Thread by @stewartbishop

Live from NY Supreme Court (and this tree) again for the criminal trial of Donald Trump over the Manhattan DA’s 34 counts of falsifying business records against the former president.

We're now in the home stretch, NY Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan is currently reading his instructions on the law to the jury. It's straight to deliberations after that.

The Manhattan DA claims that Trump and others falsified business records stemming from a $130,000 hush money deal with porn star Stormy Daniels, in order to keep news of their 2006 extramarital sexual encounter from affecting his chances in the 2016 presidential election.

Justice Merchan is expected to take about an hour (maybe more?) to read his legal instructions to the jury.

As I mentioned the other day, this is boring AF.

Want to know what's messed up? These extensive jury instructions cannot, by law, be given to the jury in written form to assist them with their deliberations. They can only request to have some part, or all, of the instructions read back to them by the judge.

This is particularly problematic in complex white collar cases.

Case in point, years back I was covering the trial of Sergey Aleynikov (look him up), and the inability of the judge to provide the jury a written copy of his instructions was a huge burden on the jury's deliberations.

Aleynikov was essentially accused of stealing code from Goldman Sachs and was charged with violating some obscure, decades-old NY state laws, which were written at a time when such code did not exist.

Much of that case depended on the question of whether or not computer code is "tangible." The jury was understandably confused. They asked for the written instructions, in vain.

Finally, the jury sent a note asking for the judge to read back the instructions again, and to do so very, very slowly. Jurors asked that so they could write down everything he said by hand.

Jurors can have written instructions during deliberations in federal trials, and society hasn't fallen yet.

Anyway, Justice Merchan is talking about what jurors must find to convict Trump of falsifying business records in the first degree, and it is somewhat complicated.

To convict a person of falsifying business records, jurors must find that person, with an intent to defraud and the intent to do another crime, or to conceal the commission thereof, falsifies the business records. The other crime in this case is violating NYC election law.

The jury doesn't have to find that Trump actually violated the aforementioned election law, it's all about intent.

However, to convict Trump, the jury must find that Trump committed this crime by using specific unlawful means, i.e., violating the Federal Election Campaign Act, falsifying other business records or running afoul of state tax laws.

The jury doesn't have to be unanimous on the unlawful means bit. For example, half the jury could find Trump committed tax crimes, while the other half thinks he committed FECA violations, and that would be fine for a conviction, assuming the other factors are met.

What constitutes a FECA violation? Justice Merchan explains that excessive campaign donations, over $2700 at the time in question, or violating rules on corporate donations, both qualify.

Justice Merchan is getting close to the end of his instructions. Jury deliberations are about to commence.

Deliberations began at 11:28 a.m. ET.

"Mother Teresa could not beat those charges," Trump told our hallway pool reporters shortly after deliberations began.

There's a note from the jury. It contains four requests for testimony from ex-AMI (Nat. Enquirer) CEO David Pecker and Michael Cohen.

Jurors asked for Pecker's testimony about a call he had with Trump re: model Karen McDougal, Pecker's decision not to buy her story of an affair with Trump, and testimony from both Pecker and Cohen about the 2015 Trump Tower meeting where their media plan was allegedly hatched.

That's quite a lot of testimony that the jury is asking for here.

A Trump verdict today seems increasingly unlikely.

And now jurors want to hear the judge's instructions again.

Justice Merchan brings the jury back out and tells them that the parties are still working on finding all the testimony they asked for, and he sends the jury home early.

The jury will pick things back up tomorrow morning at 9:30. Trump's counsel and prosecutors are staying behind while they hash out what testimony is responsive to the jury's request.