the players in Trump's hush money trial: Judge Juan Merchan, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels and more

He’s lambasted judges and prosecutors for years, a pattern of attacks that continued Monday as he entered court Monday after calling the case an “assault on America.”

“This is political persecution. This is a persecution like never before,” he said.

Earlier Monday, the judge denied a defense request to recuse himself from the case after Trump’s lawyers claimed he had a conflict of interest. He also said prosecutors could not play for the jury the 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump was captured discussing grabbing women sexually without their permission. However, prosecutors will be allowed to question witnesses about the recording, which became public in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.

Prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office also asked for Merchan to fine Trump $3,000 over social media posts they said violated the judge’s gag order barring him from attacking witnesses. Last week, he used his Truth Social platform to call his former lawyer Michael Cohen and the adult film actor Stormy Daniels “two sleaze bags who have, with their lies and misrepresentations, cost our Country dearly!”

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche maintained Trump was simply responding to the witnesses’ statements.

“It’s not as if President Trump is going out and targeting individuals. He is responding to salacious, repeated vehement attacks by these witnesses,” Blanche said.

Merchan setting a hearing for next week on the request.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors say the alleged fraud was part of an effort to keep salacious — and, Trump says, bogus — stories about his sex life from emerging during his 2016 campaign.

The charges center on $130,000 in payments that Trump’s company made to Cohen. He paid that sum on Trump’s behalf to keep Daniels from going public, a month before the election, with her claims of a sexual encounter with the married mogul a decade earlier.

Prosecutors say the payments to Cohen were falsely logged as legal fees in order to cloak their actual purpose. Trump’s lawyers say the disbursements indeed were legal expenses, not a cover-up.

After decades of fielding and initiating lawsuits, the businessman-turned-politician now faces a trial that could result in up to four years in prison if he’s convicted, though a no-jail sentence also would be possible.

Trump’s attorneys lost a bid to get the hush-money case dismissed and have since repeatedly sought to delay it, prompting a flurry of last-minute appeals court hearings last week.

Among other things, Trump’s lawyers maintain that the jury pool in overwhelmingly Democratic Manhattan has been tainted by negative publicity about Trump and that the case should be moved elsewhere.

An appeals judge turned down an emergency request to delay the trial while the change-of-venue request goes to a group of appellate judges, who are set to consider it in the coming weeks.

Manhattan prosecutors have countered that a lot of the publicity stems from Trump’s own comments and that questioning will tease out whether prospective jurors can put aside any preconceptions they may have. There’s no reason, prosecutors said, to think that 12 fair and impartial people can’t be found amid Manhattan’s roughly 1.4 million adult residents.

The prospective jurors will be known only by number, as the judge has ordered that their names be kept secret from everyone except prosecutors, Trump and their legal teams. The 42 preapproved, sometimes multi-pronged queries include background basics but also reflect the uniqueness of the case.

They’re being asked, among other questions, about hobbies and news habits, whether they hold strong beliefs about Trump that would prevent them being impartial and about attendance at Trump or anti-Trump rallies.

Based on the answers, the attorneys can ask a judge to eliminate people “for cause” if they meet certain criteria for being unable to serve or can’t be unbiased. The lawyers also can use “peremptory challenges” to nix 10 potential jurors and two prospective alternates without giving a reason.

He has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged effort to cover up a hush-money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the lead up the 2016 presidential election.

The charges stem from a $130,000 payment Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to Daniels to keep her from going public with an allegation that she and Trump had had an affair. Trump then reimbursed Cohen by falsely logging the expenses as legal fees in company records.

This live blog is no longer being updated. Scroll down to see how the day in court unfolded.

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All the players in Trump's hush money trial: Judge Juan Merchan, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels and more

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How will jury selection work in Donald Trump's hush money trial?

Done for the day

By NBC Staff

The judge is wrapping up for the day after about 10 potential jurors were able to read their survey responses — underscoring just how long the selection process may take. The first half of the day was spent handling motion arguments.

Court adjourned for the day at 4:40 p.m. ET

Juror questionnaire asks about news habits

The Associated Press

A randomly selected group of 18 prospective jurors in Donald Trump’s hush money trial on Monday afternoon began sifting through a litany of preselected questions, touching on their educational backgrounds, news habits, hobbies and ability to be neutral.

Both of the first two prospective jurors said they lived in midtown Manhattan, had never attended a Trump rally and felt they could be impartial.

On a question about whether she had any strong beliefs about the former president, the first respondent paused briefly, then said, “No.”

As the jurors ticked through the list of questions, Trump held a stapled stack of papers close to his face, appearing to follow along with the answers.

Opinions about Trump

By NBC Staff

Merchan dismissed a prospective juror this afternoon after she responded “Yes” to a question on the jury selection questionnaire about whether she had opinions about Trump.

Potential jurors excused

By NBC Staff

More than half of the 96 potential jurors who were initially in the courtroom have been excused after Merchan asked whether those in the pool feel they cannot be impartial and fair or cannot serve for some other reason.

Of those who were excused, more than two dozen were white women, according to a pool report from inside the courtroom.

Jury selection begins

The Associated Press

Jury selection in Donald Trump ‘s historic hush money trial finally got underway Monday afternoon after hours of pretrial arguments, including a request from prosecutors to fine Trump over social media posts they say violated a gag order.

The process involves selecting 12 jurors, plus six alternates. Trump’s notoriety would make that a near-herculean task in any year, but the process is especially challenging now — unfolding as Trump vies to reclaim the White House during a hotly contested presidential election year and in the city where he grew up.

Courtroom sketches released

Courtroom sketches were released following Trump’s appearance in court Monday morning.

Judge puts his foot down on Trump’s team’s efforts to delay trial process

By Jennifer Peltz | The Associated Press

The afternoon began with a squabble over the Trump team’s planned exhibits at trial. Noting that the judge issued an order in February telling the lawyers to comply immediately with state laws on notifying their adversaries in advance of some evidence, prosecutors asked the judge to give the defense 24 hours to follow through and bar anything that wasn’t identified by then.

Trump’s lawyers asked for another day, saying they have been working through hundreds of thousands of pages of material they got only in recent months from a related federal investigation.

Merchan put his foot down at 24 hours, noting that the defense team has had weeks to go through the material and had filed many requests and appeals meanwhile.

“The way you choose to use your time is your business,” the judge said.

Judge delays ruling on potential gag order

By NBC Staff

Judge Merchan announced that he would not issue a ruling today on the prosecutors’ request to hold Trump in contempt of court for violating a gag order.

He said he will hold a hearing next week on April 21 to give the defense an opportunity to respond.

The gag order bars Trump from commenting publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff and jurors.

Trial is back in session

Trump has returned to the courtroom following a lunch break.

A timeline of the hush money case

Could Trump go to jail?

By The Associated Press

Trump is facing 34 counts of falsifying business records — a felony charge that’s punishable by up to four years in prison. But there’s no guarantee that Trump would actually serve time behind bars if he’s convicted, with the sentence ultimately up to the judge.

New York court records and newspaper archives suggest that defendants convicted only of felony falsifying business records seldom get prison time unless they are also charged with more serious felonies. It’s also hard to know to what extent the logistical and political complications of jailing a former president might play a role at sentencing.

The three other criminal cases Trump is facing could lead to more lengthy prison sentences if he is convicted. In the 2020 election interference case in Washington, for example, the most serious counts call for up to 20 years behind bars.

A look at the judge who is overseeing Trump’s hush money trial

By Jennifer Peltz | The Associated Press

Born in Colombia, Judge Juan Merchan emigrated as a 6-year-old and grew up in New York. He worked his way through college, graduated from Hofstra University’s law school, and was a state lawyer and Manhattan prosecutor before being appointed a family court judge in 2006. Three years later, he was assigned to a felony trial court, which New York calls a state Supreme Court.

He has presided over cases alleging murder, rape and many other crimes: a multimillion-dollar investment fraud, a clubland stabbing, stolen laptops, harassment. The spotlight on Merchan grew white-hot in the last three years as he took on cases involving Trump’s company, its former longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg and, eventually, Trump himself.

If some might see Merchan’s familiarity with the Trump Organization case as preparation for the hush money trial, the ex-president and his lawyers see a problem.

During long trials, Manhattan judges often reserve a day each week for other cases. Merchan is keeping Wednesdays for mental health court, which he has overseen since its 2011 start, and a similar veterans’ docket he took on in 2019.

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Police investigate bomb threats at DA Alvin Bragg’s house and New York library

The Associated Press

Police say they are investigating a bomb threat at the home of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg from Monday morning. A police spokesperson says a 911 caller reported the threat shortly before 9 a.m.

Another bomb threat made to the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building was unfounded and there was no disruption to service, a library spokesperson said.

Court breaks for lunch

The court has now adjourned until 1:30 p.m. ET.

Prosecutors ask judge to fine Trump $3,000 over social media posts

By NBC Staff

Prosecutor’s have asked Merchan to fine Trump for violating a gag order by sharing certain social media posts over the weekend. They refer to three specific posts and request a levy of $1,000 each, as well as telling Trump to take them down.

“The defendant has demonstrated his willingness to flout the order. He’s attacked witnesses in the case,” said Christopher Conroy, one of the trial prosecutors.

One of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, maintained that the three posts referenced “do not violate the gag order.” He said Trump is just responding to to the witnesses’ own public statements.

“It’s not as if President Trump is going out and targeting individuals, he is responding to salacious, repeated vehement attacks by these witnesses.”

Judge pivots to discussing trial, noting the waiting jurors

By NBC News

Judge Merchan cuts off yet another tangential debate about procedures for filing motions, saying there are 500 jurors waiting and he isn’t “interested in getting into this minutia.”

He pivots to discuss the trial itself and the rules of engagement inside his courtroom. The judge is going over the instructions for questioning potential jurors, known as the voir dire process. He said that he will allow 30 minutes for the first round of questioning and 20 minutes for any subsequent rounds.

Two hours in, jury selection has yet to begin

By The Associated Press

Judge Merchan is still considering pretrial motions before potential jurors come in. While it’s not uncommon for judges to consider motions before a trial, in this case, Trump’s defense attorneys have pushed for a string of delays.

Prosecution tells judge Trump violated gag order

Will the public learn the identities of the jurors?

The judge has ordered that the jurors’ names be kept secret, an unusual but not unprecedented step in trials where there is a potential that jurors might wind up being harassed or threatened during or after the trial.

There is nothing to stop jurors from voluntarily talking about their experiences after the trial is over. While it is pending, they aren’t supposed to talk about it to anyone.

Read more here.

Court takes a brief recess

The court is taking a 10 minute break. They are expected to continue arguments over pretrial motions when court returns.

Judge denies request to include ‘Access Hollywood’ tape, E. Jean Carroll deposition

Judge to allow prosecution to enter evidence about National Enquirer coverage on Trump

By Lisa Rubin and Summer Concepcion | NBC News

The National Enquirer helped boost Trump’s 2016 candidacy by identifying and suppressing negative stories — a practice known as “catch and kill.”

Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass discussed the admissibility of an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower between lawyer Michael Cohen and ex-National Enquirer publisher  David Pecker to discuss the tabloid’s role in helping his presidential run.

Steinglass asked for permission to admit certain exhibits, including articles in the Enquirer with positive headlines on Trump that were shown to him before publication so that he could suggest changes and/or approve them. Negative stories about Trump’s primary opponents in the 2016 presidential election cycle — particularly Ben Carson, and Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida — were also reviewed by Trump and were designed to have maximum damaging impact.

Steinglass argued that the “whole point of the meeting” was for the Enquirer to distort what information the public got about Trump: to suppress negative stories about Trump, accentuate positive ones, and exaggerate his rivals’ weaknesses. The resulting headlines, Steinglass argued, cannot prejudice Trump when they were designed to help him.

Merchan ruled that he will allow the exhibits Steinglass outlined under a state law allowing evidence of alleged prior bad acts

Judge lays out the schedule of the trial

By Lisa Rubin and Rebecca Shabad | NBC News

The judge said there will be no trial on any Wednesdays or on April 29. But if the trial starts to run long, he said he reserves the right to convene trial on Wednesday afternoons.

There will also be no trial on any day that conflicts with the religious observance of any juror, he said,

At most, that would mean April 22 and 23 for Passover as well as April 29 and 30, but that will not be true to accommodate the lawyers alone. He is willing to curtail trial on April 22 and April 23 by 2 p.m. to allow counsel to make it to their holiday observances by sundown, which is roughly at 7:43 pm ET.

If everything is going according to schedule, he said he will adjourn for Barron Trump’s high school graduation and that of one of the defense lawyers’ children on May 17 and June 3, respectively. But he said he’s reserving judgment on that now.

What the case about exactly?

By Michael R. Sisak and Eric Tucker | The Associated Press

The former president is accused of falsifying internal Trump Organization records as part of a scheme to bury damaging stories that he feared could hurt his 2016 campaign, particularly as Trump’s reputation was suffering at the time from comments he had made about women.

The allegations focus on payoffs to two women, porn actor Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, who said they had extramarital sexual encounters with Trump years earlier, as well as to a Trump Tower doorman who claimed to have a story about a child he alleged Trump had out of wedlock. Trump says none of these supposed sexual encounters occurred.

Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, paid Daniels $130,000 and arranged for the publisher of the National Enquirer supermarket tabloid to pay McDougal $150,000 in a journalistically dubious practice known as “catch-and-kill” in which a publication pays for exclusive rights to someone’s story with no intention of publishing it, either as a favor to a celebrity subject or to gain leverage over the person.

Prosecutors say Trump’s company reimbursed Cohen and paid him bonuses and extra payments, all of which were falsely logged in Trump Organization records as legal expenses. Cohen has separately pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign finance law in connection with the payments.

Read more here

Judge denies a request from the defense team to recuse himself from case

By NBC News

Judge Juan M. Merchan started the day’s proceedings by discussing a motion filed by Trump’s team calling for the judge to recuse himself from the case. Merchan denied that request.

Merchan says that the defense motion to recuse “does not reasonably or logically” explain how an interview he gave to a publication violates the law or the defendant’s rights.

“There is no basis for recusal,” Merchan said.

The judge also said Trump has made attacks on social media, which he said the court has said is in violation of the gag order.

How will the jury get picked?

By The Associated Press

Judge Juan M. Merchan will begin by bringing a large group of potential jurors into his courtroom. He will then give a brief outline of the case and introduce the defendant, Trump, to the jury. The judge will then ask the potential jurors a critical question: Can they serve and be fair and impartial? Those who cannot will be asked to raise their hand. For this trial, jurors who indicate they cannot serve or be fair will be dismissed.

Those who remain will be called in groups into the jury box, where they will be asked 42 questions, some with multiple parts.

The lawyers on each side will have a limited number of strikes they can use to exclude potential jurors who they don’t like, without giving a reason. They can also argue that a particular juror should be excluded, but have to get the judge to agree to dismiss that person.

The process continues until 12 jurors and six alternates have been picked. More large groups of potential jurors can be brought into the courtroom, if needed.

Read more here

Trump and his lawyers are now seated at the defense table

By NBC News

Hands folded, Donald Trump sits at the defense table as his lawyers settle in around him. Trump is wearing his signature red tie, white shirt and dark suit.

According to NBC News, Trump chatted animatedly with his attorney Todd Blanche, “as the latter slips him pages from a very thick three-holed binder.”

As he walks into court, Trump tells the media the trial ‘is an assault on America’

By NBC News

Speaking to reporters and cameras in the hallway, Trump said that the trial is “an assault on America” and just an attack on a “political opponent.”

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” he said. “This is political persecution. … It’s a case that should have never been brought.”

“This is an assault on America and that’s why I’m very proud to be here,” Trump added. “This is really an attack on a political opponent.”

Trump supporters outside courthouse outnumbers by members of the media

Trump has arrived at the courthouse

By NBC Staff

Donald Trump arrived at a New York court at 9:02 a.m. for the start of jury selection in his hush money case, marking a singular moment in U.S. history.

