we are in the final stretch of the first criminal trial of a former president. the defense is presenting its closing arguments in donald trump s hush money trial. the former president s lead attorney, todd blanche, has spent the morning trying to plant seeds of reasonable doubt by saying the prosecution s trove of checks and documents do not link president trump to the crime. they can only believe this if they believe michael cohen. they moved on to stormy daniels, suggesting she hasn t told the truth either. once that s done we think it s getting close to the end of the defense case the prosecution will follow with what s expected to be four hours plus of their closing argument as they tie together their sprawling case after jurors heard from 20 witnesses. they saw about 200 pieces of evidence over a six-week period. the challenge? to sum up those arguments behind the 34 felony counts against the former president. remember, the prosecution has to connect donald trump n
i am here because of crooked joe biden. the worst president in the history of our country. he is destroying our country. this country is being destroyed rapidly. not slowly. rapidly. this is the time to stop him by voting him out once and for all. we don t want to wake up after the election saying again? my god. what the hell have we done. we can t have that happen again peered we have been here for six weeks. nobody has said trump did anything wrong. we have a highly conflicted judge with unconstitutional gag order and everybody sees this case for what it is. sandra: a live look now from the new york state supreme court there is nowhere manhattan where the defense just wrapped in donald trump s criminal trial. they are in a lunch paper that was a former president moments ago as he departed the courtroom and prosecutors will have their chair. and welcome. john, great to be with you today kicking off a new week. john: it will be of big week. i m john roberts from washi
good morning. it is 10:00 eastern. i m ana cabrera alongside my colleague and friend jose diaz-balart, bringing you special coverage as history unfolds this morning in a new york courthouse. closing arguments now under way in the first criminal trial of a former president. the dramatic final phase of donald trump s hush money case after 21 days in court, 22 witnesses and 80 hours of testimony. up first in today s closing arguments, trump s defense team. attorney todd blanche trying to convince a jury that the prosecution did not meet their burden of proof in this trial. nbc s yasmin vossoughian is outside the courthouse. also with us, chuck rosenberg, former senior fbi official, daniel leven, former prosecutor, jeremy solante, and jessica roth, former federal prosecutor and professor at cordosa law school. the defense closing is already under way. todd blanche saying to the jury, you should want or expect more than the testimony of michael cohen. what else are we hearing
de niro to try to change the subject? you can see the look on the biden campaign staffers faces. they knew it was a bad idea. they didn t want to be here. somebody as central command everything is going down the tubes for joe biden. i hand it over to carolyn leavitt. you heard a desperate and failing and pathetic harris: we ll pull back from that. jason miller, an important voice. the senior advisor for the trump campaign. what you saw there were dueling campaign events. you first saw robert de niro, who was mixed in with some lawmakers and then behind him were a couple of the police officers who testified in court about january 6th and were actually responding to that as officers. then robert de niro seemed to get into it with a reporter who asked about the testimonies of people at that january 6th and some of that hadn t told the truth and so on and so 4th of july. de niro dropping his usual bad language. sorry about that. in the meantime jason miller comes out and an
versus donald j. trump. we re getting live updates from inside of the courtroom. we re going to do our best to watch them together and bring out and interrupt our conversations and bring you any and all significant moments as they re happening. over the last few hours the prosecutor has been going through the claims made by trump s lawyers in their closing argument this morning. steinglass, the prosecutor, pushed back against trump s lawyers claim from this morning that porn star stormy daniels was extorting donald trump. prosecutors saying this, quote, extortion is not a defense to falsifying business records. and if you have any questions about that, you can ask the judge. after putting on the stand, just two witnesses, one of whose credibility completely crumbled during cross-examination, donald trump s defense team today closed by arguing essentially that there was never any criminal conspiracy to conceal the hush money payments. trump s attorney todd blanche also went af