Trump’s Historic Guilty Verdict and What It Means for 2024
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A New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records, making him the first former US president to be convicted of a felony.
Bloomberg legal reporter David Voreacos, who has been following the case from inside the courthouse, and Washington Bureau senior editor Wendy Benjaminson join host David Gura to discuss the trial, its historic outcome and how this could shape the rest of the 2024 election cycle.
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Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:
David Gura: After two days of deliberations, the jury in Donald Trump's hush money trial has reached a verdict. It is a history-making moment. Former President Donald Trump has been found guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
The ruling makes Trump the first former or sitting US president to be convicted of a felony. I'm David Gura, joining you from outside the courthouse in Manhattan, where the verdict has just come in, and as that verdict was being announced, as it trickled from the courthouse, the president sat silently as that verdict was announced. Rather motionlessly according to our reporters who are in the courtroom. After the verdict was announced, he left the courtroom and walked the lobby of the courthouse here in Lower Manhattan and delivered a statement decrying the proceedings that had taken place, vowing to fight them, and looking ahead to the election on November the 5th.
Today on the show: What the outcome of Trump’s trial in Manhattan means for the former president.
We go inside the courthouse, with Bloomberg legal reporter David Voreacos:
David Voreacos: There was a bit of an air of unreality that all of this was actually happening.
Gura: And we break down how this could shape the rest of Trump’s campaign, with Wendy Benjaminson, senior editor in Bloomberg’s Washington bureau overseeing our polling coverage.
Wendy Benjaminson: It's, um, I'm speechless. It is. It's unprecedented in American history.
Gura: This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I’m David Gura.
Voreacos: I think everyone in the courtroom is aware of the historical significance of this. There's never been a current or former president charged with a crime in US history.
Gura: David Voreacos was in the Manhattan court where Trump’s trial unfolded, and he followed every beat of the proceedings for Bloomberg. I checked in with David in the lead-up to the verdict.
Remind us, if you would, what the charges were that Donald Trump faced in this trial.
Voreacos: 34 counts of falsifying business records. They have to do with a very elaborate payment and cover up scheme that's been alleged by the government.
Gura: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought charges against Trump in March of 2023, accusing him of falsifying records to cover up alleged hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Voreacos: That is normally a misdemeanor, falsifying business records, but Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, elevated it to a felony case because he said the payments were done with the intent to commit other crimes, and those other crimes are state and federal election law violations or state tax violations.
Gura: And this part is critical. Prosecutors did not have to prove that Trump or his company actually committed tax fraud or election crimes.
Voreacos: Only that Trump intended to commit them. And now this is a very difficult and sort of squishy part of the case, because it goes directly to Trump's intent. Did he intend to commit election crimes in 2016 and 2017?
Gura: Now, after over four weeks in court, the jury has made a momentous ruling. All 12 of them have agreed that, beyond a reasonable doubt, former President Donald Trump did at least intend to commit election crimes. I asked senior editor Wendy Benjaminson about this.
Wendy, we had this unprecedented trial. Now we have an unprecedented verdict, a former US president convicted on, on criminal charges. How do you think about the importance of, of this moment in the sweep of history?
Benjaminson: It's astounding. Not only do we have the first former president of the United States who is a convicted felon, if he is elected, it will be the first time in American history that a convicted felon sits in the Oval Office. I, you just can't overstate the, the, the shock I feel when I, when I say this.
Gura: Wendy, I got to imagine that you've had conversations among fellow editors and reporters about this coming to pass and what it might mean. What's your thinking, or what's your sense of what will happen next?
Benjaminson: I have no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump will appeal and will drag out the resolution of this case as long as legally possible. This has been his pattern since he was sued as a young businessman way back in the seventies. He's had hundreds of lawsuits since then. Now we've seen criminal trials and civil lawsuits for attacking E. Jean Carroll.
He managed in fact, to drag out the other three trials that he was supposed to face before the election. All of those have been pushed back now till probably after the election. And he's even managed to get the Supreme Court to weigh whether he is immune and any president is immune from prosecution for criminal activity, from actions taken in the White House. So, he will appeal. It will appeal for the New York state system. But that won't stop the fact that a jury of his peers convicted him of these crimes.
Gura: The outcome of Trump’s trial is history-making. After the break, we zoom in on key moments throughout the trial with Bloomberg’s David Voreacos, and take you inside the room where it all happened.
David Voreacos has covered countless trials in his career. I sat down with him near the end of this one, just before the closing statements, and he told me, even beyond the big-picture significance of this case, the day-to-day proceedings were different than most cases he’s covered.
Voreacos: Donald Trump is a nonstop news story. I've never covered a case where the defendant walks out into the hallway and gives a press conference several times a day to a large media crowd.
