Washington
CNN
 — 

Former President Donald Trump delivered a barrage of false claims to media cameras this week as he entered and exited the Manhattan courtroom where he is on trial on charges of falsifying business records in relation to a hush money scheme during the 2016 presidential election.

Here’s a fact check of four of the claims he made about the trial. (For this particular article, we’ll leave aside the false claims he made in the courthouse about a variety of other subjects.)

Courthouse security

After The New York Times published a story that said Trump was unhappy with the meager crowd he saw when he arrived at the courthouse for opening statements on Monday, Trump told reporters inside the courthouse on Tuesday: “For blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.”

He added on social media on Tuesday: “Thousands of people were turned away from the Courthouse in Lower Manhattan by steel stanchions and police, literally blocks from the tiny side door from where I enter and leave. It is an armed camp to keep people away.” And he said in comments inside the courthouse on Thursday: “This courthouse is locked down; there’s not a person within five blocks.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are all false. The police have not turned away “thousands of people” from the courthouse. And while there are various security measures in place in the area, including some street closures enforced by police officers and barricades, it’s not true that “this courthouse is locked down,” that “for blocks you can’t get near this courthouse” or that “there’s not a person within five blocks.” In reality, there is a designated protest zone for the trial at a park directly across the street from the courthouse – and people are permitted to drive right up to the front of the courthouse and walk into the building, which remains open to the public. If people show up early enough in the morning, they can even get into the trial courtroom itself or the overflow room that shows near-live video of the proceedings. 

The reality is that few of Trump’s supporters have chosen to show up. There were well under 100 visible Trump supporters gathered in the protest zone at the outset of the trial in mid-April, and there have often been three or fewer there on subsequent days, according to CNN journalists who have been reporting from the courthouse area.

You can read more here.

Michael Cohen’s crimes and Trump

On Monday, Trump said upon leaving the courtroom that the crimes committed by his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen “had nothing to do with me.”

Cohen is expected to be a key witness for the prosecution. Trump said: “The things he got in trouble for were things that had nothing to do with me. He got in trouble; he went to jail. This has nothing to do with me. This had to do with the taxicab company that he owned, which is just something he owned – and medallions and borrowing money and a lot of things – but it had nothing to do with me.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that Cohen’s prison sentence “had nothing to do with me” is false. Cohen’s three-year sentence in 2018 was for multiple crimes, some of which were directly related to Trump. Most notably, Cohen was sentenced for campaign finance offenses connected to a hush money scheme during the 2016 presidential campaign to conceal Trump’s alleged extramarital relationships – the same hush money scheme that is central to this prosecution against Trump. Cohen was also sentenced to two months in prison, to run concurrently with the three-year sentence, for lying to Congress in 2017 in relation to previous talks about the possibility of building a Trump Tower in Moscow, Russia, including about the extent of Trump’s involvement in the aborted Moscow initiative and about when in 2016 the discussions ended. (The discussions continued into June 2016, the month after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and did not conclude in January 2016 before the first votes were cast, as Cohen had claimed.)

Referring to Trump as “Individual-1,” Cohen said at the time of his 2018 guilty plea for making false statements to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: “I made these statements to be consistent with Individual-1’s political messaging and out of loyalty to Individual-1.” When Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to the campaign finance violations, he said he broke the law “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” Trump.

The gag order on Trump

Upon leaving the courtroom on Tuesday, Trump approached the cameras, began talking, and complained that he is “not allowed to talk.”

Trump was criticizing Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order on him. Merchan had held a hearing on Tuesday morning to consider prosecutors’ allegations that Trump violated the gag order with a series of online posts, including some in which the presumptive Republican presidential nominee shared others’ articles related to the case on social media.

Trump claimed, “Can’t even allow articles to be put in.” He claimed the articles he is referring to say “the case is a sham.” He added, “I don’t even know if you’re allowed to put them in.” He also claimed that although others are permitted to lie and speak about him, “I’m not allowed to say anything.”

“I’d love to talk to you people, I’d love to say everything that’s on my mind, but I’m restricted because I have a gag order,” Trump said.

Facts First: As he has before, Trump made Merchan’s gag order sound far broader than it is. The gag order does not prohibit Trump from declaring the case a sham or from sharing others’ claims that the case is a sham. It also does not prohibit Trump from speaking to the media about the case, from defending his conduct at issue in the case, from denouncing the judge and district attorney involved in the case, or from campaigning for the presidency with speeches, media interviews and online posts. 

