>> while this defendant may be unlike any other in american history, we arrived at this trial and ultimately, today, at this verdict in the same manner as every other case that comes through the court room doors. by following the facts and the law, and doing so without fear or favor. many voices out there, the only voice that matters is the voice of the jury and the jury has spoken. >> manhattan district attorney alvin bragg speaking yesterday following the historic conviction of former president donald trump on all 34 counts in the criminal hush money trial. trump becomes the first former u.s. president in american history to be convicted of a crime. the verdict was read around 5:00 p.m. in a new york city courtroom after the 12 jurors deliberated for roughly 9.5 hours, two days. each of the 34 felony counts associated with a falsified business records pertaining to trump's reimbursement of his former attorney and fixer, michael cohen, for a hush money payment to adult film actress, stormy daniels, during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her quiet about a sexual encounter. she says she had with trump in 2006. trump has denied her claim. sentencing is set for july 11, just four days before the republican national convention begins in milwaukee. the maximum sentence for falsification of business records is four years in prison . but incarceration is not a mandatory sentence. it will be judge juan merchan who ultimately decides the punishment . along with joe, willie in may we have the host of way too early, jonathan. u.s. special correspondent for bbc news, catty cake, embassy correspondent legal correspondent lisa rubin. former u.s. attorney and msnbc contributor chuck rosenberg, and msnbc legal analyst, danny cevallos are good to have you with us. >> chuck, i'm curious, your first impressions of what happened yesterday and what american should be looking at and what they should be focusing on as we move forward. >> yeah, is going to be hard, i think, for our very divided country to look at this the way i do. i think it's a relatively simple thing. the government presented a compelling case. they deduced the facts they wanted to produce the call the witnesses they wanted to call and asked the questions they wanted to ask them, and the jury understood the pictures often do. statistically speaking, most juries convict most of the time and that's what happened here. i was thinking about, believe it or not, the national science foundation pole that shows about a quarter of americans -- and this is been consistent over time, believe the sun revolves around the earth. for those of you keeping score at home. it doesn't. so i think it's hard to convince people that what happened in new york happens routinely and regularly around the country. juries hear the facts. they deliberate. they deliver the verdict here and we need to accept that plain and simple. >> lisa rubin, eva been covering the so closely at the courthouse from the beginning and giving us your analysis and reading tea leaves the last few days. i think the prosecution hoped for but probably did not expect a clean 34 for 34 sweep on every count to get convictions on those. what is your reaction to the verdict? >> i was in the courtroom yesterday for the verdict and i can tell you that just the very existence of our verdict was a huge shock to everyone there, given the fact that judge merchan assembled the parties at 4:15. he came in and said he was prepared to release the jurors at 4:30 and he needed to take care of a couple of things and that he stepped off the bench. 4:30 came and went . and a 4:36 there was this tension all throughout the courtroom as everyone was waiting inking, what in the world is happening? could we possibly have our verdict? and when he retook the bench and said i have a note from the jury. they have a verdict. both people on both sides of me gasped audibly. you can hear it reverberate throughout the crowd just the very existence of the verdict was shocking. but i think the reactions of the parties was also so telling. >> former president trump try to put a good face on the verdict when he walked out. you could see he set his jaw and that trump -like way and pursed his lips in the way where you stupid he set his face to look ahead him and yet he looked like a man that was defeated and resigned. he walked slowly and lumbering lay. and once they were out of the courtroom, we, the press corps about 100 of us, were left in there with the d.a.s office. i don't know if i share this before but when trump was out into the hallway for security purposes everyone is frozen, and that includes the staff of the manhattan district attorney's office. if you are counting on them to look as if they just scored the biggest score and that office pop is history, you would not have seen it on their faces are alvin bragg's face. he looked to straight ahead in the prosecutors on his team did not crack a single smile among them. maybe there was a little twinge of relief in their shoulders and body language, but this was a group of people that knew all eyes of the world would be on them in this moment if they were lucky enough to get a conviction let alone 34 of them . and they bet the moment with the seriousness of purpose. this is not a group of people, despite what donald trump and his republican allies are saying, that relished this victory and are rejoicing in it. it was a somber and sad day for america that we have now seen a former president convicted on 34 felony counts. and you could see that in their faces. >> good punch to the country. dennis, let's talk about what's next. sentencing is july 11. what happens between now and then and what are the options with sentencing and i take it an appeal can't start until after that? >> probation will prepare a presentence investigation report back that normally involves interviewing the offender to find out about the offender but who needs to interview donald trump to find out about his biographical details and all the other information that normally goes into a psr. then the sides will submit