What was said during closing arguments in Trump’s hush money trial

William Brangham:

Geoff, Trump’s lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, leaned into what you just referred to before, which is that, while we all call this the hush money case, it’s really about this falsification of business records that are meant to cover up the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels that was made by Michael Cohen.

And Todd Blanche really leaned into that, telling jurors, this is not a hush money case, this is a paper case. And he argued that Donald Trump had nothing to do with creating any of that paper. That’s the 34 charges here that are 34 different invoices, ledgers, checks and check stubs that are the — central to this case.

And Blanche argued there’s no clear evidence that Donald Trump created those, orchestrated those, knew anything about those. There’s no evidence that he did that with the intent to conceal anything, and certainly no evidence that he tried to do that to win an election.

He argued that “The National Enquirer” scheme, this whole catch-and-kill scheme that was set up back in 2016, was not illegal, that there — that NDAs, these nondisclosure agreements, aren’t illegal. There’s nothing wrong about them, in essence, and that they’re quite common.

He also stressed — and this was a key part of what he had to say — is that the central witnesses here, Stormy Daniels partly, but Michael Cohen principally, simply cannot be trusted and that they had personal and financial reasons to make up stories about Donald Trump and his alleged scheme in all of this.