Gura: For somebody who hasn't been to this part of lower Manhattan, hasn't seen this courthouse, what's it like under more normal circumstances and what's it been like over these last few weeks?
Voreacos: It's a somewhat dingy building that's decades old, it sort of feels like time has passed it by, the city can't afford to keep it in tip top shape. So, it's kind of incongruous, this billionaire having to come every day to this courtroom. And the reporters line up starting around 6 in the morning for proceedings that begin at 9:30. It's a long and arduous day for all concerned. And for Trump, he has a lot of security around him. He has Secret Service. So the proceedings have a sort of edgy air about them.
Gura: Now remember, prosecutors did not have to prove that Trump committed election crimes. Just that he intended to commit them.
Over the weeks of this trial, how did they try to establish that for the jury that he was aware of it and a part of this scheme?
Voreacos: It was a very comprehensive presentation by the prosecutors.
The jurors heard testimony from several witnesses that Trump was a micromanager and kind of fanatically devoted to the details of how his company operated, trying to suggest that it would be improbable at best, for Trump to sign a reimbursement for $130,000 hush payment without him knowing what it was really for.
There was testimony about the impact of the Access Hollywood tape that came out in early October of 2016.
We got testimony about how that was a crisis moment for the campaign, because he needed women voters to win the election over Hillary Clinton. And so when Stormy Daniels came forward, the market for her story soared as a result of the Access Hollywood tape.
We also got testimony from Hope Hicks, his former press secretary, who said that in early 2018, as details of the Stormy Daniels payment were starting to surface in Wall Street Journal stories, that Donald Trump said to Hope Hicks, he's glad this story didn't come out before the election.
Gura: The jury also heard from other key witnesses, like Stormy Daniels, the adult film star at the center of the hush money scandal. And Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney and fixer.
Voreacos: He was intensely loyal to Donald Trump, for a decade and did his dirty work to clean up his messes, so to speak. He's now an avowed enemy of Trump.
Gura: There was also David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer.
Voreacos: Who testified at length about how the National Enquirer went out of its way to boost Donald Trump's campaign and attack his enemies. And look for stories that may be damaging to Donald Trump about women and tell Michael Cohen so he could alert Donald Trump.
Gura: Now, Cohen and Pecker have both already acknowledged that they broke election laws while doing this. Cohen pleaded guilty to violating tax and election laws back in 2018, and Pecker’s National Enquirer entered into what’s called a non-prosecution agreement. But the prosecution in this case couldn’t use either man’s admission against Trump as evidence.
Instead, they tried to use documents:
Voreacos: The jurors saw all of the checks and the vouchers and the invoices associated with the 34 counts. Trump directly signed nine of those checks out of his personal account, and two of them came out of the trust account that ultimately he controlled, but that he didn't sign. They saw the ledger of the Trump organization and how the company, treated those expenses in their books and records.
We also saw a document that was a bank statement for the shell company that Michael Cohen set up that had handwritten notes on it from Allen Weisselberg, who had been the chief financial officer at the Trump Organization, in which he outlined the terms of the repayment. That's about as close to a smoking gun as the prosecution has.
Gura: David pointed to a few other notable moments in Cohen’s testimony.
One involved a secret recording Cohen took of a conversation he had with Trump, allegedly about another hush money agreement with a former Playboy playmate. In another tense moment of cross-examination, one of Trump’s lawyers accused Cohen of lying about what he discussed on a particular phone call.
Voreacos: On October 24th, 2016 at 8:02 p.m. They spoke for 96 seconds the phone records show, but we don't know exactly what they said. There was one other moment in the Cohen testimony in which Cohen essentially admitted that he stole $30,000 from the Trump organization.
Gura: Meanwhile, Trump’s defense made a case that Cohen is a liar and a fraud. They also argued that it wasn’t election results that drove Trump to try and cover up this story—it was concern for his family.
I've done some trial coverage before and I think what's so interesting about it is how much of a contained drama it is. You're in this universe largely controlled by the judge and you can kind of forget what's happening outside of that room. In some courts you can't have a phone, access to the internet.
Here we sort of saw that wall breaking down a bit. You mentioned a moment ago Donald Trump would speak to the press often many times a day during these proceedings. How much did that come into the courtroom? How much were you aware of that as a reporter covering it?
Voreacos: Everyone in the courtroom was aware of what Trump was saying outside. There were pool reporters who would send reports instantly. So by the time Donald Trump sat down again in court, say, after the lunch break, everyone knew what he said in the hallway. And so you had this incongruous situation where, people were aware of what he's saying on the outside, yet, in the court itself, Donald Trump, remained silent, and he had the opportunity to testify, and in fact had said several times that he would testify, but when it came down to it, he elected not to testify.