Prospective jurors will have to answer some tough questions. Here’s an example of some of them

By The Associated Press

“Do you have any political, moral, intellectual, or religious beliefs or opinions which might prevent you from following the court’s instructions on the law or which might slant your approach to this case?”

“Have you, a relative, or a close friend ever worked or volunteered for a Trump presidential campaign, the Trump presidential administration, or any other political entity affiliated with Mr. Trump?”

“Have you ever attended a rally or campaign event for Donald Trump?”

“Do you currently follow Donald Trump on any social media site or have you done so in the past?”

“Have you, a relative, or a close friend ever worked or volunteered for any anti-Trump group or organization?”

“Have you ever attended a rally or campaign event for any anti-Trump group or organization?”

“Do you currently follow any anti-Trump group or organization on any social media site, or have you done so in the past?”

Read more here

Trump is en route to the courthouse

By NBC News

Donald Trump’s motorcade has departed Trump Tower in Manhattan and is en route to the courthouse.

Here’s who might testify

By The Associated Press

Trump has stated that he intends to testify at his own trial. “All I can do is tell the truth,” Trump said. “And the truth is, they have no case.”

For the prosecution, Cohen, a Trump loyalist turned critic, is expected to be a key prosecution witness, as he was the one who orchestrated the payoffs.

Before testifying in front of the grand jury that brought the indictment last year, Cohen said his goal was “to tell the truth” and insisted he is not seeking revenge but said Trump “needs to be held accountable for his dirty deeds.”

Cohen served prison time after pleading guilty in 2018 to federal charges, including campaign finance violations, for arranging the payouts to Daniels and McDougal.

Other expected witnesses include Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. Daniels alleges that she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 that she didn’t want, but didn’t say no to. Trump says it never happened.

Read more here

Trump complains about gag order and blasts New York case as politically motivated

By NBC Staff

Donald Trump has spent his morning posting on his Truth Social platform, blasting the trial as “rigged” and complaining about the gag order he’s been placed under.

“I want my VOICE back. This Crooked Judge has GAGGED me. Unconstitutional! The other side can talk about me, but I am not allowed to talk about them! Rigged Trial!” he posted.

How will jury selection work?

By The Associated Press

A group of regular citizens — Trump’s peers, in the eyes of the law — will be chosen to decide whether the former president of the United States is guilty of a crime.

The process of picking a jury could take days. Lawyers on both sides of the case will have limited opportunities to try and shape the panel in their favor, but the court’s goal won’t be to ensure that it has a partisan balance between Democrats and Republicans, or is made up of people oblivious to previous news coverage about the trial.

The idea is to get people who are willing to put their personal opinions aside and make a decision based on the evidence and the law.

This jury will be made up only of people who live in Manhattan, one of New York City’s five boroughs. All English-speaking, U.S. citizens over age 18 who have not been convicted of a felony are eligible for jury duty in New York. Court officials identify potential jurors from lists of registered voters, taxpayers, driver’s license holders, public benefit recipients and other sources.

The pool of potential jurors for Trump’s trial will have been chosen at random. People can volunteer for jury duty, but they can’t pick what trial they serve on.

Read more here

Will the trial be televised?

By The Associated Press

TV cameras won’t be in the courtroom to capture the historic first criminal trial of a former president.

Judge Juan M. Merchan has denied news organizations’ push to televise the proceedings, though he will briefly allow still photographers in the courtroom. New York is among the most restrictive states when it comes to electronic broadcasting of court proceedings, a nonprofit group found in 2022.

Merchan has allowed TV cameras in the hallway outside the courtroom.

Manhattan court must find a dozen jurors to hear first-ever criminal case against a former president

By Jennifer Peltz | The Associated Press

Of the 1.4 million adults who live in Manhattan, a dozen are soon to become the first Americans to sit in judgment of a former president charged with a crime.

Jury selection is set to start Former President Donald Trump’s hush money case hush money case — the first trial among four criminal prosecutions of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The proceedings present a historic challenge for the court, the lawyers and the everyday citizens who find themselves in the jury pool.

“There is no question that picking a jury in a case involving someone as familiar to everyone as former President Trump poses unique problems,” one of the trial prosecutors, Joshua Steinglass, said during a hearing.

Those problems include finding people who can be impartial about one of the most polarizing figures in American life and detecting any bias among prospective jurors without invading the privacy of the ballot box.

There’s also the risk that people may try to game their way onto the jury to serve a personal agenda. Or they may be reluctant to decide a case against a politician who has used his social media megaphone to tear into court decisions that go against him and has tens of millions of fervent supporters.

Read more here.

Trump targets two likely witnesses ahead of his criminal trial, despite gag order

By Rebecca Picciotto,CNBC

Donald Trump on Saturday took aim at two likely witnesses in his upcoming New York hush money trial, testing the boundaries of a gag order that prohibits such public statements.

“Has Mark POMERANTZ been prosecuted for his terrible acts in and out of the D.A.’s Office. Has disgraced attorney and felon Michael Cohen been prosecuted for LYING?” the former president posted on Truth Social.

The social media post is the latest challenge to the limits of a gag order that forbids Trump from making public statements about likely witnesses and jurors.

Cohen previously worked as Trump’s personal lawyer and is likely to be a key witness in the trial. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to charges related to hush money payments to two women in 2016, which he said were made “at the direction” of an unnamed 2016 presidential candidate. He is expected to name Trump at the upcoming trial.

Pomerantz is a former prosecutor who once led the Manhattan District Attorney Office’s investigation into Trump’s hush money payments before he resigned from the case in 2022.

Read the full story here.

Appeals court judge denies Trump’s bid to delay hush money trial

By Adam Reiss, Lisa Rubin and Dareh Gregorian | NBC News

A state appeals court judge last week denied Donald Trump‘s bid for an emergency delay of his impending criminal trial in New York, NBC News reported.

The ruling by Justice Lizbeth González of the state Appellate Division came after attorneys for the former president argued the trial needed to be halted because “an impartial jury cannot be selected right now based on prejudicial pretrial publicity.” The judge rejected the request in a one-line ruling late Monday afternoon with no explanation.

The ruling came just hours after Trump’s attorneys filed an eleventh-hour attempt to delay the trial that centers on charges that Trump falsified business records related to hush-money payments.

The long-shot legal maneuver came exactly one week before the first criminal trial of a former president is scheduled to start.

Read the full story here.

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It’s the first criminal trial of a former commander in chief and the first of Trump’s four indictments to go to trial. Because Trump is the presumptive nominee for this year’s Republican ticket, the trial will also produce the head-spinning split-screen of a presidential candidate spending his days in court and, he has said, “campaigning during the night.”

And to some extent, it is a trial of the justice system itself as it grapples with a defendant who has used his enormous prominence to assail the judge, his daughter, the district attorney, some witnesses and the allegations — all while blasting the legitimacy of a legal structure that he insists has been appropriated by his political opponents.

Against that backdrop, scores of ordinary citizens are due to be called Monday into a cavernous room in a utilitarian courthouse to determine whether they can serve, fairly and impartially, on the jury.

“The ultimate issue is whether the prospective jurors can assure us that they will set aside any personal feelings or biases and render a decision that is based on the evidence and the law,” Judge Juan M. Merchan wrote in an April 8 filing.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged effort to keep salacious — and, he says, bogus — stories about his sex life from emerging during his 2016 campaign.

The charges center on $130,000 in payments that Trump’s company made to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen. He paid that sum on Trump’s behalf to keep porn actor Stormy Daniels from going public, a month before the election, with her claims of a sexual encounter with the married mogul a decade earlier.

news Apr 11

Trump is about to face trial on criminal hush money charges. Here's what to know

Donald Trump Apr 14

All the players in Trump's hush money trial: Judge Juan Merchan, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels and more

Prosecutors say the payments to Cohen were falsely logged as legal fees in order to cloak their actual purpose. Trump’s lawyers say the disbursements indeed were legal expenses, not a cover-up.

Trump himself casts the case, and his other indictments elsewhere, as a broad “weaponization of law enforcement” by Democratic prosecutors and officials. He maintains they are orchestrating sham charges in hopes of impeding his presidential run.

After decades of fielding and initiating lawsuits, the businessman-turned-politician now faces a trial that could result in up to four years in prison if he’s convicted, though a no-jail sentence also would be possible.

Regardless of the eventual outcome, the trial of an ex-president and current candidate is a moment of extraordinary gravity for the American political system, as well as for Trump himself. Such a scenario would have once seemed unthinkable to many Americans, even for a president whose tenure left a trail of shattered norms, including twice being impeached and acquitted by the Senate.

The scene inside the courtroom may be greeted with a spectacle outside. When Trump was arraigned last year, police broke up small skirmishes between his supporters and protesters near the courthouse in a tiny park, where a local Republican group has planned a pro-Trump rally Monday.

Trump’s attorneys lost a bid to get the hush money case dismissed and have since repeatedly sought to delay it, prompting a flurry of last-minute appeals court hearings last week.

Among other things, Trump’s lawyers maintain that the jury pool in overwhelmingly Democratic Manhattan has been tainted by negative publicity about Trump and that the case should be moved elsewhere.

An appeals judge turned down an emergency request to delay the trial while the change-of-venue request goes to a group of appellate judges, who are set to consider it in the coming weeks.

Manhattan prosecutors have countered that a lot of the publicity stems from Trump’s own comments and that questioning will tease out whether prospective jurors can put aside any preconceptions they may have. There’s no reason, prosecutors said, to think that 12 fair and impartial people can’t be found amid Manhattan’s roughly 1.4 million adult residents.

The process of choosing those 12, plus six alternates, will begin with scores of people filing into Merchan’s courtroom. They will be known only by number, as he has ordered their names to be kept secret from everyone except prosecutors, Trump and their legal teams.

After hearing some basics about the case and jury service, the prospective jurors will be asked to raise hands if they believe they cannot serve or be fair and impartial. Those who do so will be excused, according to Merchan’s filing last week.

The rest will be eligible for questioning. The 42 preapproved, sometimes multi-pronged queries include background basics but also reflect the uniqueness of the case.

“Do you have any strong opinions or firmly held beliefs about former President Donald Trump, or the fact that he is a current candidate for president, that would interfere with your ability to be a fair and impartial juror?” asks one question.

Others ask about attendance at Trump or anti-Trump rallies, opinions on how he’s being treated in the case, news sources and more — including any “political, moral, intellectual, or religious beliefs or opinions” that might “slant” a prospective juror’s approach to the case.

Based on the answers, the attorneys can ask a judge to eliminate people “for cause” if they meet certain criteria for being unable to serve or be unbiased. The lawyers also can use “peremptory challenges” to nix 10 potential jurors and two prospective alternates without giving a reason.

“If you’re going to strike everybody who’s either a Republican or a Democrat,” the judge observed at a February hearing, “you’re going to run out of peremptory challenges very quickly.”

The charges against Trump stem from an investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office into an alleged “catch and kill” scheme to bury negative stories about Trump before the 2016 presidential election in a bid to influence the outcome, according to NBC News.

According to prosecutors, several people participated in the scheme, which involved paying people off to buy their silence and covering up the payments in Trump’s business records.

Here are the key people in the case who will come up during the trial, potentially as witnesses:

Key players in Trump’s New York criminal trial

Donald Trump

Trump was charged in April 2023 by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg with 34 counts of falsifying business records for allegedly covering up an illegal scheme to sway the 2016 presidential election by trying to suppress negative media stories about Trump by purchasing their rights. His indictment marks the first time in U.S. history that a former president was hit with criminal charges.

Michael Cohen

Cohen was vice president of the Trump Organization and a personal lawyer to Trump from 2006 to 2018. As part of the scheme, Cohen is accused of using his personal funds to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000 before the 2016 election to prevent her from publicizing the sexual encounter she alleged she had with Trump years earlier.

Stormy Daniels

Adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, privately alleged during the 2016 election cycle that she had had a sexual encounter with Trump while he was married. Cohen negotiated a deal to buy her “silence and prevent disclosure of the damaging information in the final weeks before the presidential election,” according to prosecutors.

Allen Weisselberg

He was the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer during the hush money scheme. In testimony before the House Oversight Committee in 2019, Cohen told lawmakers that Weisselberg was aware of and helped orchestrate a plan to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000.

Alvin Bragg

Bragg, a Democrat, charged Trump with the 34 counts in the case in April 2023, a little more than a year after he became district attorney of New York County.

Karen McDougal

She’s an American model and actress who appeared in Playboy magazine and alleged that she had a 9-month-long affair with Trump sometime before he was elected president. American Media Inc., AMI, paid $150,000 “in exchange for her agreement not to speak out about the alleged sexual relationship,” the district attorney’s office said.

David Pecker

He was the CEO of AMI until August 2020 and was the publisher of the National Enquirer. He is accused of being directly involved in the “catch and kill” campaign to buy the rights to stories that might harm Trump’s reputation in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Juan Merchan

The Colombian-born judge has served on the New York Supreme Court since 2009 and was assigned to oversee the criminal case against Trump soon after he was indicted in 2023.

Todd Blanche

Trump hired Blanche in April 2023 to serve as the former president’s lead counsel in the case. He has worked as a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in its white-collar defense and investigations group. He has also served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Susan Necheles

She is the other lawyer representing Trump in the case and has been defending the former president and his company since 2021. Necheles is a partner at Necheles Law LLP.

Hope Hicks

The former Trump White House communications director is expected to be a witness for the prosecution during the trial, a source with direct knowledge of the situation told NBC News in early April. She was Trump’s campaign press secretary during the period Trump is accused of orchestrating the “catch and kill” scheme.

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News here:

• Trump on trial tests his political wherewithal — and American resolve
• Trump’s hush money trial begins Monday. Here’s what to expect.
• Trump says he would ‘absolutely’ testify in his New York criminal trial

But on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, Trump feared the story, which he says is false, would cost him votes. So, prosecutors say, he arranged to pay Stormy Daniels to keep quiet.

Now, after years of fits and starts before an indictment last year, Trump is set to stand trial Monday in New York on state charges related to the very sex scandal that he and his aides strove to hide.

Barring a last-minute delay, it will be the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial. It will be an unprecedented event in U.S. history — the first criminal trial of a former president.

It wasn’t always clear the hush money allegations would even lead to charges — let alone be the first to reach trial. It is arguably the least perilous of Trump’s indictments, with others involving government secrets and threats to democracy.

news Apr 11

Trump is about to face trial on criminal hush money charges. Here's what to know

news Apr 12

Trump says he would testify in upcoming hush money trial

Yet it is almost certain to be the most salacious, with testimony expected about alleged marital infidelity, a supermarket tabloid’s complicity in a cover-up, and payouts orchestrated by a former Trump loyalist who now counts himself among the ex-president’s enemies.

Many details of the case have been public since 2018, when federal prosecutors charged Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen with campaign finance crimes in connection with a scheme to bury not only Daniels’ claims, but other potentially damaging stories from Trump’s playboy past.

They later implicated Trump as directing Cohen’s efforts, obliquely identifying him in court papers as “Individual-1.” Justice Department policy forbids charging a sitting president with a crime, and nothing came of it.

In the ensuing years, the saga of sex, politics and coverups largely faded from the headlines, eclipsed by an investigation into Russian election interference, Trump’s two impeachments and allegations that he plotted to overturn his 2020 election and hoarded classified documents after leaving office.

Former Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. examined the circumstances of a $130,000 payout that Cohen made to Daniels and declined to take the politically explosive step of seeking Trump’s indictment.

The district attorney’s office was so unsure about the hush money case that it became known among prosecutors as the “zombie case.” They would revisit it, then abandon it again as they pursued Trump on multiple fronts over the last five years, going to the Supreme Court twice to obtain his tax records and prosecuting his company and a top executive for tax fraud.

Vance’s successor, Alvin Bragg, a Democrat who took office in January 2022, saw the hush money case differently.

The grand jury convened in January 2023. It heard from Cohen, now an outspoken critic of his ex-boss, and other witnesses, including the former publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid, which helped Trump by buying some negative stories and suppressing them in a practice known as “catch-and-kill.”

