that is our show for tonight. a special edition of donald trump witness to history starts right now. after 22 witnesses and 16 days of testimony, donald trump has become the first-ever american president to be convicted of a crime. this trial will go down in history, but without cameras in the courtroom, americans never got to see the evidence for themselves. they did not get to see trump's isa close and his mouth go slack while he sat slumped at the defense table. they did not get to hear stormy daniels' salacious testimony firsthand. they do not get to watch the judge cleared the courtroom seemingly in anger as he butted heads with a truculent witness. instead, americans had to rely on word from the few reporters who were in the room. >> reporter: that was something. >> donald trump was crying from the oval office. even todd lynch said he was writing checks from the white house. >> in terms of the vibe in the room, what you have heard about it being kind of a courtroom is real. >> reporter: i was in the courtroom. his eyes have been closed for most of the morning. >> one simple word, guilty, repeated over and over. something we have never seen before. >> tonight, we welcome you to this special msnbc event, prosecuting donald trump, witness to history. over this next hour, andrew weissmann and i will lead you through what you missed inside that courtroom, not the line by line details of witness testimony but with the help of our msnbc and nbc colleagues, we will tell you what it was really like to sit just behind donald trump is the details of the case spelled out. will tell you what it felt like in the room when witnesses took the stand just a few feet away from the performer president. the unscripted, unpredictable moments where the former president seem to be nodding off for muttering curse words, what people said to each other in line for the bathroom after that riveting, controversial testimony from stormy daniels. from andrew weissmann and some of our best legal minds, we will hear what they saw inside the courtroom that the nonlawyers like the rest of us might have missed. let's start things off with our first impressions from inside the manhattan criminal courthouse. >> it is a surreal moment to go into that courtroom for the first time, and see a former president of the united states who is simultaneously the world's greatest clown. those two things at the same time, as a criminal defendant, just spins things in your head like nothing else can, and the weirdness of that alone is your first hour in the courtroom. in that first hour it is hard to take in anything other than the weirdness of donald trump. >> anticipating going into the courtroom, i was actually excited to do it. first of all, because i feel like as someone who has written a trump book and who has been covering this man from the beginning of his presidential campaign on, this kind of felt like a crescendo moment for him, and for the country, and it is the only trial he's going to face, so it definitely felt like a big moment and something i did want to witness for myself. >> having worked on the molar investigation and we could not charge the sitting president and donald trump. that was a deep department of justice rule. now, in a full-fledged criminal case, it was kind of remarkable. >> i thought there would be a lot of people there, a lot of pro-trump people in particular, and the really want, and then found other producers and camera operators and everything and just got in line and stood in line for a long time. i will say, the thing i learned was, it is not what you are wearing that makes a difference. it is what you are wearing on your feet, because where you are going to get cold is through the soles of your dress shoes. you idiot, why didn't you wear sneakers. >> people don't understand it's not like you walk up to the courthouse and whisk you in. you line up outside across the street from center street because they anticipate a number of people showing up, so you have three different lines. it is almost like flying on an airline where they put you in a group of different people. >> there are two courtrooms, they look identical. the only difference is the judge and jury aren't in the overflow. >> the overflow room holds over -- other members of the media and members of the public and it has a very large monitor in front of it that shows directly councils table so you have the prosecution on one side, the defense on the other, but you very clearly see donald trump. >> it was like a spark compared to the courtroom. you can go to the restroom whenever you want to. and there is this absence of tension in the overflow room that i did not know i was feeling in the courtroom until he was not in the courtroom, and it is almost like you know, you're standing in this very difficult wind all day and then the wind stops. it is that kind of very different sensation in what seems to be the same place. >> the day before senator tommy turberville of alabama had gone to the trial and said it was the most depressing building he had ever been in, heap scorn on it, and i was -- i take that man statements with a grain of salt, but it was perfectly nice. it was a good, highly functioning municipal building. it kind of struck me how much a certain class of americans are used to very elite spaces and they are not used to public spaces. municipal spaces, bureaucratic spaces, particularly if you're poor, you have to spend a lot of time in those kinds of spaces. elite people, people of power and money, they tend to be in grandeur. >> donald trump in that setting when he is walking past you, you know, he walks in and out to see him for the first time and this is the first time i've ever seen him