Trump trial live updates: Jury begins deliberating on verdict after receiving judge’s instructions

It’ll take a while to read back the testimony they requested and to give them the instructions again, so Judge Merchan excuses jurors for the rest of the day and bring them back tomorrow morning.

Deliberations will resume at 9.30am and they will not go on beyond 6pm.

Judge Merchan wishes them a good night.

Alex Woodward reports from the courthouse:

These questions all involve super foundational stuff — the Trump Tower meeting, the proposals from Pecker and AMI — that speak to the heart of the alleged conspiracy, which ADA Joshua Steinglass framed in his closing statement as the “prism” through which the jurors should see the rest of the case.

Not likely we’ll get to a verdict by 4:30pm based on that, but nobody knows nothin’ but the jury.

The jury has once again pushed the buzzer.

They want to rehear the jury instructions…

And finally, here’s Alex Woodward’s reporting on the jury’s fourth question regarding Michael Cohen’s testimony about the Trump Tower meeting:

Mr Trump wanted to rely on the “power” of tabloid giant National Enquirer and its placement in “supermarkets and bodegas” to place “positive stories” about him and “negative” ones about his rivals, according to Cohen.

“What [Mr Pecker] said was that he could keep an eye out for anything negative about Mr Trump and that he would be able to help us know in advance about what was coming out for us to stop it from coming out,” according to Cohen.

Cohen also said he would lead that effort on Trump’s behalf. And he would show Trump the results, “so that he knew that David was loyal, on board, and doing everything he said he would do from that August meeting,” Cohen testified.

Read the full report here:

Here’s what Alex Woodward reported regarding the jury’s third question about David Pecker’s testimony concerning his meeting at Trump Tower:

The former American Media Inc CEO joined Cohen and Mr Trump during a now-infamous meeting in August 2015 at Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he was asked “what can I do and what could my magazines do to help the campaign,” Mr Pecker recalled on Tuesday.

“I said what I would do is I would run or publish positive stories about Mr Trump and publish negative stories about his opponents,” he said. “I would also be the eyes and ears.”

But when it came to any tips about women selling stories about Mr Trump, Mr Pecker “would notify Michael Cohen, and he would be able to have them killed in the magazine, or not be published, or somebody would have to purchase them,” he said.

Read the full report here:

Here’s what Alex Woodward wrote regarding the jury’s second question about David Pecker’s testimony regarding his decision not finalize the life rights of Karen McDougal:

[David] Pecker stressed that he worked with [Michael] Cohen to buy the rights to [Karen] McDougal’s story “so it wouldn’t be published by any other organisation”.

“We didn’t want the story to embarrass Mr Trump or embarrass or hurt the campaign,” he added.

When Mr Trump requested that American Media transfer the rights to Ms McDougal’s story in September 2016, Cohen established a shell company that sent an invoice for the “agreed upon ‘flat fee’ for advisory services”.

Mr Pecker admitted that the transaction was not for that at all.

“It was for the lifetime rights to the Karen McDougal story,” he said.

Mr Pecker told Cohen that the deal was off after his conversations with counsel about the transaction, according to Mr Pecker.

“He was very, very angry, very upset, screaming basically at me,” Mr Pecker said.

“Michael Cohen said ‘the boss will be very angry with you.’ I said, ’I’m sorry, I’m not going forward, the deal is off,’” he added. “He said, ’I can’t believe it. I’m the lawyer, I’m your friend.”

American Media has never been reimbursed for the payment, according to Mr Pecker.

Read the full report here:

Here’s what Alex Woodward wrote regarding the jury’s first question about David Pecker’s testimony of his phone conversation with Donald Trump.

[Karen] McDougal turned down an initial offer of $10,000 to buy the rights to her story, according to Mr Pecker.

“She said she didn’t want to be the next Monica Lewinsky,” Mr Pecker said. “He felt that she had been more interested in having American Media buy the story than anyone else.”

Mr Trump then called Mr Pecker himself, he said.

“I spoke to Michael,” Mr Pecker recalled Mr Trump saying at the time. “Karen is a nice girl. … What do you think I should do?”

“I said, ’You should buy the story and take it off the market,’” Mr Pecker said. “I believed the story was true. I think it would have been very embarrassing for himself and for his campaign.”

Cohen then called Mr Pecker to negotiate a deal, according to Mr Pecker.

“Who’s going to pay for it?” he asked Cohen. “He said, ’Don’t worry, I’m your friend, the boss will take care of it.’”

A subsequent contract with Ms McDougal granted her a monthly column on aging and fitness for Star magazine, another one for Ok magazine, four posts a month on Radar Online, and an agreement that Mr Pecker’s American Media Inc would provide her with ghost writers, according to an agreement shown in court on Thursday.

But it granted the company “limited life story rights” that are limited to “any romantic, personal and/or physical relationship McDougal has ever had with any then-married man.”

Read the full report here:

Donald Trump boasted about having sex with adult film star Stormy Daniels at the 2006 golf tournament where they met, according to an unnamed celebrity athlete who played at the tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

The former president has consistently denied having sex with Ms Daniels, whose hush money payments by Michael Cohen ahead of the 2016 election gave rise to the 34 charges he is currently facing relating to falsified business records.

“It was clear to me and everyone who heard him that he was talking about Stormy,” the athlete said, adding that Trump encouraged other celebs to try to have sex with Daniels, behavior the athlete described as “crass,” “gross,” and “stupid.”

“He’d say all these things like, ‘You’ve gotta bang a porn star, it’s incredible,’ and, ‘It added 20 yards to my drive today,’” the athlete told The Daily Beast.

The athlete said he has not shared his story widely, and that prosecutors never approached him. His account appears to be the first publicly reported description of Trump telling people he had sex with Daniels around the time Daniels says he did.

Asked for a response to the athlete’s claims, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung falsely blamed the athlete’s decision to come forward on President Joe Biden’s political team.

The jury in Mr Trump’s criminal trial began deliberations this morning.

Alex Woodward reports from the courthouse in Lower Manhattan:

“These charges are rigged. The whole thing is rigged,” he told reporters in a hallway outside a 15th floor courtroom in Manhattan on Wednesday.

“And we have a trial like this where the judge is so conflicted he can’t breathe,” he said. ‘He’s got to do his job. It’s a disgrace. Mother Teresa could not beat those charges. But we’ll see. We’ll see how we do. It’s a very disgraceful situation.”