The grand jury voted to indict on March 30, 2023, on charges that Trump had falsified his company’s internal records to obscure the true nature of payments made to Cohen to reimburse him for his work covering up potentially embarrassing stories. The charges are felonies punishable by up to four years in prison, though there is no guarantee that a conviction would result in prison time.

Trump denies the allegations, saying it is prosecutors who are engaging in “election interference” and a “witch hunt.” He has pleaded not guilty.

In a court filing, Bragg’s office framed the prosecution as another of Trump’s election interference cases, accusing the Republican of orchestrating an “expansive and corrupt criminal scheme to conceal damaging information from the voting public” and “undermine the integrity of the 2016 presidential election.”

In the indictment paperwork, prosecutors told of a multipart scheme dating to the early days of Trump’s 2016 campaign to suppress stories alleging he had extramarital sexual encounters.

Before the Daniels payment, prosecutors said, Cohenarranged for the National Enquirer to pay $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claimed she had a monthslong affair with Trump. The tabloid also paid $30,000 to a Trump Tower doorman who claimed to have a story about a child he alleged Trump had out of wedlock.

Trump, reeling from the October surprise of the never-before-seen 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals, then directed Cohen to arrange the payment to Daniels, who was agitating to come forward with her claims that they had a sexual encounter at a 2006 celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe, California, according to the indictment.

Trump’s arraignment, five days after the indictment, was a spectacle attracting hordes of news media, supporters and protesters. His trial will take place in the same courtroom — and the same cauldron.

After Trump’s New York indictment, others followed in rapid succession.

Within 70 days, special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump in Florida with keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Fifty-four days after that, Smith charged Trump in Washington with attempting to subvert the 2020 election in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Two weeks later, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Atlanta charged Trump with racketeering and other charges in a similar election subversion case.

While the New York case has progressed at a rapid clip, Trump’s other criminal cases seem increasingly unlikely to come to trial before the November election.

The Atlanta case has been slowed by allegations of impropriety against the top prosecutor, the Washington case by a Supreme Court appeal on a legally untested immunity question and the Florida prosecution by a slew of unresolved motions.

“Partly it’s just that there are fewer of those practical obstacles to making the case move along, and maybe in some degree, this is a simpler case,” said Alex Reinert, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.

Trump has tried repeatedly to get the New York trial delayed as well. His lawyers were rejected three times this week in trying to get a state appeals court to put off the case.

In its allegations of hefty payments to stifle an election-year sex story, the case bears some cautionary parallels to the Justice Department’s unsuccessful prosecution of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. He was charged with campaign finance crimes in connection with nearly $1 million secretly provided by two wealthy donors who helped hide his pregnant mistress during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary.

Defense lawyers argued that the money was meant to conceal the affair from his wife, not to boost his election chances. Edwards was ultimately acquitted on one charge while a jury deadlocked on five other counts.

Jeremy Saland, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney who now works as a criminal defense lawyer, said that because of the magnitude of the case, Bragg must believe he has a more winnable case against Trump.

“He has to be going into the courtroom believing that he has the goods,” Saland said. “Otherwise, for the psyche of America, it could be catastrophic — that a former president is prosecuted in a case that ends up falling flat on its face, and even if not true, appearing like a sham.”

But he said that if the allegations are proved, it would still amount to “significant misconduct of somebody who was vying to be at the time the leader of the free world.” For those who say, “Come on, it’s just hush money,” he said he believed “that we hold our elected officials to a higher standard and we subject them to more scrutiny, and rightfully so.”

Donald Trump‘s history-making criminal trial is set to start Monday with a simple but extraordinary procedural step that is vital to American democracy. A group of regular citizens — Trump’s peers, in the eyes of the law — will be chosen to decide whether the former president of the United States is guilty of a crime.

The process of picking a jury could take days. Lawyers on both sides of the case will have limited opportunities to try and shape the panel in their favor, but the court’s goal won’t be to ensure that it has a partisan balance between Democrats and Republicans, or is made up of people oblivious to previous news coverage about the trial.

The idea is to get people who are willing to put their personal opinions aside and make a decision based on the evidence and the law.

Here are some of the factors that will go into jury selection:

Who can sit on the jury?

This jury will be made up only of people who live in Manhattan, one of New York City’s five boroughs. All English-speaking, U.S. citizens over age 18 who have not been convicted of a felony are eligible for jury duty in New York. Court officials identify potential jurors from lists of registered voters, taxpayers, driver’s license holders, public benefit recipients and other sources.

The pool of potential jurors for Trump’s trial will have been chosen at random. People can volunteer for jury duty, but they can’t pick what trial they serve on.

What if a juror doesn’t want to serve?

Jury duty is compulsory, but you can get excused for a variety of reasons, including a financial or medical hardship.

How will the jury get picked?

Judge Juan M. Merchan will begin by bringing a large group of potential jurors into his courtroom. He will then give a brief outline of the case and introduce the defendant, Trump, to the jury. The judge will then ask the potential jurors a critical question: Can they serve and be fair and impartial? Those who cannot will be asked to raise their hand. For this trial, jurors who indicate they cannot serve or be fair will be dismissed.

Those who remain will be called in groups into the jury box, where they will be asked 42 questions, some with multiple parts.

The lawyers on each side will have a limited number of strikes they can use to exclude potential jurors who they don’t like, without giving a reason. They can also argue that a particular juror should be excluded, but have to get the judge to agree to dismiss that person.

The process continues until 12 jurors and six alternates have been picked. More large groups of potential jurors can be brought into the courtroom, if needed.

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What questions will jurors be asked?

The judge won’t allow the lawyers to ask whether potential jurors are Democrats or Republicans, whom they voted for or whether they have given money to any political causes. But there are multiple questions aimed at rooting out whether people are likely to be biased against, or in favor of, Trump.

Among them:

“Do you have any political, moral, intellectual, or religious beliefs or opinions which might prevent you from following the court’s instructions on the law or which might slant your approach to this case?”

“Have you, a relative, or a close friend ever worked or volunteered for a Trump presidential campaign, the Trump presidential administration, or any other political entity affiliated with Mr. Trump?”

“Have you ever attended a rally or campaign event for Donald Trump?”

“Do you currently follow Donald Trump on any social media site or have you done so in the past?”

“Have you, a relative, or a close friend ever worked or volunteered for any anti-Trump group or organization?”

“Have you ever attended a rally or campaign event for any anti-Trump group or organization?”

“Do you currently follow any anti-Trump group or organization on any social media site, or have you done so in the past?”

“Have you ever considered yourself a supporter of or belonged to any of the following: The QAnon movement, Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Three Percenters, Boogaloo Boys, Antifa.”

Jurors will be asked what podcasts and talk radio programs they listen to and where they get their news.

Will the public learn the identities of the jurors?

The judge has ordered that the jurors’ names be kept secret, an unusual but not unprecedented step in trials where there is a potential that jurors might wind up being harassed or threatened during or after the trial. There is nothing to stop jurors from voluntarily talking about their experiences after the trial is over. While it is pending, they aren’t supposed to talk about it to anyone.

What will this jury decide?

Jurors in this trial will listen to testimony and decide whether Trump is guilty of any of 34 counts of falsifying business records. Their decision to convict or acquit must be unanimous. If they cannot agree on a verdict, the judge can declare a mistrial. If jurors have a reasonable doubt that Trump is guilty, they must acquit him. If they convict him, the judge will be the one who decides the sentence, not the jurors.

Jury selection is set to start Former President Donald Trump’s hush money case hush money case — the first trial among four criminal prosecutions of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The proceedings present a historic challenge for the court, the lawyers and the everyday citizens who find themselves in the jury pool.

“There is no question that picking a jury in a case involving someone as familiar to everyone as former President Trump poses unique problems,” one of the trial prosecutors, Joshua Steinglass, said during a hearing.

Those problems include finding people who can be impartial about one of the most polarizing figures in American life and detecting any bias among prospective jurors without invading the privacy of the ballot box.

There’s also the risk that people may try to game their way onto the jury to serve a personal agenda. Or they may be reluctant to decide a case against a politician who has used his social media megaphone to tear into court decisions that go against him and has tens of millions of fervent supporters.

Still, if jury selection will be tricky, it’s not impossible, says John Jay College of Criminal Justice psychology professor Margaret Bull Kovera.

“There are people who will look at the law, look at the evidence that’s shown and make a decision,” says Kovera, whose research includes the psychology of juries. “And the job of the judge and the attorneys right now is to figure out who those people are.”

Trump has pleaded not guilty to fudging his company’s books as part of an effort to conceal payments made to hide claims of extramarital sex during his 2016 campaign. He denies the encounters and contends the case is a legally bogus, politically engineered effort to sabotage his current run.

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He will go on trial in a criminal court system where juries have decided cases against a roster of famous names, including mob boss John Gotti, disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein and Trump’s own company.

Over the last year, writer E. Jean Carroll’s sex assault and defamation civil suits against Trump went before juries in a nearby federal courthouse. New York state’s fraud lawsuit against the ex-president and his company went to trial without a jury last fall in a state court next door.

But the hush-money case, which carries the possibility of up to four years in prison if he’s convicted, raises the stakes.

Trump lived for decades in Manhattan, where he first made his name as a swaggering real estate developer with a flair for publicity. As Steinglass put it, “There is no chance that we’re going to find a single juror that doesn’t have a view” of Trump.

But the question isn’t whether a prospective juror does or doesn’t like Trump or anyone else in the case, Judge Juan M. Merchan wrote in a filing Monday. Rather, he said, it’s whether the person can “set aside any personal feelings or biases and render a decision that is based on the evidence and the law.”

The process of choosing a jury begins when Merchan fills his New Deal-era courtroom with prospective jurors, giving them a brief description of the case and other basics. Then the judge will excuse any people who indicate by a show of hands that they can’t serve or can’t be fair and impartial, he wrote.

Those who remain will be called in groups into the jury box — by number, as their names won’t be made public — to answer 42 questions, some with multiple parts.

Some are standard inquiries about prospective jurors’ backgrounds. But the two sides have vigorously debated what, if anything, prospective jurors should be asked about their political activities and opinions.

Merchan emphasized that he won’t let the lawyers ask about jurors’ voting choices, political contributions or party registration.

But the approved questionnaire asks, for example, whether someone has “political, moral, intellectual or religious beliefs or opinions” that might “slant your approach to this case.” Another query probes whether prospective jurors support any of a half-dozen far-right or far-left groups, have attended Trump or anti-Trump rallies, and have worked or volunteered for Trump or for organizations that criticize him.

Potential jurors also will be quizzed about any “strong opinions or firmly held beliefs” about Trump or his candidacy that would cloud their ability to be fair, any feelings about how Trump is being treated in the case and any “strong opinions” on whether ex-presidents can be charged in state courts.

The process of choosing 12 jurors and six alternates can be chesslike, as the opposing sides try to game out whom they want and whom their adversaries want. They must also weigh which prospective jurors they can challenge as unable to serve or be impartial and when it’s worth using one of their limited chances to rule someone out without giving a reason.

“A lot of times you make assumptions, and arguably stereotypes, about people that aren’t true, so it’s important to listen to what they say” in court and, if possible, online, says Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a University of Dayton law professor who studies juries.

In prominent cases, courts and attorneys watch out for “stealth jurors,” people trying to be chosen because they want to steer the verdict, profit off the experience or have other private motives.

Conversely, some people might want to avoid the attention that comes with a case against a famous person. To try to address that, Merchan decided to shield the jurors’ names from everyone except prosecutors, Trump and their respective legal teams.

The six jurors and three alternates in each of Carroll’s federal civil cases against Trump were driven to and from court through an underground garage, and their names were withheld from the public, Carroll, Trump, their attorneys and even the judge.

Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, says that if she were involved in the hush-money case, she would ask the court to do everything possible to ensure that jurors stay anonymous and don’t fear being singled out online or in the media.

“The main concern, given the world we live in, has to be the potential for juror intimidation,” Kaplan said.

Jurors were chosen within hours for both trials of Carroll’s claims, which Trump denies. Carroll’s lawyers later tried midtrial to boot a juror who had mentioned listening to a conservative podcaster who criticized Carroll’s case. The judge privately queried the juror, who insisted he could be fair and impartial.

He remained on the panel, which unanimously found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded Carroll $5 million. Eight months later, the second jury awarded Carroll an additional $83.5 million for defamation.

___

Associated Press journalists Joseph B. Frederick and Michael R. Sisak contributed to this report.

Weisselberg, 76, is expected to be sentenced to five months in jail after pleading guilty last month to two counts of perjury. The ex-chief financial officer admitted lying when he testified he had little knowledge of how Trump’s Manhattan penthouse came to be valued on his financial statements at nearly three times its actual size.

It will be his second time behind bars. He served 100 days last year for dodging taxes on $1.7 million in company perks, including a rent-free Manhattan apartment and luxury cars.

Now, he’s again trading life as a Florida retiree for another stay at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex.

The two cases highlight Weisselberg’s unflinching loyalty to Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Trump’s family employed Weisselberg for nearly 50 years, then gave him a $2 million severance deal when the tax charges prompted him to retire. The company continues to pay his legal bills.

Weisselberg testified twice in trials that went badly for Trump, but each time he took pains to suggest that his boss hadn’t committed any serious wrongdoing. His plea agreement does not require him to testify at Trump’s hush money criminal trial, which is scheduled to start with jury selection Monday.

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In agreeing to a five-month sentence, prosecutors cited Weisselberg’s age and willingness to admit wrongdoing. In New York, perjury is a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison. Prosecutors promised not to prosecute Weisselberg for other crimes he might have committed in connection with his Trump Organization employment.

Weisselberg’s expected sentence would mirror his previous case, in which he was ordered to serve five months in jail but was eligible for release after little more than three months with good behavior. Prior to that, he had no criminal record.

Trump’s lawyers took issue with Weisselberg’s perjury prosecution, accusing the Manhattan district attorney’s office of deploying “unethical, strong-armed tactics against an innocent man in his late 70s” while turning “a blind eye” to perjury allegations against Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer who is now a key prosecution witness in the hush money case.

A message seeking comment was left for Weisselberg’s lawyer Seth Rosenberg.

Weisselberg pleaded guilty March 4. He admitted lying under oath on three occasions while testifying in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ lawsuit against Trump: in depositions in July 2020 and May 2023 and on the witness stand at the trial last October. To avoid violating his tax case probation, however, he agreed to plead guilty only to charges related to his 2020 deposition testimony.

The size of Trump’s penthouse was a key issue in the civil fraud case.

Trump valued the apartment on his financial statements from at least 2012 to 2016 as though it measured 30,000 square feet (2,800 square meters). A former Trump real estate executive testified that Weisselberg provided the figure. The former executive said that when he asked for the apartment’s size in 2012, Weisselberg replied: “It’s quite large. I think it’s around 30,000 square feet.”

However, state lawyers noted, Weisselberg got an email early in that year with a 1994 document attached that pegged Trump’s apartment at 10,996 square feet (1,022 square meters). Weisselberg testified that he remembered the email but not the attachment and that he didn’t “walk around knowing the size” of the apartment.

After Forbes magazine published an article in 2017 disputing the size of Trump’s penthouse, its estimated value on his financial statement was cut from $327 million to about $117 million.

As Weisselberg was testifying last October, Forbes published an article with the headline “Trump’s Longtime CFO Lied, Under Oath, About Trump Tower Penthouse.”

The civil fraud trial ended with Judge Arthur Engoron ruling that Trump and some of his executives had schemed to deceive banks, insurers and others by lying about his wealth on financial statements used to make deals and secure loans. The judge penalized Trump $455 million and ordered Weisselberg to pay $1 million. They are both appealing.

In his decision, Engoron said he found Weisselberg’s testimony “intentionally evasive” and “highly unreliable.”

Weisselberg is likely to factor into Trump’s hush money trial — even if he’s in jail and not on the witness stand while it’s happening.

Trump is accused of falsifying his company’s records to cover up payments during his 2016 campaign to bury stories of marital infidelity. It is the first of Trump’s four criminal cases scheduled to go to trial. Trump has pleaded not guilty and denies wrongdoing.