Rather, the gag order forbids Trump from three specific categories of speech:

1) Speaking publicly or directing others to speak publicly about known or foreseeable witnesses, specifically about their participation in the case

2) Speaking publicly or directing others to speak publicly about prosecutors (other than Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg), members of the district attorney’s staff and the court staff, or family members of any of these people including Bragg, if those statements are made with the intent to interfere with the case

3) Speaking publicly or directing others to speak publicly about jurors or prospective jurors

In his comments on Tuesday, Trump made the point that an article may have a certain headline that generally denounces the case but, “somewhere deep” in the body of the text, may mention somebody’s name he is not permitted to mention because of the gag order.

It’s not clear how Merchan would view Trump having shared an article in which, say, a witness’s name was only mentioned deep in the text. To date, though, articles that prosecutors have alleged Trump violated the gag order by sharing featured headlines that made it entirely clear the articles discussed likely witness Cohen.

Biden and the case

On Tuesday, Trump said upon leaving the courtroom: “By the way, this trial is all Biden. You know, this is all Biden, just in case anybody has any question.” He added, “He’s the one that has us in all these different lawsuits.” He said upon his departure Friday: “This is all a Biden indictment.”

Facts First: There is no basis for Trump’s claims. There is no evidence that Biden has had any role in launching or running Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution – and Bragg is a locally elected official who does not report to the federal government. The indictment in the case was approved by a grand jury of ordinary citizens.

Trump has repeatedly invoked a lawyer on Bragg’s team, Matthew Colangelo, while making such claims; Colangelo left the Justice Department in 2022 to join the district attorney’s office as senior counsel to Bragg. But there is no evidence that Biden had anything to do with Colangelo’s employment decision. Colangelo and Bragg had been colleagues before Bragg was elected Manhattan district attorney in 2021.

Before Colangelo worked at the Justice Department, he and Bragg worked at the same time in the office of New York’s state attorney general, where Colangelo investigated Trump’s charity and Trump’s financial practices and was involved in bringing various lawsuits against the Trump administration.

Trump on potential for prison time or house arrest: ‘I’m ok with it,’ but not sure ‘public would stand it’

The historic felony conviction of former President Donald Trump marks a meaningful victory for the beleaguered American legal system and a win for truth over falsehood.

Three other criminal trials involving Trump have bogged down for various reasons. Two impeachments by the House of Representatives ended in partisan votes against conviction in the Senate. But in an ordinary New York courtroom, 12 men and women considered the evidence, weighed Trump’s various defenses, and concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that he was lying.

Trump has gotten away with lying to an extent unmatched in US history, and he may get away with it again in the November presidential election. In the courtroom, however, truth prevailed. That matters.

Understanding why Trump was convicted can tell us a lot about how the criminal justice system differs from large-scale electoral politics — and why the former is more resistant to the problem of lies and misinformation.

In court, Trump’s lawyers adopted a strategy of brazen falsehood, denying every element of the prosecution’s case, up to and including the allegation that Trump had a sexual encounter with adult film actress and director Stormy Daniels.

As any lawyer could tell you (and many legal commentators did, as the trial played out), this was a legally risky strategy. Trump had a better option: He could have admitted the affair and the cover-up and asserted that he was simply trying to avoid personal embarrassment and never knowingly intended to falsify records. That would have given his legal team a better chance of undercutting the basis of the felony charges against him: that he falsified the records to interfere with the 2016 election.

It seems pretty clear that the reason Trump’s lawyer went with the deny-everything approach is that it represented the essence of Trump’s entire (and largely successful) strategy throughout his political and business careers. Trump has come to learn that he can forcefully and regularly assert things that are patently untrue, and that plenty of the public will still vote for him.

Some of his supporters believe his lies literally, accepting, for example, that he really won in 2020. But much of the Trump-supporting public — it’s hard to say exactly how much — believe Trump’s lies in a more metaphorical fashion. That is, they believe there are forces out to get Trump and that in some grand sense those forces cost him the presidency in 2020. Either way, his supporters don’t have to test his lies against any concrete evidence. They can vote and act on the basis of a general feeling.

Not so in a courtroom. There, the authority figure of the judge (notably absent in the political context) tells the jurors what counts as evidence, spells out what law they should apply, and specifies what conclusions they should reach depending on what facts they believe after hearing the evidence.

Then, prosecutors trained in presenting facts lay out the evidence and propose reasons to believe that evidence. Crucially, the jurors have no choice but to listen, again unlike the domain of politics, where you can choose what information you’re willing to hear and from which sources. The defense gets the opportunity to question the prosecution’s factual assertions, to be sure. But the fight in the courtroom is supposed to be a fair one, with each side entitled to equal time. If the prosecution’s case is convincing beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant gets convicted. The rules of the game are designed to expose the truth.

Under these idealized courtroom circumstances, Trump was sure to be convicted. It’s no exaggeration to say that, if charged and tried in this way, he very likely would have been convicted in any court in the land, even in a venue dominated by Republican voters. He simply didn’t offer a defense that would function plausibly in a court of law, as opposed to the court of public opinion.

