After jury deliberations in former President Donald Trump's hush money/falsified business records trial got underway in a Lower Manhattan courthouse on Wednesday, May 29, the jurors asked Justice Juan Merchan if they could review some of the testimony from former National Inquirer Publisher David Pecker.
Legal experts on MSNBC and CNN have a lot to say about this request and the possible implications.
In an article published on May 30 — the second day of jury deliberations — Salon's Charles R. Davis stresses that according to legal analysts, jurors' requests "suggest that the panel of 12 New Yorkers are seriously pondering a conviction."
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The jurors, Davis notes, asked to "review four pieces of evidence — the testimony from former National Enquirer Publisher David Pecker concerning a phone call he had with Trump, in which, according to Pecker, the former president named Michael Cohen as his point man; Pecker's discussion of Playboy model Karen McDougal and Cohen's efforts to buy her silence; and both Pecker and Cohen's accounts of a 2015 meeting at Trump Tower where the Republican candidate, they say, agreed to a catch-and-kill scheme to keep damaging stories out of the press."
On Threads, attorney and Never Trump conservative George Conway argued that those four requests were a good sign for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr.'s office.
Conway posted, "If I were in the DA's office I'd be giddily bouncing off the walls right now."
On SubStack, former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance — a frequent legal analyst for MSNBC — argued, "These requests for testimony track the road map prosecutors gave jurors for deciding if Michael Cohen could be believed. It's dangerous to read the tea leaves, but it's a cautiously optimistic sign that jurors are working through the evidence in ways that the government proposed."
On X, formerly Twitter, Kristy Greenberg — another legal analyst for MSNBC — posted, "Today was a good day for Trump's prosecutors: the jury has requested precisely the evidence that ADA (Joshua) Steinglass told them in his closing to focus on that proves the election law conspiracy."
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Read Salon's full article at this link.