Cohen has said Weisselberg had a role in orchestrating the payments. Weisselberg, who lives in Boynton Beach, Florida, has not been charged in that case, and neither prosecutors nor Trump’s lawyers have indicated they will call him as a witness.

The brief from prosecutors was submitted on Monday night just over two weeks before the justices take up the legally untested question of whether an ex-president is shielded from criminal charges for official actions taken in the White House.

“A President’s alleged criminal scheme to use his official powers to overturn the presidential election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power frustrates core constitutional provisions that protect democracy,” they wrote.

The outcome of the April 25 arguments is expected to help determine whether Trump faces trial this year in a four-count indictment that accuses him of conspiring to block the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.

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Trump has argued that former presidents enjoy immunity for official acts in office. Both the judge presiding over the case, Tanya Chutkan, and a three-judge federal appellate panel in Washington have forcefully rejected that claim.

The Supreme Court then said it would take up the question, injecting uncertainty into whether the case — one of four criminal prosecutions confronting Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president — can reach trial before November’s election.

In their latest brief, Smith’s team rehashed many of the arguments that have prevailed in lower courts, pointedly noting that “federal criminal law applies to the president.”

“The Framers never endorsed criminal immunity for a former President, and all Presidents from the Founding to the modern era have known that after leaving office they faced potential criminal liability for official acts,” Smith’s team wrote.

Prosecutors also said that even if the Supreme Court were to recognize some immunity for a president’s official acts, the justices should nonetheless permit the case to move forward because much of the indictment is centered on Trump’s private conduct.

Smith’s team suggested the court could reach a narrow determination that Trump, in this particular case, was not entitled to immunity without arriving at a broader conclusion that would apply to other cases.

“A holding that petitioner has no immunity from the alleged crimes would suffice to resolve this case, leaving potentially more difficult questions that might arise on different facts for decision if they are ever presented,” they said.

The ruling by Justice Lizbeth González of the state Appellate Division came after attorneys for the former president argued the trial needed to be halted because “an impartial jury cannot be selected right now based on prejudicial pretrial publicity.” The judge rejected the request in a one-line ruling late Monday afternoon with no explanation.

The ruling came just hours after Trump’s attorneys filed an eleventh-hour attempt to delay the trial that centers on charges that Trump falsified business records related to hush-money payments.

The long-shot legal maneuver came exactly one week before the first criminal trial of a former president is scheduled to start.

The hearing on the venue challenge took place Monday afternoon, with Trump attorney Emil Bove arguing that jury selection cannot proceed in a fair manner because of all the publicity surrounding the case, and that the gag order against his client is unconstitutional.

Steven Wu of the DA’s office countered the publicity isn’t confined to Manhattan, arguing it’s worldwide, due in part to Trump’s frequent commentary about the case. He suggested Trump was “trying to have it both ways” by complaining about the publicity while stoking it.

Trump’s attorneys filed the challenge as a lawsuit invoking a provision of New York law known as Article 78. An Article 78 challenges allows litigants, whether in ongoing litigation or otherwise, to seek relief from allegedly unlawful state or local government action.

Trump tried a similar move before the same appeals court last year, when he challenged a partial gag order issued by Judge Arthur Engoron in the civil fraud case brought against the former president and his company by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

The appeals court refused Trump’s request to stay the case while he appealed the order and eventually ruled against him. In the ruling, they chided his attorneys for having brought the challenge as an Article 78 petition, calling it an “extraordinary remedy” that was not warranted in that situation.

While Trump has not formally asked Judge Juan Merchan for a change of venue, in a court filing last month seeking to delay the trial because of pretrial publicity, his lawyers contended New York County — Manhattan — is “overwhelmingly biased against President Trump.” The filing noted in part that the county voted “overwhelmingly” for other candidates in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

The DA’s office responded in a filing, arguing that “given the sheer size of New York County, it is absurd for defendant to assert that it will be impossible or even impractical to find a dozen fair and impartial jurors, plus alternates, among more than a million people.”

The judge has yet to rule on that motion.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

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A New York appeals court judge on Monday swiftly rejected a last-ditch bid by Donald Trump to delay his upcoming criminal hush money trial while he seeks to move the case to another court.

Judge Lizbeth Gonzalez denied Trump’s request on the same day his attorneys filed it, and less than two hours after a hearing where his attorneys argued that the former president cannot get a fair jury in New York, NBC News reported.

Trump’s lawyers asked the state appeals court to change the trial venue and pause a gag order that bars Trump from speaking about likely witnesses or the judge’s family, a source with direct knowledge told NBC. Trump has frequently targeted both groups in the run-up to the Manhattan Supreme Court trial, which is set to begin jury selection next week.

Trump is charged with falsifying business records to conceal a payment to porn star Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election. He has made at least eight other attempts to postpone the trial, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Monday’s appeal was filed using a legal mechanism that allows a person to directly challenge a court’s actions, NBC reported. Doing so allows Trump to contest the case before the trial has even begun.

At a hearing Monday afternoon, defense attorney Emil Bove urged Gonzalez to delay the hush money trial, according to NBC.

Bove claimed Trump cannot receive a fair and impartial jury in New York because of the overwhelming publicity surrounding the case. The lawyer cited survey results showing that a majority of people in New York County believe Trump is guilty. He noted that those potential jurors have likely heard about an array of other allegations against Trump, who faces 88 criminal charges in four separate courts.

Steven Wu, arguing for the D.A., countered that the judge should deny Trump’s eleventh-hour request. The news about Trump’s legal struggles is being read worldwide, and Manhattan jurors are not uniquely incapable of acting as fair and impartial jurors, Wu said, according to NBC.

Wu added that Trump, who regularly rails against the case on social media and the campaign trail, is responsible for the media frenzy. He cannot drum up a media circus and then use that publicity to seek a change of trial venue, Wu told Gonzalez.

Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the appeal. Susan Necheles, another lawyer for Trump, declined to comment.

The appeal was first reported shortly after Bragg urged presiding Judge Juan Merchan to reject Trump’s latest request for the judge to recuse himself.

Bragg slammed that bid as a bad-faith effort to delay the trial and sidestep a gag order barring Trump from speaking about the judge’s daughter.

Trump’s “rewarmed” arguments for Merchan’s recusal offer nothing new from a prior attempt to get a new judge, Bragg wrote in a court filing.

Rather, Bragg argued, the current recusal motion is a “last-ditch” bid to postpone the trial that appears “transparently reverse-engineered” to justify Trump’s spate of recent attacks on Merchan’s adult daughter.

It’s “an effort to end-run” the gag order and “pollute the court” with attacks against the judge and his family “as part of a meritless effort to call the integrity of these proceedings into question,” Bragg wrote.’

Trump’s lawyers, in court filings Friday, argued that Authentic Campaigns, the Democratic consulting firm where Merchan’s daughter works, stands to benefit from the hush money case by using it to raise money and promote an anti-Trump message.

“Personal political views may not be a basis for recusal. But profiting from the promotion of a political agenda that is hostile to President Trump, and has included fundraising solicitations based on this case, must be,” they wrote.

Bragg, in Monday’s filing, called it “pure speculation to assume that rulings by this Court would affect Authentic’s contracts or revenue.” Even if the company were fundraising off the trial, it still wouldn’t be a sufficient basis for the judge’s recusal, Bragg added.

The filing came days after Merchan expanded a gag order on Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, to prohibit him from making statements about the judge’s family members that could interfere with the case. Merchan also amended the order to bar Trump from speaking about Bragg’s family members.

The strengthened gag order came after Trump sent a spate of social media posts targeting Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, over her political work and claiming it proved the judge was biased.

Trump also accused Loren Merchan of controlling an X account that displayed a photo depicting Trump behind jail cell bars. New York’s court administration office denied that the judge’s daughter controlled that account at the time it posted that picture.

Judge Merchan wrote in the order that people watching Trump’s attacks may conclude that their loved ones may come under fire if they get involved in the case. The situation constitutes “a direct attack on the Rule of Law itself,” he wrote.

The judge last summer had rejected Trump’s first recusal request, which also focused on Loren Merchan’s political activities.

Bragg on Monday argued that Trump’s current recusal motion makes “identical” arguments, adding that the few points it includes that were not previously made are “wholly meritless.”

The hush money case is set to be the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to head to trial. The former president’s lawyers have repeatedly tried to dismiss or delay all of those cases while he runs to unseat Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden.

— CNBC’s Dan Mangan contributed to this report.

KSIC is not admitted in New York, and James “takes exception to the sufficiency of the surety to the undertaking” given to Trump without a certificate of qualification being issued to the company, James said in the filing.

James asks that Trump’s team or KSIC “file a motion to justify the surety bond,” or provide further information about collateral provided by the former president, within 10 days.

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Don Hankey, the chairman of KSIC, said the $175 million bond posted Monday was fully collateralized by cash from Trump’s company.

Neither KSIC nor Trump’s lawyers immediately responded to NBC News’ request for comment on Thursday night. The New York attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for further comment either.

NBC News previously reported that Hankey had been negotiating to post a $557 million bond with the Trump Organization when a state appeals court ruled on March 25 that the bond would be reduced to $175 million.

“He looks forward to vindicating his rights on appeal and overturning this unjust verdict,” said Trump’s attorney Alina Habba on Monday when the bond was posted.

In February, Trump’s team appealed the $464 million civil fraud judgment against him and his company. He could be responsible for the entire amount issued by Judge Arthur Engoron’s order, which was entered in February, if his appeal fails.

A bond hearing for the civil fraud trial is scheduled for April 22. 

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Donald Trump on Thursday afternoon lost two separate attempts to dismiss criminal charges against him in his Florida and Georgia cases.

In Florida federal court, Judge Aileen Cannon rejected Trump’s bid to drop charges against him related to his alleged mishandling of hundreds of classified documents after he left the White House.

In a brief order, Cannon wrote that Trump’s argument, which hinged on his interpretation of the Presidential Records Act, was an insufficient basis for dismissal.

That ruling came about two hours after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee denied Trump’s attempt to dismiss his Georgia election interference case on the grounds that it violated his free speech rights.

The twin losses came one day after New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan denied a request by Trump to delay his upcoming criminal hush money trial.

That case is set to begin jury selection in less than two weeks. It is the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has aggressively sought to dismiss all of his criminal trials, or at least to push them past the November election. In the hush money case alone, he has made eight attempts to delay the trial.

Thursday’s developments were not a total win for Trump’s prosecutors, however.

Cannon’s ruling also pushed back on special counsel Jack Smith, who criticized the judge’s guidelines earlier this week for the proposed jury instructions.

Smith said that Cannon’s guidelines, which asked the parties to write jury instructions about how to interpret the Presidential Records Act, were based on a false legal premise that wrongly gave credence to Trump’s claims.

Smith asked Cannon to decide quickly if she will adopt those jury instructions, so that he has time to appeal her decision.

Cannon on Thursday slammed that demand as “unprecedented and unjust.”

The judge wrote that her order about the jury instructions “should not be misconstrued” as the final word on any essential piece of the case.

Rather, she wrote, it was “a genuine attempt, in the context of the upcoming trial, to better understand the parties’ competing positions” in a complex case.

But Cannon added that Smith is nonetheless free to make use of “whatever appellate options it sees fit to invoke, as permitted by law.”

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

The Office of Personnel Management regulations will bar career civil servants from being reclassified as political appointees or as other at-will workers, who are more easily dismissed from their jobs.

It comes in response to Schedule F, an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that sought to allow for reclassifying tens of thousands of the 2.2 million federal employees and thus reduce their job security protections.

President Joe Biden nullified Schedule F upon taking office. But if Trump were to revive it during a second administration, he could dramatically increase the around 4,000 federal employees who are considered political appointees and typically change with each new president.

Biden called the rule a “step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference to ensure civil servants are able to focus on the most important task at hand: delivering for the American people.’

The potential effects of the change are wide-reaching since how many federal employees might have been affected by Schedule F is unclear. The National Treasury Employee Union used freedom of information requests to obtain documents suggesting that workers like office managers and specialists in human resources and cybersecurity might have been among those subject to reclassification.

The new rule moves to counter a future Schedule F order by spelling out procedural requirements for reclassifying federal employees and clarifying that civil service protections accrued by employees can’t be taken away, regardless of job type. It also makes clear that policymaking classifications apply to noncareer, political appointments.

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Good government groups and activists have cheered the change. They viewed cementing federal worker protections as a top priority given that replacing existing government employees with new, more conservative alternatives is a key piece of a plan spearheaded by former Trump administration officials and the Heritage Foundation think tank, known as Project 2025.

It calls for vetting and potentially firing scores of federal workers and recruiting conservative replacements to wipe out what leading Republicans have long decried as the “deep state” governmental bureaucracy.

Doreen Greenwald, president of the treasury union, said the new rule “will now be much harder for any president to arbitrarily remove the nonpartisan professionals who staff our federal agencies just to make room for hand-picked partisan loyalists.”

But Kentucky Rep. James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, countered that it was “yet another example of the Biden Administration’s efforts to insulate the federal workforce from accountability.”

“The Biden Administration’s rule will further undermine Americans’ confidence in their government since it allows poor performing federal workers and those who attempt to thwart the policies of a duly elected President to remain entrenched in the federal bureaucracy,” Comer said in a statement.

He also promised that his committee “will continue to conduct rigorous oversight of the federal workforce” while exploring legislation “to make the unelected, unaccountable federal workforce more accountable.”

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Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which has led a coalition of nearly 30 advocacy organizations supporting the rule, called it an “extraordinarily strong” counter to the “highly resourced, anti-democratic groups” behind Project 2025.

“This is not a wonky issue, even though it may be billed that way at times,” Perryman said. “This is really foundational to how we can ensure that the government delivers for people and, for us, that’s what a democracy is about.”

Running to 237 pages, the rule is being published in the federal registry and set to formally take effect next month.

The Office of Personnel Management first proposed the changes last November, then reviewed and responded to 4,000-plus public comments on them. Officials at some top conservative organizations opposed the rule, but around two-thirds of the comments were supportive.

If Trump wins another term, his administration could direct the Office of Personnel Management to draft new rules. But the process takes months and requires detailed explanation on why new regulations would be improvements — potentially allowing for legal challenges to be brought by opponents.

Rob Shriver, deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the new rule ensures that federal employee protections “cannot be erased by a technical, HR process” which he said “Schedule F sought to do.”

“This rule is about making sure the American public can continue to count on federal workers to apply their skills and expertise in carrying out their jobs, no matter their personal political beliefs,” Shriver said on a call with reporters.

He noted that 85% of federal workers are based outside the Washington area and are “our friends, neighbors and family members,” who are “dedicated to serving the American people, not political agendas.”

Hankey’s assistance to Trump has brought the little-known billionaire into the spotlight. But in recent years, several of his companies’ operations attracted the attention of the U.S. Justice Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the California Department of Insurance. Since 2015, regulators have taken action against Hankey’s companies four times, public records show. 

In 2017, for example, the Department of Justice filed a complaint in federal court in California against Westlake Financial, Hankey’s big subprime auto lender. With a network of 50,000 car dealerships and $3 billion in managed assets, Westlake Financial calls itself “The Yes! Yes! Lender.”

Westlake and its subsidiary Wilshire Commercial Capital, the DOJ complaint alleged, illegally repossessed at least 70 vehicles owned by military service members protected under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. The companies paid $761,000 to settle the allegations. Five years later, the Justice Department returned with another complaint against Westlake, alleging that it had failed to provide service members with interest rate benefits they were owed under the law. The company paid $225,000 to settle that matter.

“Service members make enormous sacrifices, and we have a responsibility to protect their rights and ensure they have full access to important benefits guaranteed under the law,” said Martin Estrada, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, at the time of the settlement. 

Hankey did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The self-made Hankey is worth $7.4 billion, according to Forbes, and his companies control $23 billion in assets, employing more than 3,000 employees, the company’s website says. His eight financial entities include Westlake, Knight Insurance Group, whose unit provided the appeal bond to Trump, a commercial real estate investment firm and a provider of fleet financing for rental car companies. He is also a large stockholder in Axos Financial, the San Diego company whose bank refinanced some Trump loans in 2022 when other banks balked.The appeal bond provided to Trump by Hankey’s Knight Specialty Insurance prevents the New York Attorney General from collecting on the $464 million judgment she won against Trump and his co-defendants in a civil fraud case while Trump appeals it. The judge overseeing the matter determined that the defendants had committed “persistent” fraud over several years.

