Court adjourns after first day of Trump’s historic criminal trial – as it happened (2024)

Shortly, we should have the first set of potential jurors enter the courtroom where they will give their responses verbally to a 42-point questionnaire.

There are several categories of questions, including: in which New York neighborhood they live, their educational background, whether they’ve engaged in political activism or previously served on a jury.

Then there are questions aimed at other subconscious biases, like whether they get their news from left-leaning outlets like MSNBC or the Washington Post, or right-leaning outlets like Fox News or the New York Post.

Also on the questionnaire their knowledge about Trump generally, whether they know of his books, if they’ve attended a rally, knowledge of Trump’s associates — both for Trump and against him.

The prosecution team has entered the courtroom. They are shuffling and organizing papers on their desk.

They are Susan Hoffinger, Joshua Steinglass, and Matthew Colangelo.

One of Trump’s attorneys can be seen milling about the courtroom.

Donald Trump is now inside the Manhattan courthouse, after his motorcade pulled up outside the building just after 9am ET.

Trump has arrived at the New York criminal court for the start of jury selection. Trump travelled to court with his lawyers, including Todd Blanche and Emil Bove.

Donald Trump has just walked out of Trump Tower to his motorcade, which will take him to the 100 Centre Street courtroom, reports Hugo Lowell.

Wearing a blue suit and red tie, Trump waved to a collection of news cameras posted across the street before ducking into his secret service vehicle.

Victoria Bekiempis is reporting from the 100 Centre Street courthouse in Manhattan.

A handful of protesters are gathered in the park across the street from the 100 Centre Street courthouse in downtown Manhattan. One has a sign that reads TRUMP CRIMINAL TRIAL that appears appears spray-painted on bedsheet-like fabric.

Last year, for Trump’s arraignment, there was chaos outside the courtroom, because people were admitted on a first-come, first-served basis. Some media outlets hired professional line-sitters to wait for them.

Today, Victoria reports that the line to get into the courtroom and adjacent overflow room is orderly.

In room 1523, journalists started taking their seats on wood benches shortly after 8am. There are two large television screens where those in attendance will be able to watch video and listen to jury selection, which is in room 1530, just down the hall.

Before prospective jurors are brought into the courtroom, it is likely that both sides will confer briefly over outstanding issues. Whenever that wraps, Trump is poised to start facing potential panelists, who will be screened for potential biases in a selection process that will easily take at least one week.

Trump himself is expected to arrive at the courthouse some time around 9:30am.

There are, as yet, no visible Maga supporters gathered outside.

Some are already well known – and others are likely to become household names starting today.

If you’ve successfully managed to find your way to the internet to read this, you’ve likely heard of the defendant, Donald Trump.

There’s also Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, an adult film star who says she met Trump in 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament. She was 27, Trump was 60. She says she took $130,000 from Trump’s lawyers to keep quiet about their affair because, as she told 60 Minutes: “The story was coming out again. I was concerned for my family and their safety.”

Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, also claimed to have had an affair with Trump. She was paid $150,000 by the National Enquirer, which bought her story in order to not publish it – a practice known as “catch and kill”. Allegedly those payments also came from Trump.

Michael Cohen is the lawyer and former Trump loyalist who facilitated the payments. Trump is accused of working with Cohen and Trump organization officials to conceal the purpose of those payments on business records. In 2018, Cohen pled guilty to a range of federal crimes, including campaign finance charges, and said he made the payments at the direction of Trump. He served a three-year prison sentence. He was also disbarred in New York in 2019 after pleading guilty to lying to Congress.

David Pecker is the CEO of American Media Inc (AMI), the publisher of the National Enquirer. As well as the Playboy model’s story, AMI paid $30,000 to a former doorman at Trump Tower who was trying to sell a story that Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock.

There’s Allen Weisselberg, the former CFO of the Trump Organization who worked for the company for more than 50 years. He has already been sentenced to prison twice, but has so far refused to turn on Trump. He played a key role in concealing the purpose of Trump’s repayments to Cohen, according to the indictment.

And some of the court players:

Juan Merchan. The judge was born in Colombia and grew up in New York City. He has moved the case along quickly, and recently expanded a gag order against Trump after the former president repeatedly attacked his daughter, who has worked for various Democratic political candidates.

The district attorney who has brought the case against Trump is Alvin Bragg. Elected in 2021 to be the top prosecutor in Manhattan, he initially slow-walked a criminal investigation into Trump’s financial assets, prompting the prosecutors to resign; but then surprised everyone by moving forward with the hush-money case instead.

Trump’s lawyer is Todd Blanche. A well-respected former prosecutor who left his job at a white-collar firm to represent Trump, this will only be his second trial as a defense lawyer.

Read more details in our explainer, below.

So what happens today?

