it is good to be back with you on this second hour of "chris jansing reports." at this hour, we're officially on verdict watch. the fate of a former president now being debated by 12 new yorkers who have never served on a jury before. the final instructions they were given in a case that could alter the outcome of a presidential election. also ahead, trump's red hot reactions. his flurry of online posts before heading to the courthouse, and how his campaign is raising money off the deliberations. defining reasonable doubt, how dueling arguments on michael cohen, stormy daniels, and even the "access hollywood" tape could come into play. sifting through a mountain of evidence, two jurors, jurors number four and number six instructed on how to use a laptop to call up any evidence they want to take a look at. we look at the critical documents at the center of donald trump's 34 felony counties. our reporters are following all of the latest developments. let's begin with yasmin vossoughian outside the courthouse in new york city where the waiting game is son. tell me a little bit more about the instructions the jury got before they went behind closed doors? >> reporter: quite a bit of a waiting game to say the least, chris. inside jury deliberations on a momentous, historical day, they're going to go until 4:30 today. the instructions were quite weighty, to say the least. to say they were complicated is understated. let me walk through the jury instructions. juan merchan taking about an hour and 30 minutes walking through the jury instructions, talking about potential implicit bias, the importance of being a fair juror. do not consider the sentencing when coming up with a verdict. that is the judge's job to consider the sentencing. to consider the testimony, exhibits as well. referring to pecker's testimony, consider his non-prosecution agreement. michael cohen, of the same, to consider his guilty plea as part of his credibility assessment, not to weigh whether or not donald trump is guilty or not guilty. and talking about reasonable doubt, in the testimony and the impartiality as well. in talking about the witness's motive and the definition of intent. this was a major part of these jury instructions. and then walking through the law. right? twice it was judge juan merchan walked through the law, about seven pages or so. he talked about falsifying documents, new york election law, tax law as well. incredibly important through these instructions. i got a copy of these jury instructions right here. 50-plus pages long. this is not something the jury has inside that deliberation room, and so if they have any questions about this law, if they have any questions about the testimony despite the fact that they have it on that laptop, they have to ask the judge these questions in which the prosecution and defense need to reconvene inside the courtroom to answer those questions. it is incredibly complicated. no predictions as to when they could actually come back with a verdict. but taking all of that that the judge has laid out for them in the hour and 15 minutes of jury instructions into consideration. >> i did a poll of journalists who have been in the courtroom every day, and their predictions ranged from later today to not until next week. there you have it, the definitive answers. yasmin vossoughian, thank you. >> exactly. >> let's go to vaughn hillyard who was standing, donald trump fired off a few heated posts on social media. tell us about that. >> reporter: right, chris. donald trump himself is waiting as well, and he is ordered to remain inside of the courthouse until the jury reaches its verdict, and for donald trump, meanwhile, he has his phone back, and on his social media posts, he has sent off a flurry of posts over the course of the last two hours since they began deliberating. i want to let you look at one of them. donald trump in this social media post claims that he does not know what the charges are that were filed against him. we should note, as yasmin articulated, during the course of jury instructions this morning, each of the statutes, the state statutes here in new york that the charges leveed against him were filed under were read aloud, and the exact wording of those laws were read to the entire courtroom of which donald trump was a part of there. it is not quite clear whether this was just a willful misrepresentation or an unwillful understanding of what he was listening to over the course of the morning. we should also note in the last few minutes, he put out another post saying, quote, in all caps, it is ridiculous, unconstitutional and highly american that the judge is not requiring a unanimous decision on the fake charges brought against me. this is, again, where donald trump, we have seen this with other allies of him on social media over the last two hours are conflating the words unlawful manner that is a part of the new york state election law that is -- that prosecutors are contending donald trump violated, in which they say that he used through unlawful manner an effort to influence the 2016 election. now, there were multiple other unlawful violations that prosecutors say he violated, including other falsification of business records, federal election campaign act as well as tax law violations here in the state of new