To be sure, the overwhelming majority of criminal cases never go to a jury at all. There is much to be said about the failings of the criminal justice system when it is all plea-bargaining. In Trump’s case, however, the jury trial embodied exactly what is supposed to happen in a criminal case: The facts were tested and the truth won.

If the criminal justice system were on trial alongside Trump, and came through with flying colors, the next test is our system of electoral politics. Now, we voters are on trial. Are we capable of accepting the factual truth that Trump is now a convicted felon? Can we translate that into the political truth that the president of the United States should not be a liar who has been criminally convicted in a court of law? That is a much different, and much harder test for us to pass.

Overlooked in the furor over former Donald Trump aide Hope Hicks’ testimony in the former president’s New York criminal trial Friday was a quieter but no less important event. It came in Judge Juan Merchan’s soft-spoken but forceful reprimand of Trump for spreading a false claim. Merchan politely but firmly deflated Trump’s latest misleading spin and, in so doing, offered the dozens of journalists in the courtroom some pointers on how to deal with Trump’s incessant lies.

Trump has refrained from attacking witnesses and the jury since last week, when he was first found in contempt of court for nine violations of the gag order in the case. (On Monday, Merchan found Trump guilty of a 10th violation that took place before he was initially found in contempt.) But the former president is not holding back on attacking the truth. After proceedings ended on Thursday, Trump was asked whether he would appear as a witness in his own defense. “I’m not allowed to testify,” he stated. “I’m under a gag order — I guess, right?”

At this point he turned to his attorney, Todd Blanche, who nodded in confirmation. Trump continued, “This judge — who’s totally conflicted — has me under an unconstitutional gag order. Nobody’s ever had that before.”

Trump most likely knew his claim was a lie on several levels. Blanche certainly did. First, gag orders are common practice in high-profile criminal cases to prevent the parties from making extrajudicial statements that may affect the integrity of the proceedings. Second, the appellate division reviewing Merchan’s work declined to stay trial proceedings as it reviews the constitutionality of the gag order, suggesting its agreement with its contents.

Third, and most important, the gag order does not bar Trump from testifying. Defendants have an absolute right in criminal cases to testify in their own defense. In fact, New York provides even more rights to defendants than most jurisdictions. For example, state law requires what are known as Sandoval hearings to make defendants aware of what the prosecution will use against them and help them decide whether it is in their best interests to testify.

What was really going on Thursday was obvious. Trump has publicly promised to take the stand, but as one of the co-authors (Eisen) writes in a new book, the former president no doubt recognizes that testifying would be a disaster for him. Prosecutors’ Sandoval motions made it clear that if Trump testifies, they will raise his civil trials involving E. Jean Carroll and the civil fraud trial involving him, his sons and the Trump Organization. He would be discredited on cross-examination, both because of his penchant for lying and because of the apparent lack of any lawful explanation for the allegations in this criminal trial.

Trump needs someone to blame for his not taking the stand, so he was pointing the finger at the gag order and by extension the judge. He wants his supporters to believe that the only reason he did not testify is that the gag order prohibited him from doing so. This is a deceptive tactic from the former president, who has established himself as a merchant of disinformation.

Disinformation is the deliberate spread of false information with bad intent, as one of the co-authors (McQuade) discusses in her new book. Trump’s behavior, and indeed Blanche’s, as well, fits this definition precisely. It is clear they know this information is false, and they spread it to try to manipulate the electorate’s perceptions to their advantage.

Indeed, even Trump may have realized he had gone too far. Asked again about the gag order before court began Friday morning, he said: “The gag order is not to testify. The gag order stops me from talking about people.” Perhaps he meant it was not about testifying, or perhaps he had some other unfathomable meaning in mind.

Be that as it may, the waters had been muddied by the disinformation shared Thursday, and Merchan’s response was a clinic in how to deal with it. First, he reaffirmed the law: “I want to stress to Mr. Trump: You have an absolute right to testify at trial.” Next, the judge did not quote or even paraphrase Trump’s falsehood, which would have risked amplifying it and spreading it further. Instead, he focused on the truth, noting correctly that the gag order has nothing to do with his testimony.

Finally, the judge made his remarks in an even-tempered fashion that maintained order in the proceedings. Disinformation is designed to inflame emotions, but Merchan refused to take the bait. The judge then moved on matter-of-factly to decide other routine evidentiary matters before the court, ruling in Trump’s favor on one of them — further proof that he had been unaffected by the disinformation.

Merchan showed wisdom in keeping his cool, deciding legal issues fairly and refusing to tolerate Trump’s efforts to taint public confidence in the proceedings. With Trump and so many others constantly spewing disinformation, others can learn from Merchan’s example.