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 didn't get to see trumps eyes close and his mouth go slack as he sat slumped at the defense table. they didn't get to hear stormy daniels salacious testimony, firsthand. i didn't get to watch the judge clear the courtroom, seemingly in anger, as he butted heads with one particularly truculent witness. instead, americans have to rely on word from the few reporters who were actually in the room, making notes, writing down, committing to memory the things we saw and experienced. things that a transcript cannot capture. take a look. that was something to behold. i could hear gasps all around me . i wasn't sure we are going to get to a place where we had any guilty verdict against donald trump, let alone all 34 counts. >> donald trump was crying from the oval office. he was writing checks from the white house. >> this is a professional jury as you can get. and you can never read anything from them. >> in terms the vibe from the room, you heard about it being kind of a courtroom, it's real. >> i was in the courtroom, his eyes have been close most of the morning. i can't say what is happening behind those lids. >> one simple work, guilty, repeated over and over and over. something we have never seen before. , tonight we welcome you to the special msn ec event, prosecuting donald trump a witness to history. over this next hour, andrew weissman and i will lead you through what you missed inside the courtroom. not the line by line details of witness testimony, but with the help of our msnbc colleagues, will tell you what it was really like to sit just behind donald trump as the details of the case spilled over. we will tell you what it felt like in the room when witnesses took the stand just a few feet away from the former president. the unscripted, unpredictable moments when the former president seemed to be nodding off, uttering curse words. what people said to each other in the line for the bathroom after that riveting controversial testimony from stormy daniels. from andrew weissman and best legal minds, we will hear from what they saw inside the court, that the nonlawyers, like the rest of us, might have missed. start things off with our first impressions from inside manhattan courthouse. >> it is a surreal moment going for the first time. and see a former president of the united states, who is simultaneously the world's greatest con artist. those two things at the same time as a criminal defendant, just spends things in a way that nothing else can. and the weirdness of that alone is your first 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. but first of all, because i feel like a somebody who has written a trump book and has been covering this man from the beginning of his presidential campaign on, this kind of felt like a crescenta moment for him , and for the country. it is the only trial that he is going to face. so it definitely felt like a big moment and something that i really did want to witness for myself. >> having worked in another investigation, and we could not charge the sitting president and donald trump, that was a 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 they really weren't. and then found my nbc pham, around the spot where we do stand up, found all the producers and camera operators and everything and stood in line for a really long time. i will say, the thing that 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 caught is through the soles of your dress shoes, you idiot, why didn't you wear sneakers? >> people understand, it is not you just walk up to the courthouse and they whisk you in and it was this easy breezy kind of thing. 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, flake flying on an airline was actually kind of put you in a different group of people to board. >> two courtroom that look identical, the only difference being the judge and the jury, et cetera, are in the overflow. >> the overflow room hold other members of the media and also withhold members of the public. the overflow room has a very large monitor at the front of it that shows directly councils table. so you have the prosecution on one side, the defense on the other. what you very clearly see donald trump. >> it was like a spa compared to the courtroom. you can go to the restroom whatever you want to. you can, and there is this absence of tension. in the overflow room. that i didn't know i was feeling in the courtroom. until i wasn't in the courtroom. and it is almost like, you know, you're standing in this very difficult window 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 tuberville of alabama had gone to the trial and said it was the most depressing building he had ever been in, and he scorned on it. and i take that man's statement 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. in a simple spaces, bureaucratic spaces, 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, both when he is walking past you, he walks in and out and you kind of seen for the first time. this was the first time i have 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 i had been mostly reporters, very few anchor types 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 cohen. in 2011, when donald trump started about the presidential birth certificate, i said he was lying about it and i called him on the lie 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 you 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 is a terrible actor. and 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 on and watch this thing. i mean, it is so freaking 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 surprise to make every witness kind of a cliffhanger. it's, you can't. i don't know if trump is falling asleep or if he is just resting his eyes, but it is not boring. it is riveting. >> riveting is the perfect word to describe what it was like inside donald trump's trial. every trial is dramatic, it is why we all get addicted to tv shows like law and order and the wire. this is real life, and it was no exception. but it is one thing to hear the news about it, or if you are a nerd like me, to read the cold transcript. but tonight, we're 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 the press at 100 center street here in manhattan. so tonight i'm joined by a very special legal panel, who also spent many hours in the manhattan criminal courthouse, please welcome nbc senior legal correspondence and attorney, laura jarrett, in legal contributor, and former terminal trial attorney, katie fang, and msnbc legal correspondent, law litigator, lisa rubin. they are here with us for the whole hour, along with msnbc hosts giving us their impression 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. maybe the most surprising witness, which was the defendants last witness, the last anyone heard from bob castillo's. the big picture, 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 sort of demeanor and tone that people might get >> i think the most important part about the witness that you can't get from reading the transcript, or sometimes even watching our coverage is the entrance and the exit. because all the witnesses were brought