something that judge merchan can continue up to the time of sentencing. >> i'm just thinking about the judge in the hearing with the gag orders where he said -- and none of the weight that was going on was lost on him and who this is in front of him. and he said, i don't want to send you to prison, but i have a job to do. we don't know if he's going -- the next thing i think the country's going to be waiting for is that, and what does prison for a former president look like? can it be done in fort brag in a room? >> i don't snow. >> unbelievable. unbelievable thought. thank you not just for being here today when this happened, it's fitting that you are both sitting here next to me, but for being here every day as this goes on. harry lipman, i know we lose you. saying thank you to your contributions to your hours for the trial are ones i'd be going through and itemizing. thank you very much. for those of you at home joining us just now, you have been watching msnbc continuing coverage of today's historic news. donald trump, now the first former president of the united states to have been convicted of felony crimes. what the "new york times" declares a, quote, stain he will carry as he seeks to regain the presidency. a jury of his peers finding the ex-president guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. part of what prosecutors argue was a coverup of a sex scandal that could have derailed his presidential candidacy before the 2016 election. donald trump called the verdict a, quote, disgrace claiming this, quote, this is far from over, end quote. he is set to be sentenced as we've been discussing on july 11th, just four days before the start of the republican convention in which he will officially become the gop's candidate for president. we will hear from alvin bragg, the prosecutor who brought this historic case, in a little less than 30 minutes. right now we will of course carry his remarks live when they happen when he makes his way to the podium. the key witness at the center of this case, donald trump's former attorney and fixer, technically described as an accomplice in the plot to conceal hush money payments, michael cohen will join all of us at 8 p.m. eastern right here for his first chance at talking to the press, talking to the public since the trial began. normally at this hour i would be handing things over to my colleague, ari melber, but we're all here together for this historic news. we are joined by our colleague rachel maddow and andrew weissman and "all in" chris hayes just joined in. this is your hour. i prefer it this way. >> i learned, that i read it, that i was not getting up. >> people think everything is planned. >> thanks for staying. i'm here with rachel. i'll start like this. may 3rd, 2024, is a date in history. it is a conviction of a former president in the united states. that lasts. that is an indelible stain as you quoted "the new york times" put it on him. this is a man who has been running from the long arm of the law for a very long time. this is a country that has witnessed that and in some sense the different poles of the country have agreed on that reality and had different reactions to it. some cheering him on. he's running for president now in even more brazen ways against the law. rachel was just discussing that. he is doing that, openly talking about pardoning convicted murderers, people with federal convictions, people convicted by a jury of their peers and people who committed crimes unrelated to donald trump. the long arm of the law is something he ran from until today. he's convicted on all 34 felony counts by a jury of his peers. he will be sentenced, the judge says, on july 11th where he will, with his lawyers, face the prospect. he may be thinking about it, rachel, every day from now until july 11th, the pros sperkt that he could just be fined and get a stern warning. that's possible. or he could get some kind of supervised home confinement or he could get a sentence of incarceration where he and his guards would have to report into a local facility where he would serve time. so that's where we are today. it is a very different place than where we were yesterday or two hours ago, and it is a matter of accountability that someone who has flouted the law and run from the law has now found the law caught up with him and he must serve this accountability today. he is now a convicted felon in his one-time home state of new york. >> and he's a convicted -- he's been convicted of 34 felonies, and he is not just a former president, he is the republican party's nominee for president. i will go back to the point i made earlier, which is i think the republican party has a decision to make now as to whether or not it is okay to be convicted of 34 felonies and still hold the nomination of that party for their presidency -- for the presidency. he is the presumptive nominee. he is not the official nominee of that party. they can choose somebody else at this point, and if the felony convictions mean what they have always meant for everybody else in u.s. history who has encountered the criminal justice system while they were also standing for political office, the republican party will take that seriously and may reconsider that matter. >> can i ask you a question about that? >> yes. >> on that, this trial was about -- its hinge point was the release of the "access hollywood" tape which was the last time they sort of went, do we want to do this. they said yes. the so what are your -- >> i've been thinking about that because i -- once i absorbed this sort of shock of the unanimous 34 guilty verdicts, the next thing i started to think about was the closing from joshua steinglass the prosecutor because in his closing i pulled this part of the transcript he said to the jury, i suggest to you that the value of this corrupt bargain forged at this trump tower meeting, which is the meeting where they sat up the catch and kill scheme, cannot be overstated. it turned out to be one of the most valuable contributions anyone ever made to the trump campaign. when you put all of these campaign this scheme cooked up by these men at this time could very well be what got president trump elected. they deliberated and decided on all 34 counts we are going to find him guilty. the case put to them by the prosecution was that donald trump likely became president in the first place because of these dozens of felonies committed in order to defraud the public in order to get elected. >> and i just want to say something about the jury here. >> yeah. >> there's a writer i love, he said when you take a step back, the