At Trump trial’s closings, lawyers weave facts into clashing accounts

NEW YORK — For nearly three hours on Tuesday, Donald Trump’s lawyer did his level best to persuade the jury to acquit his client, wielding a scalpel to attack nearly every strand of the criminal case against the former president.

Then it was a prosecutor’s turn. Rather than using a fine blade, he swung a sledgehammer.

Throughout a marathon closing argument that nearly outlasted daylight, the prosecutor delivered a sweeping rebuke of the former president, seeking to persuade the jury of 12 New Yorkers that Trump had falsified records to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn actor. The prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, wove together witness testimony and documents to drive home the key points of the weekslong case, the first criminal trial of an American president.

Facing the judge’s 8 p.m. deadline, Steinglass raced to the wire, stopping only to take a gulp of water as the sky darkened outside the towering courtroom windows.

“Everything Mr. Trump and his cohorts did in this case was cloaked in lies,” Steinglass said as the jurors, who had been glued to most of his presentation, began to fidget in their seats.

By the time the prosecutor finished, the courthouse had closed to other business and the traffic on lower Manhattan streets had slowed. More than 10 hours after Trump’s lawyer began the day by calling the case “absurd” and “preposterous,” Steinglass finally had the final word.

The disparate strategies — Steinglass’ closing was more than twice as long as the defense’s — reflected their separate tasks. The defense needed only to establish reasonable doubt, while the prosecution needed to persuade the jury to accept a narrative that, Steinglass argued, could lead to only one ending: guilty on all counts.

The closing arguments were each side’s last chance to pitch their case to the jury — and frame the facts to their advantage — as they drew from a deep well of evidence: testimony from 22 witnesses, reams of emails and a surreptitious recording of Trump coordinating a secret payoff.

Starting Wednesday, the power will shift from the lawyers at the lectern to the jurors in the deliberation room. The jury could take anywhere from a few hours to weeks to reach a verdict while Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, campaigns to reclaim the White House.

Tuesday began with Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, commanding the spotlight.

He aimed attacks at the prosecution’s bedrock contention that the records were false, and that Trump was responsible for creating them. But Blanche saved his harshest criticism for the prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer. It was he who paid off the porn actor, Stormy Daniels, in a hush-money deal in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Portraying Cohen as a greedy liar bent on revenge, Blanche assailed his credibility and claimed that the defense had caught him testifying falsely about Trump’s knowledge of the deal.

After the prosecution successfully objected, Blanche pivoted to a medley of sports-themed insults, calling Cohen “literally like the MVP of liars” and “the GLOAT,” or the “greatest liar of all time.”

In a blistering rebuttal, Steinglass accused Trump of “chutzpah,” noting that Cohen had told many of his lies to protect the former president. He also said that many other witnesses for the prosecution — the defense called only two — remained loyal to Trump, including his longtime friend, David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer. Pecker, Steinglass argued, had “absolutely no reason to lie here,” and yet, “his testimony is utterly devastating.”

The prosecutor also defended Cohen, who years ago pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in the hush-money arrangement, observing that he “is understandably angry that, to date, he’s the only one who’s paid the price for his role in this conspiracy.” But, he told jurors, “I’m not asking you to feel bad for Michael Cohen — he made his bed.”

Before Steinglass stepped to the lectern, Blanche’s argument had emphasized Cohen’s importance to Trump even as he impugned Cohen’s character. And when Blanche pleaded with the jury not to send Trump to prison based on Cohen’s word — even though a prison sentence would not be mandatory — the judge rebuked him stingingly.

“Making a comment like that is highly inappropriate,” the judge, Juan M. Merchan, scolded. “It is simply not allowed,” he added, noting that Blanche was a former prosecutor, and should know better. “It’s hard for me to imagine how that was accidental.”

Trump, who faces probation or as long as four years in prison, is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, one for each purportedly bogus document: 11 invoices from Cohen, 11 checks to him and 12 entries in Trump’s ledger.

The records portrayed the payments to Cohen — $420,000 spread throughout 2017 — as ordinary legal expenses that arose from a retainer agreement.

But Steinglass argued that there was no such retainer or legal expense. And the $420,000, he said, included repayment for the hush money, an overdue bonus and another debt Trump owed Cohen. To top it off, Trump covered Cohen’s tax bill on the influx of cash.

It was a lot of money, Steinglass acknowledged, but to the president-elect, “It was worth it to hide the truth about what this money was really for.”