in through a side door to the courtroom, instead of the traditional back door where you walk along the entirety of the gallery, he watched through the center aisle and walked to the witness stand. here, each and every witness, no matter hostile to donald trump or friendly, had to walk by his first row of surrogates on their way into the courtroom. went by corporal security officers and those of them who had counsel, their counsel then load thereafter. in some cases, trump really wanted to have an interaction with the as with rona graff, his former executive assistant and other cases, the body language was as hostile as hostile could be. michael cohen looks like you wanted to vault over the courtroom doors so that he could avoid being even proximate to donald trump. that that entrance and exit was really fascinating to watch. >> katie, i had a question to you is somebody who spent so many years as a criminal prosecutor. lots of people have talked about how there should have been cameras in the courtroom, 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 had been televised. >> i think it would've increased the intensity of the experience for everyone involved, especially the witnesses. you kind of ask yourself on and off, donald trump himself would have maybe reacted to more visibly than he did. maybe she wouldn't have acted or looked like he was asleep if you knew that there was a camera trained on him. but when it comes to the witnesses themselves, it is important because if they knew, just like we have seen in other trials, that they would be on the witness stand. i think it would've amplified maybe even performances that we saw from some of the witnesses. i think you are more hyperaware. i also think the jurors would have been aware, even if you never saw their identities, i know that they know it is important, what is at stake. but when you're in a courtroom, it is a small space. people need to understand this is not some huge cavernous federal courtroom. it is a small state courtroom and so people are within very close proximity, within feet of each other. and that is the jury. so if you know also, does not just people in the court that are watching or the overflow room, is america and the world, i think that amplifies the intensity. >> i was really surprised by how close the witness stand was to the jury box. really close. and actually the witness stand for donald trump was much, much further. so that was something i think you don't get from being there. much more for supersmart legal panel who were inside the courtroom, coming up. first, it is one of the most shocking testimonies of the truck, when stormy daniels took the stand, all while apparently, unbeknownst to us, wearing a bulletproof vest. after the break, our team takes us not only inside the courtroom, but inside the elevators and, wait for it, bathroom lines. where reporters try to process what they had just heard. you're watching prosecuting donald trump, witness to history. >> many of the journalists in the room are looking at each other think, my gosh, i can't believe that this is happening. i cannot believe this is actually being set on a public state. either way, how am i going to communicate this on television? everybody wants super straight, super white teeth. they want that hollywood white smile. new sensodyne clinical white provides 2 shades whiter teeth and 24/7 sensitivity protection. i think it's a great 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among the reporters and the spectators of the courthouse? and, what about that bullet proof vest her lawyer says she wore to court. here are some more firsthand accounts from my colleagues from inside the room. when she came in, all of us kind of took a deep breath. no one expected we don't know who the witnesses are until that day. for a reason. right? the prosecution always protects their witnesses. resources we might figure out who witnesses maybe an hour beforehand. that morning, donald trump had posted on truth social that they had just informed of who the witness was and they had prepared and that person shouldn't be able to take the stand. and so the minute he had posted that, and then, by the way deleted it an hour later, we said, it is 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. that is true of michael cohen, for example, as it is stormy daniels. on day one, she came in in a jumpsuit with her hair sort of haphazardly piled up on top of her head, wearing glasses, and not looking at all like the adult film star that 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, as well. she was wearing an outfit that accommodated her wearing a bulletproof vest because she felt that her life was at risk in coming to court and testify against former president trump and the reaction of people in margo world, who are loyal to president trump, i could just tell you this by looking at my twitter feed, reinforced why she felt she was in danger. >> we know trump reactions to stormy daniels thing, you can see. but there's donald trump, known to millions of people as the orange turned that has to sit there for the first time in his life and listen to himself being called the orange, his defense lawyer thinking that somehow harms stormy daniels. that she flippantly refers to donald trump as the orange turd. there's not a juror there who cares that stormy daniels refers to him as the orange turd. not one, they're not offended by it. these are new yorkers, these are people who have hurt worse in every trip on the subway. >> so we leave the courtroom, we walk out, there is like a row of bathrooms during breaks. everybody kind of lines up in the bathroom like you would in any kind of public place. we are all online looking at each other, giving eyes to each other. oh my gosh, that really what happened? getting onto the elevator, going down for lunch, did she just accuse the former president of this? did she just say this happened with the former president everybody's kind of mulling over and digesting what it is we all just heard >> the jurors, i think, have been admirably sort of stonefaced. i know i have seen reports, i didn't see it with my own eyes, but i've seen reports of some jurors kind of involuntarily reacting to some of the more salacious details i came out, particularly during stormy daniels paths tory., the jury was like stonehenge. like they were very restrained. >> this is a case about falsifying business records and the defense team made it sound like a 1970s rape case. they went after her about really hard about the fact that she has been in the porn industry for years. you have been in more than 200 porn films, how could you be a damsel in distress in the hotel room? in that moment, look at right at the jurors faces to try to see if i could read anything and get any glimpse of what they were thinking. they were inscrutable. they are maintaining a poker face the whole time. this is the same courtroom that harvey weinstein was tried in. this is a storied courthouse. this is a storied prosecution team. they have done sex crimes before. this was such a momentto have the woman at the center of this case basically told she couldn't have possibly been a comfortab