their sentencing memorandum. the trump side will unquestionably ask for probation only sentence. the real question for me and what i'm curious about is what the d.a.s office asks for. will they say, this is a political decision is asked for probation only. we won and let's call it a victory. will he ask for incarceration? i believe they will ask for an incarceration sentence in this case. the question is what judge merchan will do. there plenty of arguments to be made for probation-only sentence. this is a 71 plus-year-old offender. a nonviolence offense and first-time offender. no guns or drugs or violence involved. and i would make an additional argument and reasonable minds can disagree here but i would say that loss, in the great chuck rosenberg what are you and fraud systems, the single biggest driver of a sentence is the dollar amount of loss and loss is measured in different ways. as a defense attorney i would argue the loss in this case is 0.0. not a traditional fraud case where you have traditional victims we handed over their money, let's say and i'm thinking of an example -- let's say i made up a fake university in charge people fake tuition for my fake university and kept all that money. i'm just giving a hypothetical example. that might be a case where you could measure loss in terms of the number of victims multiplied by how much they paid. you don't really have that here. you could make the argument that the loss in the victims of the people of the state of new york. i get that and reasonable minds can disagree but as a defense attorney i would argue that loss in this case is zero. i think that you will see a request for a non-incarceration probation only sentence. but i also think it was in the prosecutors ask for jail time. >> let me open this up to our lawyers, chuck, lisa, and danny and ask, what happened? i must say that -- and i've said it here before -- inundation were 77 million people voted for donald trump, i just -- maybe i was being cynical but i just thought there would be one out of 12 jurors that would've said, no. not going to go along with it. we are going to drag this thing out for ever. i was surprised by the quickness of it. i was surprised by the resounding 34 of 34. what do you all think happened in there that moved the dynamic in such a dramatic way against donald trump? lisa, i'll start with you. >> well, joe, i think what happened is evidence happened. and the evidence in this case was overwhelming. todd blanche can go on as many networks as he can find and sate that has client was convicted solely on the word of michael cohen and nothing could be further from the truth. his client was convicted largely on the words of two categories of people . his acolytes are starting with david pecker and ending with hope hicks , and his own words heard by the jury in a recording that michael cohen made september 6 , 2016. and even including his tweets, which were consciousness of his guilt in 2018. his legal filings were he admitted this was a reimbursement. and all of the books that he wrote proclaiming how you got to be donald trump. those laid out a framework for his m.o. his m.o. was reward the people who are loyal. loyalty above all else. don't trust anyone, even if you have the best people around you. micromanage. because at the end of the day your checkbook belongs to you and you alone. donald trump was convicted because evidence happens. >> and i think one of the things that we may not know for some time until we talk to jurors, but i don't think the jurors spent a lot of time parsing out each and every count. i think they looked at them as a group. and they could've done that because the facts involved with each transaction were so similar yes, there were minor dents races. i did wonder if the macy's on the fact that donald trump signed some checks but not all the checks or for example the checks came from the trump organization and they came from the trust. those were examples of differences between these transactions. but of course, each count, all these counts could've been divisible by three because you had a boucher related to a check related to an invoice. so in that sense, they could've group those together. but unlike many financial crimes cases where the transactions are very distinct and involve different facts, this could've been a case where they really just could've grouped all these together and said that trump's intent applied to all of them broadly based on the evidence they heard of trump's involvement in the could've arrived at this relatively quickly. maybe we will find out they took a straw poll right away when they got in the jury room and there was a minority. and going to your question, joe. you are right. we often speak that it only takes one juror. but practically speaking if you are that one of 12 and you get in that jury room and you find that i'm the only one who doesn't agree with my 11 fellow jurors, those folks, i don't think, tend to hold out for too long. mass psychology is that, well, i better listen to what they have to say. i'm convinced of will. i'm someone with an open mind. i said i would look at this with an open mind. when you wanted to make in the minority, maybe it doesn't take too long. that's why the read back the testimony to say, hey, steve, are you convinced now? maybe your memory is refreshed. are you with us? that's probably why this happened. in my view this was a short deliberation. >> morning joe: weekend will be right back. 