Former President Donald Trump is very unlikely to get what he wants in the jury instructions for his criminal hush money trial in Manhattan, legal expert Lisa Rubin told MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Thursday evening.
Trump, whose trial has lasted weeks and seen several moments of courtroom drama, is accused of fraudulently concealing hush payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep information about their alleged affair from voters in the 2016 election. Trump denies he did anything illegal and that the affair in question happened at all.
"There is some possibility we might get the jury instructions before they are given to the jury. It's unclear whether that's going to happen now," said Hayes. "What are the key issues?"
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"I think some of the key instructions that we haven't gotten resolved yet is how the judge is going to define the critical intent element," said Rubin. "Let's go back to what the actual charges are here, because we often lose sight of it. Trump has been charged with falsifying business records in the first, meaning, he has either falsified the business records himself or caused others to do so, with an intent to defraud, including an intent to commit or conceal another crime. That's what bumps it up to a felony."
"The defense would like an instruction that says a person acts ... with an intent to defraud when his or her purpose is to lead another into error or disadvantage, and that matters here because the Trump Organization is a privately-held company," Rubin continued. "And so their argument is, President Trump didn't have an intent to defraud because, who was he trying to defraud, these are the records of the Trump Organization and there's nobody who would be on the receiving end of these records."
However, she added, "Judge Merchan is not likely to give the instruction the way they want, because he says an intention to defraud doesn't require that there's a particular person out there that you are trying to defraud. You could be, for example, trying to keep up false business records for a rainy day so that when for example the SDNY or the SEC comes knocking, you have something already cooked that makes it look like something that the prosecutors would say was not. And so, that's an example of a way in which the defense is trying through jury instructions, to accomplish something that maybe the evidence in the case doesn't accomplish for them."
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