york. they say that the jury can find that he violated one, two or all three of those in order to configure itself under the unlawful manner part of the statute over the state of new york election law. so for donald trump, again, so much of this is also about the court of public opinion because he only has so much control here at this point, how the 12 actual jurors are deliberating, will find him guilty or not. it's a matter of articulating to the outside world, how he believes this case should go and includes misrepresentations of what has unfolded inside that courtroom. >> vaughn hillyard, stay close. i want to go to nbc's rehema ellis. and whether that motivated the hush money payment to stormy daniels. so take us through that. >> reporter: those closing arguments yesterday, chris, as you know, went on a whole day, not ending until about 8:00 at night. they were dueling in terms of trying to get the attention of these jurors. when it comes to one of the first ones, and that was that "access hollywood" tape you talked about. the prosecution, i want to show you the full screen on this, the prosecution was trying to say the "access hollywood" tape was like a category 5 hurricane to the trump campaign. hope hicks testified that it saw the campaign in something of a meltdown, if you will, and thought this might tip the election. the defense on the other hand was saying it was not a doom's day event, this was essentially locker room talk and it would not be held in that much of a reason for high esteem, thinking this was such a big deal. that was just one of those dueling kinds of arguments, and there were more. talking about stormy daniels herself, when this whole thing came out, this on the heels of the "access hollywood" tape. they're talking about paying her. the prosecution said, look, if she didn't testify about those details because it was questionable, was her testimony too messy, too salacious. it would undoubtedly give the defense more ammunition to call her a liar. she went so detailed in terms of talking about the carpet, the furniture, what was inside donald trump's toiletry case in the bathroom, if you will, saying there was old spice in there. but the defense countered in saying they did it to try to inflame your emotions. they did it to try to embarrass president trump. and so, again, the jury will have to decide who do they believe on that in terms of the deliberations they're going to. the final one i want to bring up in terms of these debates and dueling ideas, this is in reference to michael cohen. the defense hammered away at michael cohen over and over again, saying that he was a liar. in fact, calling him at one point, the greatest liar of all time. the defense says he was the personal attorney to president trump, an outside attorney, and the payments were compensation to him, period. but the prosecution came back with this, saying cohen spent more time being cross examined at this trial than he did doing legal work for donald trump in 2017. michael cohen was on the witness stand testifying for the better part of three days. the jury has now to widdle all of this down in terms of how each and every one of these elements has impact in terms of the job they have got to do. that determines the guilt or innocence of donald trump. they have been in deliberations working through the lunch hour of about two and a half hours with more to come, i suspect. chris. >> rehema ellis, thank you. also at the center of this case are documents, including invoices and check stubs that the jury will consider as part of their deliberations. nbc's katie phang is at big board for us. welcome to the big board. >> it's maiden debut. >> remind us what the jury is going to be looking at? >> it's a great question. this is important for everybody to consider not only are we looking at this but the jury gets to look at this in the deliberations. what's key is this is a document that was prepared by the manhattan d.a.'s office that was entered into evidence. it's an exhibit, a summary exhibit. what's important is look at this, for example, there's the check, and excuse me, the check in this case, the one that was for $70,000 is right here. so what, chris, we're going to be looking at and the jurors are going to be considering is the fact that you had michael cohen as the payee of these checks, but also you also had signatures coming from somebody like donald trump. now, this one was from the actual revocable trust. we didn't have that. this exhibit is how it lays out all the different invoices. you have 11 of them. so that's your 11 invoices, your 12 vouchers and your 11 checks, and, chris, these are your multiple felony counts that we have. also what we're considering is this, you have a jury. this jury is made up of 12 people. seven men and five women. and this jury actually has been sitting in deliberations for now more than two hours. one of the things that we also looked at when we were looking at the jury instructions, or, excuse me, the jury questionnaire is where do these jurors get their information. and part of that, they gave people some concern, and i know it did, was the fact that there was a juror here who said they got some of their information from truth. truth social. however, when you look at other information sources for the jurors, it