Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
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His legal fight is not over, and his political campaign is ratcheting into high gear — but for now, the former president can't deny that he's been found guilty on all 34 guilty counts of falsifying business records in order to keep a porn star silent ahead of the 2016 election.
To explain how we got here and what's coming next, Kyle Cheney, a senior legal affairs reporter at POLITICO, and Ankush Khardori, a senior staff writer and legal columnist for POLITICO Magazine, sat down for a very timely conversation on the Playbook Deep Dive podcast .
They discussed how Trump's defense team may have repeatedly harmed their own case, how Trump's conduct during the trial could influence Justice Juan Merchan's sentence and Trump's best hopes for an appeal.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive producer Kara Tabor and senior producer Alex Keeney.
Kyle, you were inside the courthouse when the verdict was announced. Set the scene for us as the jury entered the room to deliver the news.
Kyle Cheney: The moment really started just before they came in, because everyone was packing up to go home for the day. There had been no word from the jury at all. And the judge, Juan Merchan, said, “We're going home. We’re going to send the jury home at 4:30,” that they’re not going to have a decision today.
I have left to go check on them. And then he was gone for a while and we were all thinking, “What’s taking so long?”
Suddenly he comes back and says, “Actually, we're not going home today. There’s a verdict.”
So it was this kind of whiplash moment that I thought added to the suspense and the drama of it, which was already high, of course. But then you had the jury come out and they confirmed they had reached their verdict.