Too bad........

After 5 hours and 2 cryptic notes, Trump jury fails to reach quick verdict

How do you figure out what 12 anonymous New Yorkers who are meeting in secret are thinking?

By KYLE CHENEY and BEN FEUERHERD

Donald Trump’s criminal trial has reached its coda, the slow deep breath before a jury renders a historic decision that will unleash a whirlwind upon the 2024 presidential campaign.

The jury’s deliberations, which are carried out in secret, mark the most tense and suspenseful moment of a trial meant to determine whether Trump falsified business records to cover up a hush money scheme aimed at influencing the 2016 election.

His fate now rests with the 12 people his lawyers and prosecutors chose more than a month ago. After receiving final instructions from the judge on Wednesday morning, those 12 Manhattanites deliberated for nearly five hours before being excused for the day without reaching a verdict.

No one other than the jurors themselves know what they’re discussing in the drab cloisters of the Manhattan criminal courthouse or when — and even if — they might come to a unanimous verdict.

In other words, after weeks of noise — screaming matches among lawyers, blistering interrogations of high-profile witnesses, salacious details of an alleged sexual encounter between Trump and a porn star — everything has gone quiet.

And with that quiet has come intense speculation. Was a juror really making friendly facial expressions at Trump allies throughout the trial? Did the jurors’ request on Wednesday afternoon to review certain excerpts of testimony from key prosecution witnesses portend doom for Trump? And did their request, a few minutes later, to hear the judge rehash his instructions give Trump new reason to hope?

Guesswork, armchair psychoanalysis and expositions on human nature ruled the day.

In some respects, this period of limbo between testimony and verdict is a feature of every criminal trial, particularly when a defendant’s liberty is at stake. In this case, far more hangs in the balance, as Trump pursues a second term in the White House and appears for now to have a slight polling edge on President Joe Biden.

Trump himself has remained agitated, and seemed particularly so as the case shifted out of the lawyers’ hands and into the jury’s.

“I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE CHARGES ARE IN THIS RIGGED CASE,” Trump blared on Truth Social one hour into deliberations. “I AM ENTITLED TO SPECIFICITY JUST LIKE ANYONE ELSE. THERE IS NO CRIME!”

Trump also seems to be grappling with the possibility of jail time that could result from a conviction. In comments to reporters as he left court Wednesday, Trump alluded to his former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who he said was “suffering greatly” in jail at Rikers Island, where he’s serving five months for perjuring himself during the Trump Organization’s civil business fraud trial last year.

Trump and his allies have also been lowering expectations, suggesting a guilty verdict is all but assured. Trump said earlier Wednesday that “Mother Teresa” couldn’t beat the case he’s facing. And others predicted the jury would race to deliver a conviction because of a “rigged” process.

The only insight at all into the jury’s thinking came in the form of two jury notes.

The first note provided tea leaves for jury watchers. The panel requested to review testimony from four moments in the trial when key witnesses described events central to the allegation that Trump conspired with his former fixer, Michael Cohen, and tabloid publisher David Pecker to bury negative stories during the 2016 campaign.

The testimony requested delves into the pivotal 2015 Trump Tower meeting, a 2016 phone call between Pecker and Trump and evidence about why Pecker backed out of a deal to turn over Karen McDougal’s story to Cohen. (McDougal, a former Playboy model, said she’d had an affair with Trump.) All of the testimony relates to the conspiracy prosecutors alleged is at the heart of the case.

In a second note, jurors made another request that served as a Rorschach test for court observers: Could Merchan please reread his 55-page jury instructions?

At the start of those instructions, Merchan emphasized that the case was now up to the jury. He told them not to inform him of the status of their deliberations or which way the jury or individual jurors are leaning.

“It is not my responsibility to judge the evidence here,” he told the panel. “It is yours. You are the judges of the facts, and you are responsible for deciding whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty.”