does include things like cnbc, we've got msnbc, i mean, so these are not necessarily any type of where the jurors are going to go. i think it's important to realize that we have a foreperson, that's juror number one. that foreperson is the person that's going to be presiding over the deliberations. that foreperson doesn't necessarily have out sized weight. there are two people that we have a little bit of interest in, juror number 3 and juror number 5. juror number 3 is a corporate lawyer, they practice corporate law, and juror number 7 does civil litigation. if there's interest or concern about the jury instructions, the other jurors may look to those lawyers for some guidance, chris. >> katie phang, thank you so much. up next, peer pressure, what happens when a unanimous decision seems out of reach. we'll talk to two people who served as jurors in two high profile criminal trials. that's next. next. ♪ things are looking up, i've got symptom relief. ♪ ♪ control of my crohn's means everything to me. ♪ ♪ control is everything to me. ♪ feel significant symptom relief at 4 weeks with skyrizi, including less abdominal pain and fewer bowel movements. skyrizi is the first il-23 inhibitor that can deliver remission and visibly improve damage of the intestinal lining. and the majority of 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>> basically when we went around the table, i believe there are 14 counts, federal charges against both bob mcdonald and his wife maureen. we just took it one at a time, and talked about the evidence for each, and just one at a time because it was just a lot to go through. >> today when they were -- when the judge merchan was giving the jury instructions, he said you can't take into account who the defendant is, and he had said in another point, and i think in the closing the prosecutor said, you know, everybody is equal under the law. but were you hyper aware of the status of the person you were judging? is it possible to say i'm going to treat this person like any other person? >> yes, and i was very aware that this was the former governor and his wife sitting there. however, i went in and i believe that all of my fellow jurors went in as well with an open mind and listened to the evidence as presented. >> jessica, i would say rob blagojevich was a colorful character. he certainly knew how to get a lot of publicity. i'm guessing most of the people on the jury were well aware of who he was, and there he was, as donald trump is, sitting inside that courtroom every day. was it hard to not let that influence you, any preconceived notions you or others may have had about him? >> i think for me, i came in there fairly unbiassed. i hadn't really been following the previous trial. when i got called for jury duty, i did a little research and kind of knew beforehand that it was going to be the trial for blagojevich, and i think that a lot of the jurors that were selected did a great job of evaluating all the evidence. we spent ten days in deliberations. we re-read all of the evidence, re-listened to all of the eight hours of phone calls. and really went over every single count one by one, analyzing and getting consensus on each one. so i think for us, it was just a great group, and we worked together really well, and for me, i don't think i came in there with any bias. i was very open minded. and i wanted to actually see that blagojevich might be innocent of some of these counts. didn't happen to be very many. that was my stance at first, and just the evidence was very compelling and we voted the way we thought was best. >> i mean, it sounds like you were incredibly thorough. was there any point at which you thought we might not be able to come to a consensus here? >> we did have one juror who was -- who was not sure about the decision he wanted to make. so the fellow jurors, we just went through the evidence again, and just talked him through it, what his concerns were and how we saw things, and so forth. it did take a little bit of convincing. >> jessica, did you find there was some back and forth? >> there was only about three counts that we had a little bit back and forth, and that took a couple of days to sort out. for most of them, we were just very thorough. i had two notebooks full of notes. everybody else took great notes and really listened. we did have to comb over all of the evidence there was, piled up papers and phone calls, and things we had to listen to and go through. i think we were very thorough, but i don't think there was a lot of disagreement. >> does anything surprise you? there they were, just toughing it out, working it through. i'm guessing that some people who are listening who just want to know what's going to happen here are saying, oh, my gosh, maybe this will take days and days and days for donald trump, but what's your reaction to what they're telling you about being inside the deliberation room? >> it's fascinating and, at the same time, a lot of us who have tried cases often go back and talk to the jurors at the end of the case and get feedback on what they thought was compelling or what they didn't think was compelling, and these types of stories you hear over and over from jurors who come into a room, total strangers, don't know each other, having heard the same set of facts, the same se