Some Hankey customers are less than happy with his company’s practices, according to consumer complaints filed against Westlake with the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Over the past year, records compiled by the agency show an almost daily stream of customer allegations against Westlake, ranging from improperly repossessed vehicles, charges on a loan the customer did not sign up for, and failing to provide accurate loan balance and payment histories to credit reporting agencies. Such inaccuracies can cripple consumers’ ability to get other loans, lease residences or even secure jobs. 

Customers who fall behind on their auto loans also say Westlake employees call them repeatedly, the complaint records show. “Even when I have a payment arrangement, they will still call up to 6 times a day 7 days a week,” a borrower from Florida wrote last month. 

Hankey companies have also been subject to regulatory actions by the CFPB and by the California Department of Insurance. According to a 2015 consent decree filed by the CFPB against Westlake and its affiliate Wilshire, the CFPB found that Westlake and Wilshire pressured borrowers using illegal debt collection practices. Some 176,000 customers were affected, the consent order said. 

According to the CFPB, Westlake and Wilshire changed loan terms without telling borrowers, accruing additional interest on the loans. The companies also allegedly misled customers by manipulating caller IDs and posing as employees calling from flower shops or pizzerias to trick borrowers into disclosing their locations or their vehicles’ for repossession purposes. In other cases, Westlake collection agents led borrowers to believe that their vehicles would be released if they paid a certain sum, usually less than the full amount owed. Once those payments were made, Westlake did not release the vehicles, the CFPB found.

Westlake and Wilshire neither admitted nor denied the findings but paid $44 million to the customers and a $4.25 million penalty.

KnightBrook Insurance, another Hankey company, was cited by the California Department of Insurance in 2015 for an array of violations in the way it handled customer claims. Over a one-year period, the department reviewed 127 automobile and collateral protection claims handled by KnightBrook and found 45 violations of the state insurance code. 

Those alleged violations included failure to include fees in the total loss settlements customers received, failure to “conduct and diligently pursue a thorough, fair and objective investigation of a claim;” failure to pay salvage certificate fees; and failure to pay reasonable towing charges.

According to the report, KnightBrook agreed with the state’s findings and said it “intends to implement corrective actions in jurisdictions where applicable.”

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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A New York appellate court had given the former president 10 days to put up the money after a panel of judges agreed last month to slash the amount needed to stop the clock on enforcement.

The bond Trump is posting with the court now is essentially a placeholder, meant to guarantee payment if the judgment is upheld. If that happens, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will have to pay the state the whole sum, which grows with daily interest.

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If Trump wins, he won’t have to pay the state anything and will get back the money he has put up now.

Until the appeals court intervened to lower the required bond, New York Attorney General Letitia James had been poised to initiate efforts to collect the judgment, possibly by seizing some of Trump’s marquee properties. James, a Democrat, brought the lawsuit on the state’s behalf.

The court ruled after Trump’s lawyers complained it was “a practical impossibility” to get an underwriter to sign off on a bond for the $454 million, plus interest, that he owes.

Trump is fighting to overturn a judge’s Feb. 16 finding that he lied about his wealth as he fostered the real estate empire that launched him to stardom and the presidency. The trial focused on how Trump’s assets were valued on financial statements that went to bankers and insurers to get loans and deals.

Trump denies any wrongdoing, saying the statements actually lowballed his fortune, came with disclaimers and weren’t taken at face value by the institutions that lent to or insured him.

The state courts’ Appellate Division has said it would hear arguments in September. A specific date has not been set. If the schedule holds, it will fall in the final weeks of the presidential race.

Under New York law, filing an appeal generally doesn’t hold off enforcement of a judgment. But there’s an automatic pause — in legalese, a stay — if the person or entity obtains a bond guaranteeing payment of what’s owed.

Courts sometimes grant exceptions and lower the amount required for a stay, as in Trump’s case.

Trump’s lawyers had told the appeals court more than 30 bonding companies were unwilling to take a mix of cash and real estate as collateral for a $454 million-plus bond. Underwriters insisted on only cash, stocks or other liquid assets, the attorneys said.

They said most bonding companies require collateral covering 120% of the amount owed.

Trump recently claimed to have almost a half-billion dollars in cash — along with billions of dollars worth of real estate and other assets — but said he wanted to have some cash available for his presidential run.

Recent legal debts have taken a sizable chunk out of Trump’s cash reserves.

In addition to the $175 million he had to put up in the New York case, Trump has posted a bond and cash worth more than $97 million to cover money he owes to writer E. Jean Carroll while he appeals verdicts in a pair of federal civil trials. Juries found that he sexually assaulted her in the 1990s and defamed her when she went public with the allegation in 2019. He denies all the allegations.

In February, Trump paid the $392,638 in legal fees a judge ordered him to cover for The New York Times and three reporters after he unsuccessfully sued them over a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices.

In March, a British court ordered Trump to pay to pay legal fees of 300,000 pounds ($382,000) to a company he unsuccessfully sued over the so-called Steele dossier that contained salacious allegations about him. Trump said those claims were false.

Trump could eventually generate cash by selling some of the nearly 60% of stock he owns in his newly public social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group — but that would be a longer-term play. Trump’s stake could be worth billions of dollars, but a “lock-up” provision prevents insiders like him from selling their shares for six months.

Judge Juan M. Merchan said the original gag order — barring Trump from making public statements about jurors, witnesses and others connected to the case — did not include his family members, but subsequent attacks warranted including them.

Trump is now also barred from commenting publicly about the family of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, though he is still free to go after Bragg, the elected Democrat whose office is prosecuting the case.

“This pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose,” Merchan wrote. “It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game,’ for Defendant’s vitriol.”

A violation could result in Trump being held in contempt of court, fined or even jailed.

Trump criticized Merchan and Merchan’s daughter, a Democratic political consultant, in a series of Truth Social posts last Wednesday, a day after the judge issued his original gag order. Another post, over the weekend, included a photograph of Loren Merchan.

Prosecutors had urged Merchan to clarify or expand his gag order after Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform last week that Loren Merchan “makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,’” and wrongly accused her of posting a social media photo showing him behind bars.

Trump’s lawyers had fought the gag order and its expansion, arguing that Trump was engaging in protected political campaign speech.

Trump’s lawyers and the Manhattan district attorney’s office declined comment.

The trial, which involves allegations Trump falsified payment records in a scheme to cover up negative stories during his 2016 presidential campaign, is scheduled to begin April 15. Trump denies wrongdoing and has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Merchan’s gag order echoes one in Trump’s Washington, D.C., election interference criminal case. It prohibits statements meant to interfere with or harass the court’s staff, prosecution team or their families — now including Merchan’s family.

The Democratic president issued the proclamation on Friday, calling on “all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.”

But in 2024, the March 31 designation overlaps with Easter, one of Christianity’s holiest celebrations. Trump’s campaign accused Biden, a Roman Catholic, of being insensitive to religion, and fellow Republicans piled on.

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“We call on Joe Biden’s failing campaign and White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only — the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s press secretary. She assailed what she called the Biden administration’s “years-long assault on the Christian faith.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said on social media that the “Biden White House has betrayed the central tenet of Easter” and called the decision “outrageous and abhorrent.”

Biden devoutly attends Mass and considers his Catholic upbringing to be a core part of his morality and identity. In 2021, he met with Pope Francis at the Vatican and afterward told reporters that the pontiff said he was a “good Catholic” who should keep receiving Communion.

But Biden’s political stances on gay marriage and support for women having the right to abortion have put him at odds with many conservative Christians.

It’s a shift from the first time around when the presumptive Republican presidential nominee encountered early skepticism and, once in a while, the uproar of condemnation.

Rather than being dismissed as campaign bluster or Trump speaking his mind to rouse his most devoted voters, his words are being adopted as party platforms, potentially able to move quickly from rhetoric to reality with a West Wing in waiting and crucial backing from key corners on Capitol Hill.

“We’re going to have to deport some people,” said Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, one of Trump’s biggest supporters, days after campaigning alongside Trump in his home state.

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While Democratic President Joe Biden and his allies are sounding alarms about Trump’s proposed agenda for a second term — and his promise that he would be a “dictator” but only on Day one — the Republican Party in Congress is undergoing a massive political realignment toward Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who clashed with Trump at times particularly over the Capitol riot while also pushing through dozens of his judicial picks, is preparing to step down from his leadership role at the end of the year. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., faces constant threats of his ouster.

Rising in the churn are MAGA-aligned newcomers such as Vance, who wasn’t yet elected during Trump’s presidency, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who was elected as Trump lost to Biden in 2020. Both Vance and Greene are considered potential vice presidential picks by Trump.

Greene, who recently filed a motion to potentially force Johnson from the speakership, said it’s too soon to be discussing a second-term policy agenda or who will fill West Wing positions.

As she campaigns for Trump, she said her priority is just winning the election.

Other Republicans in the House and Senate often simply shrug when asked about Trump’s agenda, pointing to policies they like and others they might support.

Meanwhile, a cast of former Trump White House officials in Washington is pushing out policy papers, drafting executive actions and preparing legislation that would be needed to turn Trump’s ideas into reality. These efforts are separate from Trump’s campaign, whose senior leaders have repeatedly insisted that outside groups do not speak for them, though many group leaders would be in line to serve in a new Trump administration.

If Trump wins, “we are going to have a plan — and the personnel — ready to roll,” said Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official who heads the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which is collecting thousands of resumes and training staff for a potential second Trump administration.

Trump himself has suggested having a “very tiny little desk” on the Capitol steps so he can sign documents on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2025.

“On Day 1 of President Trump’s new administration, Americans will have a strong leader,” said Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s national press secretary.

Congress pushed back at times during the first Trump administration, a stable of Republicans joining with Democrats to halt some of his proposals.

Republicans and Democrats resisted a White House effort to commandeer funds for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, leading to the longest government shutdown in history. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who died in 2018, famously gave a thumbs-down to Trump’s effort to repeal the health law known as the Affordable Care Act.

And after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to reverse his 2020 loss to Biden, 10 Republicans in the House voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection and seven Republican senators voted to convict him. Many of those lawmakers have since left Congress. One, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, is retiring at the end of his term. Had the Senate convicted Trump, it could have then moved to bar him from holding federal office again.

As a result, there are fewer lawmakers now in Congress willing or able to stand up to Trump or publicly oppose his agenda as he has effectively commandeered the party apparatus, including the Republican National Committee, as his own.

“Those people are all kind of flushed out,” said Jason Chaffetz, a former GOP representative who is close to Trump allies on and off Capitol Hill.

Trump still falsely argues the 2020 election was stolen and is claiming he should be immune from a four-count federal indictment alleging he defrauded Americans with his effort to overturn the results. He has made Jan. 6 a cornerstone of his 2024 campaign and often refers to those imprisoned for the attack as “hostages.”

GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a leader of the effort to challenge the certification of electors on Jan. 6, said he does not agree with the idea of a “blanket pardon” for those convicted in the riot — some 1,300 people have been charged.

But he said he is closely watching the upcoming Supreme Court case contesting that rioters obstructed an official proceeding, which could call into question hundreds of cases, including some of the charges against Trump.

“My view is, let’s see what the Supreme Court says on that,” Hawley said.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, once a staunch Trump critic after their fierce rivalry during the 2016 campaign, said anyone who engaged in violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 should be prosecuted. But Cruz, who also helped challenge the 2020 election that day, was open to pardons for others.

“One of the saddest legacies of the Biden presidency,” he said, was what he called the “weaponization” of the Justice Department to “persecute” thousands of people who engaged in “peaceful protest.”

Perhaps Trump’s most enduring campaign promise in 2024 is his repeated pledge to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” — reviving the immigration and border security debates that helped define his presidency.

He points to the Eisenhower-era roundup of immigrants as a model, one that goes far behind his 2017 travel ban on migrants from mostly Muslim countries or the family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has been a leader on immigration issues, particularly the 2013 bill that provided a 10-year path to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. without legal documentation, though it ultimately failed to become law.

But with migrant crossings hitting record highs during Biden’s term, Rubio said, “Whether they’re deported through the hearings that they’re waiting for, they’re deported through some effort to expedite it, something’s going to have to happen.”

“No one’s saying it would be easy, but something’s going to have to happen with all the people that have come here,” he said.

Added Vance: “I think you have to be open to deporting anyone who came to the country illegally.”

Vanessa Cardenas, a former Biden campaign official who now heads the advocacy organization America’s Voice, said she was worried that Trump allies in a second term would “actually know how to work the levers of government.”

“I worry that there’s a little bit of amnesia about how cruel his policies were,” she said, describing the fear in migrant communities. “Our tolerance level for his language and his ideas keeps increasing.”

__

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.

Eastman, a former law school dean, faced 11 disciplinary charges in the state bar court stemming from his development of a legal strategy to have then-Vice President Mike Pence interfere with the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

State Bar Court of California Judge Yvette Roland’s recommendation, issued Wednesday, now goes to the California Supreme Court for a final ruling on whether he should be disbarred. Eastman can appeal the top court’s decision.

“Dr. Eastman maintains that his handling of the legal issues he was asked to assess after the November 2020 election was based on reliable legal precedent, prior presidential elections, research of constitutional text, and extensive scholarly material,” Eastman’s attorney, Randall Miller, said in a statement after the ruling. “The process undertaken by Dr. Eastman in 2020 is the same process taken by lawyers every day and everywhere – indeed, that is the essence of what lawyers do.”

The judge found Eastman liable for 10 of the 11 charges, including misleading courts, moral turpitude, making false statements and plotting with Trump to hinder the transfer of power.

“Eastman conspired with President Trump to obstruct a lawful function of the government of the United States; specifically, by conspiring to disrupt the electoral count on January 6, 2021,” Roland wrote in her 128-page decision.

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Eastman separately faces criminal charges in Georgia in the case accusing Trump and 18 allies of conspiring to overturn the Republican’s loss in the state. Eastman, who has pleaded not guilty, has argued he was merely doing his job as Trump’s attorney when he challenged the results of the 2020 election. He has denounced the case as targeting attorneys “for their zealous advocacy on behalf of their clients.”

He’s also one of the unnamed co-conspirators in the separate 2020 election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, but Eastman is not charged in the federal case.

The State Bar of California alleged that Eastman violated the state’s business and professions code by making false and misleading statements that constitute acts of “moral turpitude, dishonesty, and corruption.” In doing so, the agency says he “violated this duty in furtherance of an attempt to usurp the will of the American people and overturn election results for the highest office in the land — an egregious and unprecedented attack on our democracy.”

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In her decision, Roland wrote: “In view of the circumstances surrounding Eastman’s misconduct and balancing the aggravation and mitigation, the court recommends that Eastman be disbarred.”

Eastman was a close adviser to Trump in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He wrote a memo laying out a plan for Pence to reject legitimate electoral votes for Biden while presiding over the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 in order to keep Trump in the White House.

Prosecutors seeking to strip Eastman of his law license depicted him as a Trump enabler who fabricated a baseless theory and made false claims of fraud in hopes of overturning the results of the election.

Eastman’s attorney countered that his client never intended to steal the election but was considering ways to delay electoral vote counting so states could investigate allegations of voting improprieties. Trump’s claims of fraud were roundly rejected by courts, including by judges Trump appointed.

The judge wasn’t persuaded by Eastman’s claim that his actions amounted to no more than a dedicated representation of Trump.

“It is true that an attorney has a duty to engage in zealous advocacy on behalf of a client,” Roland wrote. “However, Eastman’s inaccurate assertions were lies that cannot be justified as zealous advocacy. Eastman failed to uphold his primary duty of honesty and breached his ethical obligations by presenting falsehoods to bolster his legal arguments. Finally, the court notes that acts of moral turpitude are a departure from professional norms and are unequivocally outside the realm of protection afforded by the First Amendment and the obligation of vigorous advocacy.”