only people are ordinary people. they kicked him out of office the second time around. and in two different jurors ran off the street. it's popping out addresses. in a civil trial and in this trial, came to each other as equal citizens and a said, yeah, he did it. you don't understand trump's appeal and that he is the real key. really the tribune of the bulk of the people and you elites -- no, no, no. people, real people, our fellow citizens at every hingepoint -- important hinge point have rejected him or in this case found him plainly guilty of the thing he plainly did. >> why do you think? >> i just have a lot of faith in people. again, i think that -- i don't want to overstate the case. bad people can be elected. it's not some fool proof system. jurors can return wrong verdicts, and we've seen that. one of the things i think is tricky in our discussion of this is not to paint the majesty of the law -- >> throwing it out the window? >> yeah. it's a complicated and often remorseless system that we have constructed here in america. >> would you say that's true of rich white people? >> no, generally it's not. >> with three experienced defense counsel. >> we stood by today. >> to me the process was itself a monumental achievement. >> everyone in that room, again, as equals, in this municipal building with these career prosecutors and this judge and this jury of average citizens testing the principle of equal justice under the law. can you just take this process we use on other people and apply it to this sflid whatever happened today in that outcome of the jury, that process worked. it would have worked in a hung jury. i would have believed that. the process was its own achievement. >> it was different than your average case because every single human being in that process was subjected to threat and intimidation, including threats to their family by virtue of the fact they were in there, and they still carried this through to the end. >> yeah. it's something we've all covered is regular people who interact with regular jobs in society, particularly marginalized communities, don't have this impression you can never get in trouble. there's never cases like this. not every case is a capital murder case. this was not the most serious case on the books but it was also not nothing. >> yeah. the. >> you know, we're here talking about this. i mean, i'm not going to read them all, but we have -- if you print out all of the new york cases, business record cases, they go on and on and on. the fact that some people who are uninformed, elite, out of touch, never get in trouble. give yourself information. there's experience and knowledge. their personal experience may be, you don't get in trouble for lying on your taxes? no, you don't get in trouble. you're projecting. >> correct. correct. >> it's not always the first thought. to be legally clear, if you have an honest mistake on your taxes, you don't get incarcerated. if you have a multi-year case, you can. many people have been tried and convicted. what happened today is conviction on that kind of case. another technical point i haven't made, we have andrew here, 6 p.m. on the east coast, let's make it -- >> yeah, you go for it. >> your time. >> they got here through this process, as we've all said. had it taken longer, that would have been okay. had it been a hung jury, that would have been okay. had they deadlocked and been encouraged to keep going, that would have been okay. but let's observe, they didn't. after several days they said, we're torn, it's tough, what do we do? there are strict rules to fairness to the defendant. the judge can't say you're not leaving nm you agree which can lead to a conviction. it's called an allen charge. new york has its version. this is regulated. it can be reviewed on appeal. they never even gotten to that point. i would observe if it got to that point it would be legal, normal, okay but it wasn't even that close a call. >> but they also didn't go away for five minutes. they went away for hours, slept on it, sent notes, asked questions. >> absolutely thorough. >> it would have also, i think -- people would have judged the jury, forgive the phrase, had they gone away and seven minutes later come back and -- >> no. >> they clearly engaged substantively with the matter. >> right. as you've pointed out, other politicians have been held to account. governor blagojevich was held to account. the state of illinois did not fall apart because he was patrolled for trying to sell a senate seat through a bribe. that was a good thing, not a bad thing. he was convicted. john edwards was tried on a different murkier case by jack smith, by the way, and it took weeks and they deadlocked. you can't have a deadlock. if they deadlocked to the point of a hung jury, they would cover that. notwithstanding what other people might say regardless because they're not following it, legally i would report this went thorough, detailed but didn't take an extraordinary or unusually long time because they went through 34 counts and found 34 felonies. >> what i said the other night is the summation is maybe this is exactly what it looks like. i think carried the day. i mean, again, it is a little bit -- and i wouldn't -- i really sort of put myself in the posture of not second guessing the jury, whatever their determination was. they were in the room, i wasn't. they heard the case, i didn't. there was a little bit of those occasional gravitas moments, you go through, does that exist? is herschel walker a good senate candidate? have i lost my mind? is her shell walker a good candidate? >> is child labor a bad -- >> no, he's a bad senate candidate. you're not crazy. following the cases as close as we did, it's not a case like anything i've ever reported on. i've reported on criminal cases. it certainly looked like they had the goods on him and they presented the case and they had the paper trail. in the end to have them deliberate as they did and come back with this, there is something just -- i don't know -- >> it's nice when we can believe our eyes and our ears. >> yes. >> what i thought was notable was that trump's side seemed to be asking them to do what trump asked the voters to do, don't believe what you see, don't believe what you hear, and they didn't do that. can we bring our colleague katie tur in. >> you do it. >> katie tur was inside the courthouse today when the verdict was read. we eagerly await her reporting. katie, go ahead. >> reporter: you know, i was inside the overflow room when the verdict was read. i wanted to be able to see this moment with my own eyes. in about three weeks