Gura: Were you surprised that he didn't testify?
Voreacos: I was not surprised. His lawyers didn't explain, but it seemed obvious that it posed a lot of peril on cross examination.
Gura: While Trump didn’t take the stand, David told me, he was still the center of everyone’s attention.
Voreacos: I mean, he's the story, all eyes are on him at all times. So, everyone wants to know what is Trump doing, how is he reacting. There were cameras in the court that would show his face. So people in the courtroom and in the overflow courtroom would use binoculars to try to gauge what his facial expressions and body language were saying.
And, there were a number of days where, for long stretches, Trump would close his eyes during the testimony, particularly during Michael Cohen's testimony, and that was quite striking.
Gura: What was the dynamic like between him and the judge in this case?
Voreacos: Judge Merchan has shown considerable restraint in dealing with Donald Trump. There was one moment where he called the lawyers up to the bench to essentially say, ‘I heard your client cursing, and I don't want to embarrass him, but I want you to tell him to stop.’
Trump has not been particularly courteous back to the judge. And in fact, he came out of the courtroom, and on the campaign trail, sort of lashed out at the proceedings, lashed out at the judge, lashed out at the witnesses, and that led, uh, the prosecutors to, asked the judge to hold him in contempt of court, which is what happened.
Gura: Donald Trump is assessed fines for violating that gag order for being in contempt of court. And then there's this moment where apparently the judge has had enough. And he says, ‘You know, I, if this isn't an incentive for you to stop doing this, disparaging the jury and the proceedings, I could put you in jail.’ How big a moment was that?
Voreacos: I think everyone in the courtroom was a little taken aback because everyone thought, what would that look like? What would it entail to send Donald Trump to jail in the middle of his trial? And the judge himself, I think, saw that as a sobering and momentous point in the trial and ultimately, he decided not to do it.
Gura: Another notable moment: When senior members of the GOP arrived in a show of support for the former president. I asked Bloomberg’s Wendy Benjaminson about this.
What did you make as you saw that entourage start to coalesce around the former president as these lawmakers made their way by train or car, whatever means, to, to New York to stand outside the courthouse with him and, and some of them went inside and sat behind him in, in the courtroom itself?
Benjaminson: It was astounding, to be honest, because first of all, when I say Republican leadership, I mean the Speaker of the House, chairmen of large committees. These were senior members of Congress who were going up to defend, former president of the United States, who was standing trial on felony charges, there was no sense of let's let the court system play out. We'll comment on this once the jury has spoken. You know, there was one moment when Michael Cohen was on the stand and the courtroom doors fling open and there's the entire Republican leadership of the House.
Gura: Looking ahead, Trump still has three other pending criminal cases against him — one in DC for conspiring to overturn the election on January 6th; another in Florida, for taking classified documents from the White House; and a third in Georgia, for trying to overturn the election results in that state.
But Wendy told me, it’s not clear whether any of this will actually hurt Trump’s chances of retaking the White House in November.
Wendy, this took place in the crucible of a presidential campaign and something that we heard from the former president at the beginning of this was, it was going to handicap him. He wasn't going to be able to campaign like his rival, he wouldn't be able to go out on the trail and make his case to the American people. Now that the trial is over, how much of that was borne out? In fact, how much did this forestall Donald Trump from campaigning?
Benjaminson: None of it was borne out in fact, and none of it forestalled Donald Trump. He managed to finagle a Wednesday off, every week. So he had Wednesdays to campaign. He had the weekends to campaign. And he had a news conference almost every single day he was at the courthouse.
Gura: Am I right to assume he's going to use this as a, as a tool, certainly a rhetorical tool, on the campaign trail? What is your sense of how resonant that will be?
Benjaminson: Well, I think we will never hear the end of this, to be honest. He will say that he is a victim of crooked Joe Biden, I'm using his words, Crooked Joe Biden's political witch hunt to take him down because they're all scared of him and his popularity. So we will hear nothing except this until the election itself.
A few months ago, we asked people, would it change your vote if Donald Trump were convicted of a crime before the election? Half of voters said it would affect their vote. Certainly, it shows that half of the electorate will take a step and start thinking now that he is convicted.
Gura: How much do they really care, about sort of Donald Trump in the courtroom facing criminal charges?
Benjaminson: I actually think they care less than either we or the Democrats or Donald Trump himself thinks. Our polling shows that the economy remains by far the number one issue. 35 percent of swing state voters have consistently said the economy — house prices, grocery prices, interest rates — is what's driving them to the polls.
When you get to the Democrats, you add abortion rights to that. Immigration is a top issue. But Trump's criminal tribulations have never been the driving force that Donald Trump portrays it to be. They really are worried about their own lives, their own pocketbooks, and those of their children's.
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