Trump trial jury reaches verdict in hush money case

A jury has reached a verdict Thursday in the criminal hush money trial of former President Donald Trump in New York.

The 12-member jury sent out a note to the trial judge at 4:20 p.m. ET.

“We the jury have a verdict. We would like an extra 30 minutes to fill out the forms if that’d be possible,” the note said, according to Judge Juan Merchan, who read it out loud in the courtroom.

Jurors deliberated less than 10 hours over two days before sending out the note. Before the announcement, Trump, his lawyers, prosecutors and reporters expected the jury to be dismissed for the day at 4:30 p.m.

Trump was sitting in the courtroom with his arms crossed and a resigned look on his face minutes after the announcement was made.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr., whose office is prosecuting Trump, entered the courtroom after the note was sent out.

Trump, 77, is charged in the case with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels by his then-personal lawyer Michael Cohen before the 2016 election.

The verdict in Manhattan Supreme Court came hours after jurors heard readbacks of testimony by Cohen and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, as well as portions of legal instructions they received Wednesday from Merchan.

Trump is the first former U.S. president to be charged with a crime.

The records at issue in the case relate to reimbursements by Trump and the Trump Organization to Cohen, the former fixer who paid Daniels to keep quiet about a sexual tryst she said she had with Trump in 2006.

Cohen testified during the trial that Trump directed him to pay off Daniels before the 2016 election to prevent her story from damaging his presidential campaign.

Trump, who is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, faces three other pending criminal cases.

In two of those cases, Trump is charged with crimes related to his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. 

One of those cases is in federal court in Washington, D.C., and the other is in Georgia state court in Atlanta.

Trump is charged in federal court in Florida with crimes related to his retention of classified government records after he left the White House in January 2021 and to his attempts to prevent those documents from being recovered by federal officials.

Trump also faces a civil judgment in Manhattan Supreme Court ordering him to pay more than $450 million in damages to the state of New York after he was held liable for business fraud involving the Trump Organization and its valuation of real estate assets.

He also faces two civil defamation verdicts by federal juries that awarded damages of nearly $90 million to writer E. Jean Carroll, who testified that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s in a dressing room of a Manhattan department store.

Trump is appealing the verdicts in the three civil cases.

This is developing news. Check back for updates.