Roland did agree with Eastman’s attorney on one of the 11 counts. The judge found Eastman’s remarks to a rally in Washington on Jan. 6 did not contribute to the subsequent assault on the Capitol.

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Eastman will be placed on involuntary inactive status within three days of the judge’s order, which means he cannot practice law in California while the Supreme Court considers the case, the state bar said.

The States United Democracy Center, which filed an early ethics complaint against Eastman, cheered the judge’s decision.

“This is a crucial victory in the effort to hold accountable those who tried to overturn the 2020 election. After hearing from almost two dozen witnesses over a 35-day trial, the court found that John Eastman violated his ethical duties to uphold the constitution,” said Christine P. Sun, a senior vice president for the nonprofit. “This decision sends an unmistakable message: No one is above the law — not presidents, and not their lawyers.”

Eastman has been a member of the California Bar since 1997, according to its website. He was a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute. He ran for California attorney general in 2010, finishing second in the Republican primary.

Eastman was dean of Chapman University law school in Southern California from 2007 to 2010 and was a professor at the school when he retired in 2021 after more than 160 faculty members signed a letter calling for the university to take action against him.

Donald Trump on Wednesday again targeted on social media the daughter of the judge in his upcoming criminal hush money trial — one day after that judge imposed a gag order limiting what Trump can say about the case.

Trump, in a Truth Social screed, slammed New York Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan as a “hater” and repeated his call for the judge to recuse himself from the case.

Trump pointed to Merchan’s daughter’s work in progressive politics, and a social media account that he claims is hers, as evidence that it is “completely impossible” for him to get a “fair trial.”

Merchan’s daughter “represents Crooked Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, and other Radical Liberals, [and] has just posted a picture of me behind bars, her obvious goal,” Trump claimed.

The posts marked Trump’s second day in a row highlighting Merchan’s daughter’s role as a president at Authentic Campaigns, a Democratic political consulting firm. The firm touts its work for clients including President Joe Biden, whom Trump is campaigning against, and for other Democratic groups and politicians.

“Maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump,’ and when he rules against me over and over again, he is making her company, and her, richer and richer,” Trump wrote. “How can this be allowed?”

Trump attorney Todd Blanche declined to comment on Trump’s posts in light of the gag order, which restricts him from making certain statements about “family members of any counsel or staff member.”

The posts extended Trump’s stream of attacks against Merchan that began after the judge set an April 15 trial date in the hush money case. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Trump’s latest attacks on Merchan’s daughter went further than his past comments by claiming she “just posted” a picture of him behind bars.

Trump appeared to be referencing a social media account on X, which Authentic had previously associated with Merchan’s daughter.

As recently as Wednesday, that X account featured as its profile photo an edited headshot of Trump behind metal bars. As of Wednesday afternoon, that profile photo had been changed to a childhood photo of Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris had shared that photo on social media during a 2019 Democratic primary debate, shortly after she attacked then-rival Biden over his record on busing.

It is unclear if the account handle currently belongs to Merchan’s daughter. X indicates that the account “joined in April 2023,” months after Authentic most recently referenced it on social media.

Trump was arraigned in the hush money case that month. Around the same time, multiple right-wing news outlets published reports about Merchan’s daughter’s political activities.

The X account’s posts are protected, meaning that they can only be viewed by approved followers. A spokesman for the New York courts did not immediately respond when asked by CNBC to confirm or deny that the account currently belongs to Merchan’s daughter.

Trump nevertheless asserted Wednesday that the account is hers, while he railed against his newest gag order.

“So, let me get this straight, the Judge’s daughter is allowed to post pictures of her ‘dream’ of putting me in jail, the Manhattan D.A. is able to say whatever lies about me he wants, the Judge can violate our Laws and Constitution at every turn, but I am not allowed to talk about the attacks against me, and the Lunatics trying to destroy my life, and prevent me from winning the 2024 Presidential Election, which I am dominating?” he wrote.

The gag order imposed Tuesday does not completely limit Trump from talking about his critics. He can still criticize the prosecutor in his case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and he is not explicitly barred from speaking about Merchan himself.

Trump is, however, barred from making public statements about likely witnesses and jurors in the case.

And he cannot speak about lawyers in the case, court staff, employees in the D.A.’s office and their family members if those statements are made with the “intent to materially interfere” with the proceedings.

Merchan in the order wrote that Trump’s prior statements about various figures involved in the case “were threatening, inflammatory [and] denigrating.”

“Such inflammatory statements undoubtedly risk impeding the orderly administration of this Court,” wrote the judge, who also noted “the nature and impact of the statements made against this Court and a family member thereof.”

“Given that the eve of trial is upon us, it is without question that the imminency of the risk of harm is now paramount,” he wrote.

Trump had referenced Merchan’s daughter on Truth Social around the time of his arraignment in the hush money case.

Trump’s attorneys in a court filing last May referenced Merchan’s daughter’s work as they urged the judge to recuse himself from the case.

Merchan, in August, declined to do so.

A judge on Tuesday imposed a limited gag order on Donald Trump ahead of his criminal hush money trial in New York.

Trump’s statements about various figures involved in the case “were threatening, inflammatory [and] denigrating,” Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Juan Merchan said in a court order.

“Such inflammatory statements undoubtedly risk impeding the orderly administration of this Court,” Merchan ruled.

The gag order bars Trump from making public statements about likely witnesses and jurors in the case.

He must also refrain from speaking about lawyers in the case, court staff, employees in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and their family members if those statements are made with the “intent to materially interfere” with the case.

Merchan’s order still allows Trump to speak out about Alvin Bragg, the district attorney prosecuting the former president on charges of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

The gag order does not specifically bar Trump from criticizing the judge.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung in a statement to NBC News said the gag order prevents the presumptive Republican presidential nominee “from engaging in core political speech, which is entitled to the highest level of protection under the First Amendment.”

Merchan’s decision, which granted a Feb. 22 request by Bragg to restrict Trump’s speech about the case, came hours after Trump tore into the judge as a “Trump Hater” on social media.

Trump in multiple Truth Social posts called on Merchan to recuse himself from the case, and roped the judge’s daughter into his attacks by pointing to her work for a Democratic consulting firm.

The fusillade against Merchan came one day after the judge scheduled the trial to start April 15, rejecting a bid by Trump’s attorneys to delay it further.

Trump, who was in court when Merchan delivered that decision, said at a press conference afterward that he would be willing to testify in the trial.

Merchan’s gag order ruling Tuesday afternoon appeared to reference Trump’s remarks about his daughter.

He noted “the nature and impact of the statements made against this Court and a family member thereof,” along with Trump’s remarks about witnesses such as Michael Cohen, his former attorney who is set to testify in the trial.

“Given that the eve of trial is upon us, it is without question that the imminency of the risk of harm is now paramount,” the judge wrote.

Merchan also noted in a footnote that Trump targeted a prosecutor in the case “within hours” of the April 15 trial date being set.

Trump attorney Todd Blanche declined a request for comment.

Trump is already bound by a gag order in a separate criminal case in Washington, D.C., federal court, where he is charged with illegally trying to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. A federal appeals court in December upheld Trump’s challenge of that gag order, but narrowed it to allow him to speak about his prosecutor, special counsel Jack Smith.

Trump also was under a gag order in his civil fraud case, in which he was found liable for fraudulently inflating his asset values on business records for financial gain.

Bragg, in his own gag order request in late February, noted that Trump has a “long history of making public and inflammatory remarks about the participants in various judicial proceedings against him, including jurors, witnesses, lawyers, and court staff.”

Trump’s attorneys argued in response that it would be “unconstitutional and unlawful to impose a prior restraint” on the First Amendment-protected speech of the leading presidential candidate.

They instead said they would continue to comply with a judge’s admonition at the start of the case, cautioning Trump not to make statements that would prejudice the trial process.

But Merchan in Tuesday’s order said he was “unpersuaded” by that proposal.

Donald Trump faces hundreds of millions of dollars in legal penalties, his presidential campaign is confronting a cash crunch and his businesses have reported operating losses for years.

But on Monday afternoon, Trump was richer than he has ever been.

Trump’s net worth shot up by more than $4 billion in recent days to about $6.5 billion, according to Bloomberg, which tracks the 500 wealthiest people in the world.

The bonanza was the result of a merger approved Friday between Trump’s social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, and a shell company, Digital World Acquisition Corp., known as DWAC.

Trump owns nearly 80 million shares, or roughly 58%, of Trump Media, which operates his social media site Truth Social. At DWAC’s closing price Monday of $49.95 a share, Trump’s stock was worth $4 billion on paper.

The newly merged social media company said it will begin trading Tuesday under the ticker symbol DJT.

DWAC’s share price soared 35% in Monday trading, after a New York appeals court slashed the amount of cash the former president needs to get a bond saving him from having to immediately pay a $454 million civil fraud penalty.

Early Monday, Trump appeared to be unable to put up the more than $550 million to secure a bond that would stop the state from moving to seize his real estate assets.

Shortly after 10 a.m., an appeals court ruled that Trump only needed to post a $175 million bond. The court also paused the judgment from coming due for 10 days.

Trump says he has the cash to cover that bond.

As a result of the media merger and the adjusted bond, Trump, 77, was included Monday in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index for the first time in his life, according to the news outlet.

It’s unclear whether his wealth will stay this high, however. Trump is barred from selling his DWAC shares for six months, and the stock has a volatile share price history.

Trump Media brought in less than $3.5 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2023, while posting a $49 million net loss in the same period.

MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on Friday described Trump’s media company as a meme stock largely dependent on one man.

Bloomberg said its estimate of Trump’s net worth was based on ethics disclosures required for presidential candidates, public filings tied to key real estate holdings and staff reporting.

Judge Juan M. Merchan made the ruling Monday. The judge earlier had scolded the former president’s lawyers as he weighed when to reschedule the trial after a last-minute document dump caused a postponement of the original date.

Merchan had bristled at what he suggested were baseless defense claims of “prosecutorial misconduct,” appearing unpersuaded by Trump team arguments that prosecutors had until recently concealed tens of thousands of pages of records from a previous federal investigation.

Prosecutors said only a handful of those newly records was relevant to the case, while defense lawyers contended that thousands of pages are potentially important and require a painstaking review. Merchan, who earlier this month postponed the trial until at least mid-April, told defense lawyers that they should have acted much sooner if they believed they didn’t have all the records they felt they were entitled to.

“That you don’t have a case right now is really disconcerting because the allegation that the defense makes in all of your papers is incredibly serious. Unbelievably serious,” Merchan said. “You’re accusing the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the people involved in this case of prosecutorial misconduct and of trying to make me complicit in it. And you don’t have a single cite to support that position.”

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee arrived in court for a hearing scheduled in place of the long-planned start of jury selection in the first of his four criminal cases to go to trial. It took place on a uniquely consequential day for Trump and his legal and political affairs as, besides a likely determination of a trial date, a New York appeals court on Monday granted him a dose of good news by agreeing to hold off collection of his $454 million civil fraud judgment — if he puts up $175 million within 10 days.

The hush money case, filed last year by prosecutors in Manhattan, has taken on added importance given that it’s the only one of the prosecutions against Trump that appears likely for trial in the coming months.

The district attorney’s office said there was little new material in the documents trove and no reason for further delay, with prosecutor Matthew Colangelo saying in court Monday that the number of relevant, usable, new documents “is quite small” — around 300 records or fewer.

“We very much disagree,” countered defense lawyer Todd Blanche, who said the number totaled in the thousands and continues to grow. Trump’s lawyers argued that the delayed disclosures warranted dismissing the case or at least pushing it off three months.

“We’re not doing our jobs if we don’t independently review the materials,” Blanche said. “Every document is important.”

But Merchan seemed unmoved, asking Blanche why the defense team, which subpoenaed for the records in January, didn’t bring up concerns about potentially missing documents weeks earlier.

“Why did you wait until two months before trial? Why didn’t you do it in June or July,” Merchan said.

Donald Trump May 26, 2023

Prosecutors Say They Have a Recording of Trump and a Witness in Manhattan DA Case

news Jul 19, 2023

Trump loses bid to move New York hush money criminal case to federal court

Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges that he falsified business records. Manhattan prosecutors say Trump did it as part of an effort to protect his 2016 campaign by burying what he says were false stories of extramarital sex. Trump on Monday repeated to reporters his claims that the case is a “witch hunt” and “hoax.” The prosecutor overseeing the case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, is a Democrat.

The case centers on allegations that Trump falsely logged $130,000 in payments as legal fees in his company’s books “to disguise his and others’ criminal conduct,” as Bragg’s deputies put it in a court document.

The money went to Trump’s then-personal attorney Michael Cohen, but prosecutors say it wasn’t for actual legal work. Rather, they say, Cohen was just recouping money he’d paid porn actor Stormy Daniels on Trump’s behalf, so she wouldn’t publicize her claim of a sexual encounter with him years earlier.

Trump’s lawyers say the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses, not cover-up checks.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges, including campaign finance violations related to the Daniels payoff. He said Trump directed him to arrange it, and federal prosecutors indicated they believed him, but they never charged Trump with any crime related to the matter.

Cohen is now a key witness in Manhattan prosecutors’ case against Trump.

Trump’s lawyers have said Bragg’s office, in June, gave them a smidgen of materials from the federal investigation into Cohen. Then they got over 100,000 pages more after subpoenaing federal prosecutors themselves in January. The defense argued that prosecutors should have pursued all the records but instead stuck their heads in the sand, hoping to keep information from Trump.

The material hasn’t been made public. But Trump’s lawyers said in a court filing that some of it is “exculpatory and favorable to the defense,” adding that there’s information that would have aided their own investigation and consequential legal filings earlier in the case.

Bragg’s deputies have insisted they “engaged in good-faith and diligent efforts to obtain relevant information” from the federal probe. They argued in court filings that Trump’s lawyers should have spoken up earlier if they believed those efforts were lacking.

Prosecutors maintain that, in any event, the vast majority of what ultimately came is irrelevant, duplicative or backs up existing evidence about Cohen’s well-known federal conviction. They acknowledged in a court filing that there was some relevant new material, including 172 pages of notes recording Cohen’s meetings with the office of former special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated Russia’s 2016 election interference.

Prosecutors argued that their adversaries have enough time to work with the relevant material before a mid-April trial date and are just raising a “red herring.”

Trump’s lawyers also have sought to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court rules on his claims of presidential immunity in his election interference case in Washington. The high court is set to hear arguments April 25.

___

Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Philip Marcelo contributed to this report.

If he does, it will stop the clock on collection and prevent the state from seizing his assets while he appeals.

The development came just before New York Attorney General Letitia James was expected to initiate efforts to collect the judgment.

Earlier this week, Trump’s lawyers pleaded for a state appeals court to halt collection, claiming it was “a practical impossibility” to get an underwriter to sign off on a bond for such a large sum.

The ruling was issued by the state’s intermediate appeals court, the Appellate Division of the state’s trial court, where Trump is fighting to overturn a judge’s Feb. 16 finding that he lied about his wealth as he grew the real estate empire that launched him to stardom and the presidency.

US & World

news Mar 24

As Trump's $454 million fraud judgment deadline looms, son Eric gripes ‘they want to bankrupt him'

news Mar 23

Trump says ‘I love Truth Social' one day after DWAC stock plunges on social media merger vote

news Mar 22

Trump claims he has $500 million cash, after his lawyers say he can't get $454 million bond

Trump’s debt stems from a months-long civil trial last fall over the state’s allegations that he, his company and top executives vastly puffed up his wealth on financial statements, conning bankers and insurers who did business with him. The statements valued his penthouse for years as though it were nearly three times its actual size, for example.

Trump and his co-defendants denied any wrongdoing, saying the statements actually lowballed his fortune, came with disclaimers and weren’t taken at face value by the institutions that lent to or insured him. The penthouse discrepancy, he said, was simply a mistake made by subordinates.

Engoron sided with the attorney general and ordered Trump to pay $355 million, plus interest that grows daily. Some co-defendants, including his sons and company executive vice presidents, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, were ordered to pay far smaller amounts.