Well, Trump will be present, though he won’t be testifying or anything like that yet. (He may never: he has a history of talking big about cases, only to refuse to speak under oath.) He’s likely to speak to the media outside the courthouse about the case, although he is under a gag order to prevent him from making public statements about witnesses, prosecutors, court staff, and the family members of the judge, Juan Merchan, and the district attorney, Alvin Bragg – though not about those two men themselves.

Mainly, like everyone else, he’ll be watching the trial kick off with jury selection, which could last a couple of weeks of what’s expected to be a roughly six-week trial.

Finding 12 human beings who don’t have an opinion about the guy who has absolutely dominated media coverage for nearly a decade will be next to impossible. The judge has acknowledged this, and ruled that merely liking or disliking Trump itself won’t be grounds to dismiss a juror. Instead, Merchan will be looking for people who can be reasonably fair and impartial, whatever their personal opinions of Trump. Each juror will answer a questionnaire, including whether they support far-left or far-right movements and which podcasts and newspapers they subscribe to.

Trump’s team will be looking for jurors that support him. Some analysts go as far as to say that, given the huge weight of evidence against him, Trump’s strategy will likely be to find just one juror who secretly intends to support Trump no matter what facts emerge. That bias could lead to jury nullification and a mistrial. In other words, a win for Trump.

Prosecutors, for their part, will be hoping to find 12 people who are willing to treat the facts at face value and intelligent enough to understand campaign finance law.

But there’s another jury here, as Trump well knows – the jury of public opinion. Remember, even if Trump is convicted and serves time in prison, he could still be elected president. So he will no doubt use every opportunity he can – including on the steps of the courthouse today – to shout his message that everything’s a “deep state” conspiracy, in the hopes that whether he wins or loses he gets a bump in the polls: either for an acquittal, or as a martyr.

You might be forgiven for asking: so which case is this again?

After all, Trump faces four different investigations:

He’s also accused of taking classified documents from the White House and showing them off to random people at his country club, including top secret information about America’s nuclear arsenal.

And he’s accused twice (one federal case, one in Georgia) for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden but then worked doggedly to undermine, efforts that culminated when a mob who believed Trump’s election lies stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in order to stop Congress from transferring power to Joe Biden.

And don’t confuse this case for two civil cases Trump has just lost – for defaming the writer E Jean Carroll by claiming that she was lying about Trump raping her, which a judge determined was “substantially true” – and another for fraud, specifically inflating the value of his properties in New York in order to win more favourable loans. So far he owes more than $500m for those defeats.

Trump’s other criminal cases, however – while seemingly even more consequential than the Stormy Daniels one – have become bogged down. Trump has pursued a strategy of filing endless movements and appeals, in a naked attempt to delay the cases. Largely, it has worked.

That means the Stormy Daniels case, brought by the district attorney Alvin Bragg in New York, could be the only one he faces before the presidential election on 5 November. And should should he regain the presidency, Trump could move to quash the two federal cases – though not the Georgia one. But in that case the DA, Fani Willis, has been embroiled in a controversy for allegedly hiring her married boyfriend as a prosecutor.

It’s enough to make your head spin.

It’s also, however, very simple. Finally, after nearly eight years since he first started actively trying to subvert democracy, Trump faces a criminal trial. He can’t delay any longer.

Today, he’ll be in the courtroom.

Good morning, this is Chris Michael.

Today marks a first in American history: a US president is going on trial for criminal charges.

Donald Trump, winner of the 2016 election, loser in 2020 and now once again the presumptive Republican nominee in 2024, is accused of attempting to interfere with the first of those elections, by paying hush money to hide information from the American voters – specifically, the fact that he had an affair with an adult film star, Stephanie Clifford, AKA Stormy Daniels.

Prosecutors say he had his attorney, Michael Cohen, pay $130,000 to a Daniels attorney in order to buy her silence. Similarly, they say he participated in a “catch and kill” scheme with the National Enquirer to buy another affair story – this one from the Playboy model Karen McDougall – in order to not publish it.

Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records after he allegedly repaid his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for the payments but listed them as legal fees. This would, prosecutors say, violate campaign finance law because the payments were intended to keep valuable information away from US voters right before the 2016 election.

All of this came, if you’ll recall, around the time of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, where Trump bragged he could sexually assault women because of his fame. Prosecutors say Trump was terrified that if another story came out, about affairs with a p*rn star, it could cost him the 2016 election. Of course, the story didn’t come out, and he won the presidency.

It is a tricky case – not necessarily because of the facts of the hush-money payments themselves, but because prosecutors will have to prove Trump’s intent to commit a crime.

It also plays out in the thick of a presidential campaign, where Trump is running neck and neck in the polls with the US president, Joe Biden.

Strap in.