in person, he was less than expected. >> the first time i was in the courtroom, donald trump was very surprised to see me, because it had been mostly reporters, very few anchor tapes showing up there, and donald trump has hated me longer than anyone who was going to walk into that courtroom. he was once very fond of stormy daniels and you know, very fond of michael: but in 2011 when donald trump started talking about [ inaudible ] birth certificate, i said he was lying about it and i called him a liar and donald trump had never been called a liar before in his life. when he was leaving that day, he just did the stupidest thing he could possibly do. he looked right at me in this grand way that everyone in the courtroom could see, and he was trying to do a face that would be tough guy and scary and threatening and full of hate, but he's a terrible actor, so it came out as just an insanely twisted face that meant nothing but madness, and i loved it. >> if there were cameras in the court, people all over america in all 50 states would be calling in sick to work in order to stay home and watch this thing. i mean, it is so compelling in person. and, the drama of this particular criminal case against trump is both lurid and cogent and full of amazing characters and has just enough surprised to make every witness kind of a cliffhanger. you can't -- like i don't know if trump is falling asleep or if he's just resting his eyes, but it's not boring. it's riveting. >> riveting is the perfect word to describe what it was like inside donald trump's trial. every trial is dramatic. that's why we all get addicted to tv shows like law and order, but this is real life, and it is no exception, but it is one thing to hear the news about it , or to read the transcript, but tonight we are going to continue to learn from people who were inside the courtroom day in and day out, waking up at the crack of dawn to wait in line to get one of the few seats available to the public and press at 100 center street here in manhattan, so tonight i am joined by a very special legal panel who also spent many hours in the manhattan criminal courthouse. please welcome nbc senior legal correspondent and attorney, laura jarrett. msnbc host, legal contributor and former criminal trial attorney, katie fang, and msnbc legal correspondent and former big law litigator, lisa rubin. they are here with us for the whole hour along with msnbc host giving us their impressions from inside the courthouse. lisa, obviously some of these witnesses got a ton of attention. they may not have been the most important witnesses but stormy daniels, michael cohen and maybe the most surprising witness, which was the defendants last witness, bob costello. i thought that was a huge bomb. but what was your impression of how they did that people might not get from just reading accounts and hearing from us about what was technically said? what was the demeanor and tone people would get? >> i think the most important part about the witness you can't get from reading the transcripts is the entrance and the exit, because all of the witnesses were brought in through a side door to the courtroom instead of the traditional backdoor where you walk through the gallery, you walked through the center well then walked to the witness stand. here, each and every witness, hostile to donald trump or friendly, had to walk by his first row of surrogates on their way into the courtroom, flanked by courtroom security officers and their counsel then followed thereafter. in some cases, trump really wanted to have an interaction with them, as with rona graff, his former executive assistant. michael cohen looked like he wanted to vault over the courtroom doors so that he could avoid being proximate to donald trump so i thought that entrance and exit was really fascinating to watch. >> katie, as someone who has spent so many years as a criminal prosecutor, was of people have talked about how there should've been cameras in the courtroom, or at least audio, and let's leave that aside for a moment. how do you think, if there had been cameras, that might have affected witnesses, the lawyers on either side, or even the defendant, donald trump, if this happened? >> i think it would have increased the intensity of the experience for everyone involved, especially the witnesses. you have to ask yourself whether or not donald trump himself would have reacted even more visibly than he did. maybe he would not have acted or looked like he was asleep if he knew there was a camera trained on him but when it comes to the witnesses themselves, if they knew, just like we've seen in other trials, that they would be on the witness stand, i think it would've amplified the performances we saw from some of the witnesses. i think you are more hyperaware and the jurors would've been aware, even if you never saw their identities. i know that they know it's important, but when you're in the courtroom, it's a small space. it's not some cavernous federal courtroom. it is a small state courtroom and some people are within very close proximity, within feet of each other and so you know also it's not just the people in the courtroom that are watching or the overflow room. it's america and the world. i think that amplifies the intensity. >> excellent point. i was really surprised by how close the witness stand was to the jury, really close and actually, the witness stand from donald trump was much further, so that was something i think you don't get from not being there. >> we have much more of our supersmart legal panel who are inside the courtroom coming up, but first, it was some of the most shocking testimony of the trial, when stormy daniels took the stand all while