Under New York law, filing an appeal generally doesn’t hold off enforcement of a judgment. But there’s an automatic pause if the person or entity posts a bond that covers what’s owed.

The ex-president’s lawyers have said it’s impossible for him to do that. They said underwriters wanted 120% of the judgment and wouldn’t accept real estate as collateral. That would mean tying up over $557 million in cash, stocks and other liquid assets, and Trump’s company needs some left over to run the business, his attorneys have said.

The attorney general’s office objected to the freeze.

All eyes are on a vote scheduled for Friday by shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp., a publicly traded shell company that is looking to merge with the former president’s media business. The deal’s approval would open the door for Trump Media & Technology Group, whose flagship product is the social networking site Truth Social, to soon begin trading on the Nasdaq stock market in Digital World’s place.

If the merger is greenlit, which is likely, Trump stands to receive a sizeable payout. He would own most of the combined company — or nearly 79 million shares. Multiply that by Digital World’s current stock price of more $42, and the total value of Trump’s stake could surpass $3 billion.

The prospect of the deal arrives at a time the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is facing his most costly legal battle to date: a $454 million judgment in a fraud lawsuit.

news Mar 21

Judge orders Trump company to tell financial watchdog about efforts to get appeal bonds

decision 2024 Mar 20

Trump eyes Sen. Marco Rubio as a potential VP pick

But even if the Digital World merger is approved Friday, Trump wouldn’t be able to immediately cash out his windfall, unless some things change, due to a “lock-up” provision that prevents company insiders from selling newly issued shares for six months.

Trump’s earlier foray into the stock market didn’t end well. Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts went public in 1995 under the symbol DJT — the same symbol Trump Media will trade under. By 2004, Trump’s casino company had filed for bankruptcy protection and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.

Digital World listed many of the risks its investors face, as well as those of the Truth Social owner, if Trump Media also goes public.

One risk, the company said, is that Trump would be entitled to vote in his own interest as a controlling stockholder — which may not always be in the interests of all shareholders. Digital World also cited the high rate of failure for new social media platforms, as well as Trump Media’s expectation that it would lose money on its operations “for the foreseeable future.”

Trump Media lost $49 million in the first nine months of last year, when it brought in just $3.4 million in revenue and had to pay $37.7 million in interest expenses.

Trump Media and Digital World first announced their merger plans in October 2021. In addition to a federal probe, the deal has faced a series of lawsuits leading up to Friday’s vote.

Truth Social launched in February 2022, one year after Trump was banned from major social platforms including Facebook and Twitter, the platform now known as X, following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He’s since been reinstated to both but has stuck with Truth Social as a megaphone for his message.

Trump promoted Truth Social in a post on the social media network Thursday evening, saying: “TRUTH SOCIAL IS MY VOICE, AND THE REAL VOICE OF AMERICA!!! MAGA2024!!!”

Trump Media doesn’t disclose Truth Social’s user numbers. But research firm Similarweb estimates that it had roughly 5 million active mobile and web users in February. That’s far below TikTok‘s more than 2 billion and Facebook’s 3 billion — but still higher than rivals like Parler, which has been offline for nearly a year but is planning a comeback, or Gettr, which had less than 2 million visitors in February.

A handful of senators criticized former President Donald Trump‘s comments, some appeared to agree with him, and at least two insisted they hadn’t seen the remarks, which invoked a trope that American Jews have divided loyalties between the U.S. and Israel.

Other senators responded with what became a common refrain while Trump was in office — saying it was a poor choice of words without directly condemning him.

“I wouldn’t say any of that,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said of Trump’s comments.

“It’s not what I would say,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., similarly suggested that Trump could use “more artful language” but contended that he is “not wrong about, I think, Democratic leaders’ failing the Israeli state and, and second-guessing them.”

Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., said he hadn’t closely followed Trump’s remarks but added that he “speaks his mind.”

Asked whether Trump should back off the kind of rhetoric he used this week, Thune said he’d “prefer to keep people’s religious faith out of these discussions.”

The firestorm started when Trump said in an interview with Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump administration official, that “any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”

“They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves, because Israel will be destroyed,” Trump continued, before he discussed Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, a frequent Trump critic, offered some of the most pointed criticism of Trump’s remarks.

“That’s highly offensive,” he said. “We do not in this country attack people based upon their religious beliefs or their political views.”

“Conflating religion to politics is an enormous error and violates some of the founding principles of our, of our government and our American history. It’s a terrible mistake on his part, for which he really ought to apologize but won’t,” Romney added.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., meanwhile, appeared to echo Trump’s position that Jewish voters are wrong to back Democrats.

“I don’t know why any Jewish person would support Democrats,” he said. “The Biden administration is not holding Hamas accountable.”

A Pew Research Center poll conducted last month found that 62% of Jewish Americans held a favorable view of President Joe Biden, while 21% of Jewish Americans rated Trump favorably.

Biden’s re-election campaign has condemned the comments, with a campaign spokesperson saying Monday that “Donald Trump openly demeans Jewish Americans.”

Visiting Omaha, Nebraska, on Tuesday, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, blasted Trump’s remarks as “a disgusting, toxic, antisemitic thing to say by anyone, let alone a former president.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who is also Jewish and recently called for new elections in Israel, condemned the remarks, calling them “utterly disgusting and a textbook example of the kind of antisemitism facing Jews, pushing the dangerous antisemitism trope of dual loyalty.”

Trump accused “liberal Jews” in a social media post last year of voting to “destroy” the U.S. and Israel.

On Tuesday, Trump appeared to double down on his recent remarks as he left a polling location in Palm Beach, Florida. Asked about his comments in the Gorka interview, he said, “Democrats have been very, very opposed to Jewish people.”

This article first appeared on NBCNews.com. Read more from NBC News:

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Trump’s lawyers are trying to stop that from happening. They have asked a court to put collection efforts on hold while he appeals the verdict.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee tried getting a bond for the full amount, which would have stopped the clock on collection during his appeal and ensured the state got its money if he were to lose.

But more than 30 underwriters said no, Trump’s lawyers told the court. They said getting a bond for such a large sum is “a practical impossibility.”

That’s raised the possibility that New York Attorney General Letitia James could start trying to enforce the judgment as soon as Monday.

Here’s a look at what that might look like, and what it would mean for Trump’s business empire.

Could New York really seize Trump’s assets?

Yes. If Trump isn’t able to pay, the state “could levy and sell his assets, lien his real property and garnish anyone who owes him money,” Syracuse University Law Professor Gregory Germain said.

Potential targets could include properties such as his Trump Tower penthouse, Wall Street office building and golf courses. James’ office could also seek court permission to drain Trump’s bank accounts and investment portfolios, or sell off other assets like his planes, helicopters — or even his golf carts.

Seizing assets is a common legal tactic when someone can’t access enough cash to pay a civil penalty.

In a famous example, O.J. Simpson’s Heisman Trophy was seized and sold at auction to cover part of a $33.5 million wrongful death judgment. More recently, a city commissioner in Miami, Florida, fought to keep his home after a federal judge ordered it seized and auctioned off to help pay a $63.5 million judgment in a political retaliation case.

New York state seized three large moving trucks in 1999 to help satisfy a $250,000 judgment against a moving company that ripped off customers. In 2006, the state seized a $342,000 investment account to cover part of a $2 million judgment against operators of illegal tire and solid waste dumps.

How soon could it happen?

Not quickly. Any attempt to collect would be done through the courts, including through liens and foreclosure actions.

State officials can’t just show up on Monday and padlock Trump Tower, but they can lay the groundwork by issuing subpoenas requiring Trump to provide information about his assets.

“If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets,” James, a Democrat, said in a recent interview with ABC News.

Why does Trump owe this money?

The state, through James’ office, sued Trump in 2022, alleging he had committed fraud for years by inflating his wealth on financial statements given to banks and insurance companies in connection with various business deals.

In February, after a 2½-month trial, Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay $355 million plus interest, saying, “The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience.”

Trump denies any attempt to deceive banks or anyone else about his wealth. He has said the judge’s decision and the lawsuit itself were politically motivated attempts to keep him from reclaiming the White House in 2024.

He has also argued that it is unfair to make him sell off assets or spend huge amounts buying a bond when the case is still being appealed, though a court requiring an appeal bond is fairly common in New York and other jurisdictions.

Asked Tuesday if he’s confident he can pay, Trump lashed out at what he deemed “a rigged trial by a crooked judge and a crooked attorney general.”

“We have a lot of cash and we have a great company, but they want to take it away or at least take the cash element away. Billions of dollars in value, billions of dollars in properties. But they’d like to take the cash away so I can’t use it on the campaign,” Trump told reporters after voting in Florida’s Republican primary.

“We’ll see how the courts rule on it,” he said.

Could Trump pay if he wanted?

Trump says he is worth several billion dollars, but much of his wealth is tied up in skyscrapers, golf courses and other properties.

He reported having about $294 million in cash or cash equivalents on his most recent publicly available financial statement, but that document is outdated, covering the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021. It’s also one of the documents that Engoron deemed fraudulent for exaggerating Trump’s wealth.

Since then, Trump has netted nearly $187 million from selling the lease on his Washington, D.C., hotel and the rights to manage a New York City golf course. His current cash position is unclear. During his civil fraud trial, he said he had more than $400 million in cash, but that figure is unverified.

Trump also has other legal bills. In January, a jury ordered him to pay $83.3 million for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll after she accused him of sexual assault. Earlier this month, Trump secured a $91.6 million bond to guarantee that judgment while he appeals.

Trump’s lawyers said freeing up cash by offloading some of Trump’s properties in a “fire sale” would result in massive, irrecoverable losses.

Are there other ways Trump could raise the money?

Trump could receive a financial windfall from a looming deal to put his social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, on the stock market under the ticker symbol DJT.

A shareholder meeting is scheduled for Friday. If the deal is approved, Trump would own at least 58% of the shares in the company, which runs his Truth Social platform. Depending on share price, that could be worth several billion dollars, though he might not be able to turn those stocks into cash immediately.

In the meantime, the amount Trump owes is increasing by nearly $112,000 each day due to interest. As of Tuesday, he owed the state nearly $457 million.

To obtain a bond, Trump’s lawyers said they would be required to post collateral covering 120% of the judgment.

Last month, Trump’s lawyers proposed posting a $100 million bond, but a judge in the state’s mid-level appeals court said he had to pay the full amount. Trump has appealed that decision.

Could Trump declare bankruptcy?

Under federal bankruptcy law, enforcement of the judgment would be paused if he personally declared bankruptcy. However, he would still be personally liable if just his company, the Trump Organization, or other entities were to declare bankruptcy.

Trump has repeatedly bragged that he has never, personally, declared bankruptcy, although several of his previous companies have.

“If he can’t post a bond or meet the appellate division’s bonding requirements, then I would expect him to file bankruptcy to take advantage of the automatic stay on collection,” law professor Germain said.

“But that’s a couple of chess moves away, so we will just have to see what happens.”

The former president’s lawyers wrote in a court filing that “obtaining an appeal bond in the full amount” of the judgment “is not possible under the circumstances presented.”

With interest, Trump owes $456.8 million. In all, he and co-defendants including his company and top executives owe $467.3 million. To obtain a bond, they would be required to post collateral worth $557 million, Trump’s lawyers said.

A state appeals court judge ruled last month that Trump must post a bond covering the full amount to pause enforcement of the judgment, which is to begin on March 25.

Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in February that Trump, his company and top executives, including his sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr., schemed for years to deceive banks and insurers by inflating his wealth on financial statements used to secure loans and make deals.

Among other penalties, the judge put strict limitations on the ability of Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, to do business.

Trump is asking a full panel of the state’s intermediate appellate court to stay the judgment while he appeals. His lawyers previously proposed posting a $100 million bond, but appeals court judge Anil Singh rejected that. A stay is a legal mechanism pausing collection while he appeals.

A real estate broker enlisted by Trump to assist in obtaining a bond wrote in an affidavit filed with the court that few bonding companies will consider issuing a bond of the size required.

The remaining bonding companies will not “accept hard assets such as real estate as collateral,” but “will only accept cash or cash equivalents (such as marketable securities).”

“A bond of this size is rarely, if ever, seen. In the unusual circumstance that a bond of this size is issued, it is provided to the largest public companies in the world, not to individuals or privately held businesses,” the broker, Gary Giulietti, wrote.

Trump appealed on Feb. 26, a few days after the judgment was made official. His lawyers have asked the Appellate Division of the state’s trial court to decide whether Engoron “committed errors of law and/or fact” and whether he abused his discretion or “acted in excess” of his jurisdiction.

Trump wasn’t required to pay his penalty or post a bond in order to appeal, and filing the appeal did not automatically halt enforcement of the judgment.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, has said that she will seek to seize some of Trump’s assets if he’s unable to pay the judgment.

Trump would receive an automatic stay if he were to put up money, assets or an appeal bond covering what he owes. He also had the option, which he’s now exercising, to ask the appeals court to grant a stay with a bond for a lower amount.

Trump maintains that he is worth several billion dollars and testified last year that he had about $400 million in cash, in addition to properties and other investments.

In January, a jury ordered Trump to pay $83.3 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him in 2019 of sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. Trump recently posted a bond covering that amount while he appeals.

That’s on top of the $5 million a jury awarded Carroll in a related trial last year.

Judge Juan Manuel Merchan agreed to a 30-day postponement and scheduled a hearing for March 25 to address questions about the evidence dump. The trial had been slated to start on March 25. It is among four criminal indictments against Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee.

Trump’s lawyers wanted a 90-day delay, which would’ve pushed the start of the trial into the early summer. Prosecutors said they were OK with a 30-day adjournment “in an abundance of caution and to ensure that defendant has sufficient time to review the new materials.”

Georgia Mar 15

Prosecutor leaves Georgia election case against Trump after relationship with district attorney

news Mar 15

Former Vice President Mike Pence will not endorse Trump in 2024

news Mar 14

Trump hush money prosecutor tells judge he is OK with one-month delay of trial start

Trump’s lawyers said they have received tens of thousands of pages of evidence in the last two weeks from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which investigated the hush money arrangement while Trump was president.

The evidence includes records about former Trump lawyer-turned-prosecution witness Michael Cohen that are “exculpatory and favorable to the defense,” Trump’s lawyers said. Prosecutors said most of the newly turned over material is “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case,” though some records are pertinent.

The hush money case centers on allegations that Trump falsified his company’s records to hide the true nature of payments to Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign to suppress her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump years earlier.

Trump pleaded not guilty last year to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and has denied having a sexual encounter with Daniels. His lawyers argue the payments to Cohen were legitimate legal expenses and were not part of any cover-up.

Prosecutors contend Trump’s lawyers caused the evidence problem by waiting until Jan. 18 — a mere nine weeks before the scheduled start of jury selection — to subpoena the U.S. attorney’s office for the full case file.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said it requested the full file last year but the U.S. attorney’s office only turned over a subset of records. Trump’s lawyers received that material last June and had ample time to seek additional evidence from the federal probe, the district attorney’s office said.

Short trial delays because of issues with evidence aren’t unusual, but any delay in a case involving Trump would be significant, with trial dates in his other criminal cases up in the air and Election Day less than eight months away.

The defense has also sought to delay the trial until after the Supreme Court rules on Trump’s presidential immunity claims, which his lawyers say could apply to some of the allegations and evidence in the hush money case. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments April 25.

Trump has repeatedly sought to postpone his criminal trials while he campaigns to retake the White House.

“We want delays,” Trump told reporters as he headed into a Feb. 15 hearing in New York. “Obviously I’m running for election. How can you run for election if you’re sitting in a courthouse in Manhattan all day long?”

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a two-page order saying that though the Trump team had raised “various arguments warranting serious consideration,” a dismissal of charges was not merited.

Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, had made clear during more than three-and-a-half hours of arguments that she was reluctant to dismiss one of the four criminal cases against the 2024 presumptive Republican presidential nominee. She said at one point that it would be “quite an extraordinary” step to strike down an Espionage Act statute that underpins the bulk of the felony counts against Trump but that his lawyers contend is unconstitutionally vague.

