NEW YORK — The jury in former President Donald Trump‘s hush money trial returned with multiple requests for the judge before their deliberations ended Wednesday without a verdict after more than four hours.
The panel of 12 New Yorkers, seven men and five women, will decide whether Trump is guilty of 34 felony charges of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. Defense attorneys and prosecutors remained in the courtroom after 5 p.m. local time while jurors were dismissed and told to return Thursday morning.
Judge Juan Merchan said the jury first sent a note with four bullet points, including a request to review testimony from David Pecker, publisher of the National Enquirer as the former CEO of American Media Inc., about a 2016 phone conversation with Trump while Pecker was in an investor meeting.
The jury asked to be read back Pecker’s testimony about the deal involving AMI’s purchase of former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s life rights during the 2016 election. They also requested to be read back portions of testimony from both former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Pecker about a 2015 meeting at Trump Tower at which, prosecutors said, Trump, Cohen, and Pecker discussed a conspiracy to suppress negative stories about Trump while he ran for president.
Merchan also received another request from the jury to rehear the instructions. The judge read more than 50 pages of legal instruction to jurors earlier in the day, which took about an hour.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the request to rehear instructions was interesting in part because it may indicate at least one juror is unconvinced by either the prosecution or the defense’s arguments that the verdict should be a “no-brainer.”
“I cannot imagine a need for the instruction unless there was an early disagreement in that room on the evidence and the standards,” Turley said.
It was not immediately clear whether the jurors would have the full instructions read back to them again or whether they would rehear only a section of the instructions.
Legal experts say it is uncommon for jurors to want to hear full instructions again but more common to request to hear specific portions of instructions again.
Trump, his defense team, and prosecutors were still in the courtroom as of 5 p.m. local time to discuss the jury’s request to hear some parts of testimony again. It could take hours more to fulfill the jury’s request because a court reporter must search through the testimony on record to identify the instances that correspond to the jury’s note.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said he wanted to add an extra page of testimony to be read back to jurors about the Trump Tower meeting. Defense attorneys want to keep the testimony readback tailored to the jury’s request.
Merchan said he could understand why Blanche would be concerned about most of the portion the prosecutors wanted to add, though it wasn’t immediately clear how he would decide on that conflict.
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Trump was temporarily allowed to leave the courtroom Wednesday afternoon but remained in the building while Merchan dismissed the jury for the day.
The former president returned to the courtroom at around 5 p.m. local time on Thursday, where his attorney Blanche appeared to be smiling as he spoke to Trump.