apparently, unbeknownst to us, wearing a bulletproof vest. after the break, our team takes us inside the courtroom, inside the elevators and parking lots where reporters tried to process what they had just heard. you are watching prosecuting donald trump, witness to history. >> many of the journalists in the room were looking at each other thinking my gosh, i cannot believe this is happening. and by the way, how am i going to communicate this on television? te this 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we could all unsubscribe and switch to xfinity. their connection is unreal. and we could all un-experience this whole session. okay, that's uncalled for. welcome back to to prosecuting donald trump, witness to history, the reporting of the first ever criminal trial of the u.s. president. after years of covering stormy daniels and her claims that donald trump paid her to keep quiet about a sexual encounter so it would not come out before the 2016 election, what was it like to finally see her in person when she finally took the stand to testify against him, and after her dramatic, combative, sometimes shocking testimony, what was the conversation like among the reporters and spectators of the courthouse, and what about that bulletproof vest her lawyers say she wore. here are some more firsthand accounts from my colleagues who were inside the room. >> when she came in, all of us kind of took a deep breath. no one expected -- i mean, we don't know who the witnesses are until that day for a reason. the prosecution always protects their witnesses so resources we might figure out who the witness is maybe an hour before hand and that morning, donald trump had posted untruths social that they had just been informed of who the witness was and they had not prepared and that person should be able to take the stand and so the minute he had posted that and by the way, deleted it an hour later, we said, it's going to be stormy. i have compared this trial to watching two movies that are made eight years apart, and none of the central characters look the way you remember them in 2016, and that is as true of michael cohen, for example, as it is stormy daniels. on day one, she came in and a jumpsuit with her hair haphazardly piled up atop her head, wearing glasses and not looking at all like the adult film star we remembered. i have since come to learn, because her lawyer said this on another media outlet, she was wearing a bulletproof vest, and that accounted, i think, for her appearance. she was wearing an outfit that accommodated her wearing a bulletproof vest because she felt her life was at risk in coming to court and testify against former president trump and the reaction of people in maga world who are loyal to trump about her testimony, reinforced why she felt she was in danger. >> there were no trump reactions to the stormy daniels thing, but you can see there is donald trump, known to millions of people as the orange turned who has to sit there for the first time in his life and listen to himself being called the orange turned, and the person who was doing that was his defense lawyer, thinking this somehow harms stormy daniels, that she flippantly refers to donald trump as the orange turned. there is not a person there who cares that she refers to him as the orange turd. they're not offended by it. these are new yorkers. these are people who have heard worse in the subway. >> so, we leave the courtroom. we walk out. there was a row of bathrooms during breaks. everybody lines up in the bathroom like you would in any kind of public place. we are all in line looking at each other, giving eyes at each other, like oh my gosh is that what really happened? getting onto the elevator, going down for lunch, did she just accuse the former president of this? everyone is mulling over and digesting what we just heard. >> the jurors have been admirably stonefaced. i know i've seen reports. i did not see with my own eyes but i saw reports of jurors involuntarily reacting to some of the more salacious details that came out during stormy daniels' testimony. i didn't see anything like that. for me, the jury was like stonehenge. they were very restrained. >> this is a case about falsifying business records, and the defense team made it a case that sounded like a 1970s rape case. you've been in 200 adult films like how could you be raped? a look at the jury and they were poker-faced. this is a storied courthouse, storied prosecution team. they have done six -- sex crimes before and it was basically a moment where they told the woman at center of this case that she couldn't have been mistreated. >> she was treated so differently than different witnesses. hope hickson david pecker, the person who headed the national enquirer, were devastating witnesses. their subsequent testimony is so damning for donald trump and their cross-examination was kid gloves. >> nobody's testimony is in some restricts -- respects more devastating than hope hicks because of her proximity. no one questioned her credibility but if you take a step back and forget about the accident of their respective births, hope hicks coming from very wealthy greenwich connecticut, being raised as the ralph lauren model, the epitome of poise and grace in the trump white house contrasted with stormy daniels, who had, by contrast, a very rough childhood, a mother who abandoned her -- all of this comes out on her direct examination but the difference in how they were trusted, i think, is really palpable in sort of a toxic brew of class and misogyny. there was absolutely a judgment about her credibility based on what she did for a living and then you have to think to yourself well, wait a second, hope hicks may look t