As Trump looked on in the courtroom, his attorneys pressed Cannon to throw out the case, arguing he was legally entitled to keep the sensitive records he is charged with illegally retaining after he left the White House.

His lawyers say the Presidential Records Act gave him the authority to designate as personal property the records he took with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Prosecutors countered that those records were clearly presidential, not personal, and included top-secret information and documents related to nuclear programs and the military capabilities of the U.S. and foreign countries.

Cannon’s ruling covered only the Espionage Act arguments. A separate motion argued Thursday about whether Trump was entitled under the Presidential Records Act to retain the documents remains pending, but the judge also seemed disinclined to throw out the case on those grounds too.

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In an audio recording Donald Trump discusses a ‘highly confidential' document with an interviewer

“It’s difficult to see how this gets you to the dismissal of an indictment,” she told a Trump lawyer at one point.

The hearing was the second this month in the case in Florida, which has unfolded slowly in the courts since prosecutors first brought charges last June. Cannon heard arguments on March 1 on when to schedule a trial date, but has yet to announce one and gave no indication Thursday on when she might do so. Prosecutors have pressed the judge to set a date for this summer. Trump’s lawyers are hoping to put it off until after the election.

After the hearing, Trump on his Truth Social platform took note of the “big crowds” outside the courthouse, which included supporters with flags and signs who honked their car horns in solidarity with the ex-president. He again said the prosecution is a “witch hunt” inspired by President Joe Biden.

Some of Thursday’s arguments centered on the 1978 statute known as the Presidential Records Act. The law requires presidential documents to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration, though former presidents may retain notes and papers created for purely personal reasons.

Trump’s lawyers contend that he was free under that law to to do with the records as he pleased.

“He had original classification authority,” said defense lawyer Todd Blanche. “He had the authority to do whatever he thought was appropriate with his records.”

But prosecutor David Harbach told Cannon that there are “all sorts of reasons” that that argument is wrong. Prosecutors believe the files Trump is charged with possessing are presidential records, not personal ones, and that the statute was never meant to permit presidents to retain classified and top-secret documents, like those kept at Mar-a-Lago.

“The documents charged in the indictment are not personal records, period. They are not,” Harbach said. “They are nowhere close to it under the definition of the Presidential Records Act.”

Trump’s lawyers also challenged as overly vague a statute that makes it a crime to have unauthorized retention of national defense information, a charge that forms the basis of 32 of the 40 felony counts against Trump in the case.

Defense lawyer Emil Bove said ambiguity in the statute permits what he called “selective” enforcement by the Justice Department, leading to Trump being charged but enabling others to avoid prosecution. Bove suggested a recent report by special counsel Robert Hur that criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information did not recommend charges proved his point about the lack of clarity.

When a law is unclear, Bove told Cannon, “The court’s obligation is to strike the statute and say ‘Congress, get it right.'”

Jay Bratt, another prosecutor with Smith’s team, disputed that there was anything unclear about the law, and Cannon pointedly noted that striking down a statute would be “quite an extraordinary step.”

Trump is accused of intentionally holding onto some of the nation’s most sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago — only returning a fraction of them upon demand by the National Archives. Prosecutors say he urged his lawyer to hide records and to lie to the FBI by saying he no longer was in possession of them and enlisted staff to delete surveillance footage that would show boxes of documents being moved around the property.

Cannon has suggested in the past that she sees Trump’s status as a former president as distinguishing him from others who have held onto classified records.

After the Trump team sued the Justice Department in 2022 to get his records back, Cannon appointed a special master to conduct an independent review of the documents taken during the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search. That appointment was later overturned by a federal appeals court.

On Thursday, she wrestled with the unprecedented nature of the case, noted that no former president had ever faced criminal jeopardy for mishandling classified information.

But, Bratt responded, “there was never a situation remotely similar to this one.”

Trump is separately charged in a federal case in Washington with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump has argued in both federal cases that presidential immunity protects him from prosecution, though Cannon has not agreed to hear arguments on that claim in the documents case.

The U.S Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on Trump’s immunity claim in the election interference case next month.

The dispute centers on the Trump team’s interpretation of the Presidential Records Act, which they say gave him the authority to designate the documents as personal and maintain possession of them after his presidency.

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team, by contrast, says the files Trump is charged with possessing are presidential records, not personal ones, and that the statute does not apply to classified and top-secret documents like those kept at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

The Presidential Records Act “does not exempt Trump from the criminal law, entitle him to unilaterally declare highly classified presidential records to be personal records, or shield him from criminal investigations — let alone allow him to obstruct a federal investigation with impunity,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing last week.

It was not clear when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon might rule, but the outcome will determine whether the case proceeds or whether, as Trump’s lawyers hope, it is thrown out before ever reaching a jury — a rare action for a judge to take.

Donald Trump Mar 1

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Trump lawyers urge judge to set classified documents trial after presidential election

Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, is also expected to hear arguments Thursday on a separate but related Trump team motion that says the statute that forms the bulk of the criminal charges — making it a crime to willfully retain national defense information — is unconstitutionally vague as it applies to a former president.

It is not surprising that defense lawyers are seeking dismissal of the case based on the Presidential Records Act given that the legal team has repeatedly invoked the statute since the FBI’s August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago.

The law, enacted in 1978, requires presidents upon leaving office to transfer their presidential records to the U.S. government for management — specifically, the National Archives and Records Administration — though they are permitted to retain personal records, including diaries and notes that are purely private and not prepared for government business.

Trump’s lawyers have said that he designated as personal property the records he took with him to Mar-a-Lago, which prosecutors say included top-secret information and documents related to nuclear programs and the military capabilities of the U.S. and foreign adversaries.

Cannon has suggested in the past that she sees Trump’s status as a former president as distinguishing him from others who have held onto classified records.

After the Trump team sued the Justice Department in 2022 to get his records back, Cannon appointed a special master to conduct an independent review of the documents taken during the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search. That appointment was later overturned by a federal appeals court.

More recently, even while ruling in favor of Smith’s team on a procedural question, Cannon pointedly described the case as the “first-ever criminal prosecution of a former United States President — once the country’s chief classification authority over many of the documents the Special Counsel now seeks to withhold from him (and his cleared counsel) — in a case without charges of transmission or delivery of national defense information.”

Trump faces 40 felony counts in Florida that accuse him of willfully retaining dozens of classified documents and rebuffing government demands to give them back after he left the White House. Prosecutors in recent court filings have stressed the scope of criminal conduct that they say they expect to prove at trial, saying in one that “there has never been a case in American history in which a former official has engaged in conduct remotely similar to Trump’s.”

They allege, for instance, that Trump intentionally held onto some of the nation’s most sensitive documents — only returning a fraction of them upon demand by the National Archives — and then urged his lawyer to hide records and to lie to the FBI by saying he no longer was in possession of them. He’s also charged with enlisting staff to delete surveillance footage that would show boxes of documents being moved around the property.

The hearing is the second this month in the case in Florida, one of four prosecutions Trump confronts as he seeks to reclaim the White House this year. Cannon heard arguments on March 1 on when to set a trial date, but has not immediately ruled. Both sides have proposed summertime dates for the trial to begin.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan told Trump’s attorney in a written order that he won’t delay deadlines for posting a bond that would ensure 80-year-old writer E. Jean Carroll can be paid the award if the judgment survives appeals.

The judge said any financial harm to the Republican front-runner for the presidency results from his slow response to the late-January verdict in the defamation case resulting from statements Trump made about Carroll while he was president in 2019 after she revealed her claims against him in a memoir.

At the time, Trump accused her of making up claims that he raped her in the dressing room of a luxury Manhattan department store in spring 1996. A jury last May at a trial Trump did not attend awarded Carroll $5 million in damages, finding that Trump sexually abused her but did not rape her as rape was defined under New York state law. It also concluded that he defamed her in statements in October 2022.

Trump attended the January trial and briefly testified, though his remarks were severely limited by the judge, who had ruled that the jury had to accept the May verdict and was only to decide how much in damages, if any, Carroll was owed for Trump’s 2019 statements. In the statements, Trump claimed he didn’t know Carroll and accused her of making up lies to sell books and harm him politically.

Trump’s lawyers have challenged the judgment, which included a $65 million punitive award, saying there was a “strong probability” it will be reduced or eliminated on appeal.

In his order Thursday, Kaplan noted that Trump’s lawyers waited 25 days to seek to delay when a bond must be posted. The judgment becomes final Monday.

“Mr. Trump’s current situation is a result of his own dilatory actions,” Kaplan wrote.

The judge noted that Trump’s lawyers seek to delay execution of the jury award until three days after Kaplan rules on their request to suspend the jury award pending consideration of their challenges to the judgment because preparations to post a bond could “impose irreparable injury in the form of substantial costs.”

Kaplan, though, said the expense of ongoing litigation does not constitute irreparable injury.

“Nor has Mr. Trump made any showing of what expenses he might incur if required to post a bond or other security, on what terms (if any) he could obtain a conventional bond, or post cash or other assets to secure payment of the judgment, or any other circumstances relevant to the situation,” the judge said.

Trump’s attorney, Alina Habba, did not immediately comment.

Since the January verdict, a state court judge in New York in a separate case has ordered Trump and his companies to pay $355 million in penalties for a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth. With interest, he owes the state nearly $454 million.

At a rally Saturday in Greensboro, Trump compared Robinson, who is Black, to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the famed civil rights leader. Trump referred to Robinson as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

Trump said Robinson wasn’t sure how to respond when Trump compared him to the legendary civil rights leader, telling him: “I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two.”

“You should like it,” Trump said.

Trump listed Robinson among several candidates that people should vote for in Tuesday’s North Carolina Republican primaries, saying “they have my complete and total endorsement.” Trump is also on the primary ballot as he seeks to all but eliminate his last remaining rival, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, from mathematical contention for the GOP nomination.

Despite the lack of a formal endorsement, the ex-president’s support combined with strong fundraising and popularity among the GOP’s base have helped make Robinson the GOP’s front-runner for the gubernatorial nomination.

Robinson’s primary rivals — State Treasurer Dale Folwell and trial attorney Bill Graham — have questioned his ability to win the general election in November, particularly in light of harsh comments on LGBTQ+ rights and other issues.

Trump called Robinson, who also spoke at Saturday’s rally, an “incredible gentleman” and “great, natural speaker.” Trump recalled, with some imprecision, how Robinson rose to fame following a 2018 speech to the Greensboro City Council in support of gun rights and police that went viral.

That led Robinson to a National Rifle Association board position and being elected the state’s first Black lieutenant governor in 2020 in his first bid for public office.

Robinson, a Greensboro native, said in a news release that he was “humbled” to have Trump’s endorsement and looked forward to working with Trump to “lead our united Republican ticket to victory in November, and get our state and country back on track.”

Voters also will choose a Democratic nominee for governor on Tuesday. The field includes Attorney General Josh Stein and former state Supreme Court Associate Justice Mike Morgan. Term-limited Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper endorsed Stein months ago.

State Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton said the endorsement wasn’t a surprise. North Carolina doesn’t need a leader in Robinson who would “prioritize job-killing culture wars that take our state backward,” she added in a news release.

Statewide elections are usually close affairs in the nation’s ninth-largest state.

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Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.

After several days of extraordinary testimony, Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee heard arguments over whether Willis’ relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade amounts to a conflict of interest that should force them off one of four criminal criminal cases against the former president.

Attorneys for Trump and some of his co-defendants accused Willis and Wade of lying on the witness stand about when their relationship began, and told McAfee that keeping the district attorney on the case threatens to undermine the public’s confidence in the hugely consequential prosecution.

“Think of the message that would be sent if they were not disqualified,” said Harry MacDougald, who represents former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark in the election case. “If this is tolerated, we will get more of it. This office is a global laughingstock because of their conduct.”

Willis’ office, meanwhile, said the lawyers have failed to provide evidence that the district attorney benefited financially from the relationship with Wade, which the pair say ended last summer. Adam Abbate, a prosecutor with the DA’s office, accused the attorneys of pushing “speculation and conjecture” and trying to embarrass Willis with questions on the witness stand that Abbate said had nothing to do with the conflict of interest question.

“It’s a desperate attempt to remove a prosecutor from a case for absolutely no reason, your honor, other than harassment and embarrassment,” he said.

McAfee said at the end of the hearing that there are “several legal issues to sort through, several factual determinations that I have to make,” adding that he “will be taking the time to make sure that I give this case the full consideration it’s due.”

Willis walked into the hearing after attorneys for the election case defendants wrapped up their arguments, and sat at a table where Wade and his attorney were also seated while listening to Abbate make his case.

The legal arguments follow several days of hearings filled with salacious testimony that has created a soap opera atmosphere overshadowing the underlying charges accusing the former president of working to overturn his 2020 election loss in a desperate bid to cling to power. Willis and Wade were forced to answer uncomfortable questions on the witness stand about their sex life and romantic getaways, underscoring the extent to which the focus of the case has wandered from allegations of election interference to the prosecutors’ love lives.

Even if Willis fends off the disqualification effort, the allegations have threatened to taint the public’s perception of the prosecution. Trump and others have seized on the relationship to try to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the case as the Republican presidential primary front-runner vies to reclaim the White House.

Attorneys for Trump and some of his co-defendants say Willis paid Wade large sums for his work and then improperly benefited when he paid for vacations for the two of them.

Willis and Wade have acknowledged the relationship, but say it has no bearing on the case against Trump. The pair said they didn’t begin dating until the spring of 2022, after Wade was hired, and that they split travel expenses.

The hearings have at times wandered into surreal territory: Atlanta’s mayor watching from the gallery as a former Georgia governor testified, details of romantic getaways, and Willis’ father talking about keeping stashes of cash around the house.

Willis’ removal would throw the most sprawling of the four criminal cases against Trump into question. But it wouldn’t necessarily mean the charges against him and 14 others would be dropped. A nonpartisan council supporting prosecuting attorneys in Georgia would be tasked with finding a new attorney to take over. That person could either proceed with some or all of the charges against Trump and others, or drop the case altogether.

Even if a new lawyer moved forward on the path charted by Willis, the inevitable delay would seem likely to lessen the probability of the case getting to trial before November’s presidential election when Trump is expected to be the Republican nominee.

At a hearing preceding testimony, McAfee noted that under the law, “disqualification can occur if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one.” He said he wanted testimony to explore “whether a relationship existed, whether that relationship was romantic or non-romantic in nature, when it formed and whether it continues.”

Those questions were only relevant “in combination with the question of the existence and extent of any personal benefit conveyed as a result of the relationship,” McAfee said.

A Fulton County grand jury indicted Trump and 18 others in August on charges related to efforts to keep the Republican incumbent in power even though he lost the election to Democrat Joe Biden. Four people have pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors, while Trump and 14 others have pleaded not guilty.

Willis and Wade’s relationship was first exposed in a motion filed by an attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman that sought to have the indictment dismissed and to bar Willis and Wade and their offices from continuing to prosecute the case. The motion alleges Willis and Wade were already dating when she hired him as special prosecutor for the election case in November 2021.

Robin Yeartie, Willis’ former friend and employee, testified she saw the pair hugging and kissing long before Willis hired Wade. But Wade’s former law partner and onetime divorce attorney, Terrence Bradley, expected to be a key witness for lawyers trying to disqualify Willis, was at times evasive during testimony, and said he had “no direct knowledge of when the relationship started.”

In one of hundreds of text messages Bradley exchanged with Roman’s attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, however, he told her that he “absolutely” believed the relationship began before Willis hired Wade. In other texts, which were obtained by The Associated Press, Bradley fed information to Merchant over a period of several months to help her prove her allegations.

Trump’s attorneys filed an analysis of location data from Wade’s cellphone that they say supports the assertion Willis and Wade began dating before he was hired. An investigator’s statement says Wade’s phone was in the neighborhood south of Atlanta where Willis was living at least 35 times in the first 11 months of 2021. Wade had testified he visited Willis’ condo fewer than 10 times before his hiring.