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>> first question first, jonathan. my experience has been overwhelmingly that when jurors assemble and they tell a judge they can be fair and listen with an open mind, they actually mean it. so, yeah, understand it only takes one juror to hang a jury and to create a miss trial but that's not what tends to happen. and i think danny is right about the psychology of it. listen to their own words during jury selection. people who said they could not be fair, i'm sorry, people who couldn't be fair said they could not be fair and were removed from the jury. the number of people said they could be fair and they were impaneled. and by and large, that's true. that's by experience. people really do listen to the facts and follow the instruction of the judge and if the facts are compelling, and they were in this case apparently, then you have a conviction. was it quick? it was relatively quick. quick verdicts tend to be government verdicts. quick verdicts tend to be prosecution verdicts but i don't think it was unduly quick. i think 10 hours of plenty of time to sit down and talk to your brothers and sisters on the jury and to agree on the weight of the evidence and to fairly deliberate the case. not unduly quick. and finally, jonathan, with regard to sentencing. look. it's always a bad idea before the first pitch to tell the umpire that he sucks. it's just not the way you want to go into the first inning of a baseball game. it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. nevertheless, as danny articulated earlier, this is a first-time, nonviolent offender. and typically in new york state courts, a first-time, nonviolent offenders does not get a jail sentence. that said, continuing to yell at the umpire and denigrate the alpine the courts and the jurors and the system and the prosecutors is just a bad strategy. and one thing that joses look for at sentencing is what the defendant has to say because all defendants have a chance to speak at sentencing. we call it allocution and, you know, i sit there and listen as a prosecutor to whether or not the defendant is remorseful, whether he or she apologizes, whether he or she takes responsibility. and i think mr. trump is constitutionally incapable of doing that. and so, might that be determinative here? perhaps pick the typical defendant in a case like this would get a sentence of probation. danny is exactly right. but mr. trump has been and always will be a wildcard. and his fate now resides in the hands of one person and he's been spending a lot of time denigrating that one person so we will see. >> yeah. you know, i learned early on the campaign trail that the rules of evidence and civil procedure and all the things that kept things sane inside a courtroom did not apply when you get out in politics. it's like, oh my god. people can say whatever they want to say and it was a bit of a shock. we reversed that here and we talked about it a good bit over the past year. gravity returning. the lies that people could say outside of a courtroom about stolen elections that they would never say in front of a judge. while in this case you have donald trump, and i have no doubt that the abusiveness that some people, for some strange reason are drawn to on the campaign trail, it cost him inside the courtroom. they had a mild-mannered judge. the judge that the jury seemed to like. and trump was constantly being abusive toward the judge. he had a witness that the judge had to dress down. time and time again, trump and his lawyers thought they could bully their way through these proceedings. it's a very small room. and if the jury, if they like the judge, they're looking at what's going on through the eyes of the judge. that had to hurt donald trump from the very beginning. >> joe, i think you're probably talking about the most important point that happened during this trial, including the verdict. and it overshadows the big headlines that say guilty on every front page in the country. and it's the fact that 12 ordinary american citizens, perhaps at different political beliefs, different religious beliefs come at different ethnic backgrounds. we don't know that. 12 average americans sat in a room and, guess what? they did not get information or evidence from tiktok or instagram they got evidence presented rationally by the prosecution in this case and they made a decision that donald j trump was guilty and donald j trump's reaction to the guilty verdict was, once again -- he has already demeaned and destroyed much of our electoral process by saying it's rigged and corrupt. and now he took on the rule of law. he took on the definition of justice itself by saying this verdict was corrupt and it was rigged and it's a rigged system . well, if he was correct in both his assertions that the electoral process is rigged and corrupt and the judicial process is rigged and corrupt then there is no more america. there is no more america. and, lisa, i'm wondering if you as an officer of the court are worried about the fact that trump and his followers have seen ted cruz and marco rubio are going to continue to do damage to the rule of law? >> absolutely. that's a huge concern of mine. i cannot believe ted cruz's statement last night about the verdict that this was an outrage and an upset to the rule of law i kept thinking, you were involved in this. you kept dragging your father into this. he had david pecker do mockups of your father with lee harvey oswald . you are defending this guy? the competitive sycophancy going on here is olympic level and what's going to suffer his democracy and justice, which should be the twin pillars of our country, right? and yet they are all falling all over themselves to say this is not how the justice system should function this is exactly how the justice system should function. chuck said the other day that win or lose, whatever happened here, we should respect the verdict of this jury. everything i saw from this jury showed an engaged and vested, serious group of people who were coming together to make a great decision and they understood that what they were doing was particularly serious giving who the defendant was but it wasn't like they took this flippantly. and yet we have donald trump and his republican allies continuing to call the process a sham. the judge corrupt. the district attorney a sham with racial overtones that i find particularly grotesque. >> more coverage of the guilty verdict and donald trump's criminal trial after a quick break. and now... ♪♪ they're backk! the footlong cookie is back at subway! can neuriva support your brain health? 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