from today i will have been covering donald trump for nine years. there will not have been a day in the past nine years where i think i have not mentioned his name or at least thought a thought about donald trump. i was there at the time that this trial is regarding, the "access hollywood" tape, the stormy daniels payment. i've covered the fallout from the "access hollywood" tape. i understood what the prosecution was trying to argue when they were talking about intent and the desire to conceal the stormy daniels payment because what the campaign was going through in those moments when the campaign was falling apart, republicans were abandoning him, when his own campaign staff was abandoning him, when senator mike lee was crying saying he could never possibly support a man who said such things. i've been, you guys have, too, the last nine years we've been living with the consequence of reporting on donald trump and everything that comes with that, the good and frequently the bad. and so today when i was watching donald trump's face as the verdict was read and i was watching as the jury filed out in front of him, i was struck by how not a single one of them from my vantage point looked at his face. they either looked straight ahead or they looked down as they passed by him. i never saw a juror look directly in his eyes. and you have to imagine now what those jurors -- you have to wonder what they must be feeling. the weight of getting up knowing you have to make this decision alone, how heavy that must have been to get out of bed and understand a decision you make could change the course of american history. who knows how it's going to affect the election, but a decision you make will have some effect. and now to live with that decision and live with the consequences that might come with it. i don't know what judge merchan said to the jury behind closed doors. he was going to have a meeting with them to thank them but i wonder if he did what judge claplan did in the e. jean carroll case was to tell the jurors that it's probably not a good idea to talk to us reporters and the press. obviously you want to understand what was happening. i'd love to hear the thinking. i'd love to understand who thought what about the underlying felonies and the intent, but at the same time, it is completely understandable to know that -- to think that these jurors would never want to talk to us, would never want their identities released because to have that information out there subjects them to a world of ugliness and potentially a world of violence. we live in such a tense time and such an angry time that i think about what the jurors were feeling when they passed by his table. when it comes to donald trump himself, i wanted to genesee his face as this was read because this is a moment in history and this is a man who's not faced consequences for his actions for the most -- for most of his life. he's been facing a series of them recently in court cases and he has no control over, by the way. he was stone cold. didn't react whatsoever. there was no raise of the eyebrows. there was no shrug. there was no reaction. he sat there looking at the jury, looking at each one of them as they passed by but never made a move. never muttered anything. never changed his expression. he looked almost deflated from my experience with him, but what a moment in history and what an experience to see this happen in real time and to understand that donald trump, this man who has lived his life basically consequence free, was elected president despite everything that happened in 2016, is now running again, now faces the consequences of being held to account in a jury, held to account, found guilty of multiple felonies by a jury of his peers here in manhattan. >> katie tur putting it in perspective reporting live from the courthouse in manhattan where his fate was sealed by the jury. thank you so much. we want to bring in the former acting u.s. solicitor general of the united states neil katchel here with rachel, nicole, chris and andrew. neil, may 30th, 2024, donald j. trump convicted on 34 counts. what does this verdict mean? >> i think about it in three words. 34 for 45. 34 counts for the 45th former president of the united states. it's never happened before in our history, and these are felony counts. these aren't slaps on the wrist. they're not misdemeanors. these are not minor things as the prosecutor steinglass said in his closing, donald trump may have been elected president because of these crimes. because of his hiding of his campaign contributions and the political implications, i don't understand that. i'm not a lawyer. but i can tell you what this means about the rule of law. i mean, my parents came to this country. because of the idea that no one is above the law. it can hold someone to account no matter who you are. and this jury has now decided that. and, ari, i think the most important point is they decided that and trump was guilty against the most difficult standard for the prosecution to show in all of american law. they had to show beyond a reasonable doubt. they had to bring in all 12 jurors. i know how hard that is. i did that in the george floyd murder with my team. that's a scary standard to do. here it was met as it was in the floyd case. and, you know, that's a -- such a tough standard, ari. it's kind of like failing kindergarten. if you are facing a jury trial, you've got to kind of try to fail a jury trial if you are a defendant. you have everything going for you, and yet trump managed to do that. >> yeah. >> i think the last thing i would say, chris's point about -- chris hayes's point about the faith in the system is right. i think this shows that the system works, but i suspect trump's next move will be, as it always is, to denigrate the system, to attack the institutions, to attack the prosecution, to attack the jury system. don't pop our champaign corks yet because trump's going to run against the system and our job as lawyers is to make sure that people understand how that system works and how it was -- justice was done today. >> neil katchal weighing in here for the first time. we appreciate you doing that. thank you. we're back with our full panel. neil mentioned what chris has said. as well, nicole, you think about we're moments away from alvin bragg, the d.a. who brought this case who was going to be controversial either way. i would note if his name is not super familiar, if you are watching and can't even conjure exactly what he looks like, that is because he has followed the jack smith playbook or the bob muller playbook before that. d