WASHINGTON (AP) — Former President Donald Trump has agreed to be interviewed by the FBI as part of an investigation into his attempted assassination in Pennsylvania earlier this month, a special agent said on Monday in disclosing how the gunman prior to the shooting had researched mass attacks and explosive devices.

The expected interview with the 2024 Republican presidential nominee is part of the FBI’s standard protocol to speak with victims during the course of its criminal investigations. The FBI said on Friday that Trump was struck by a bullet or a fragment of one during the July 13 assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“We want to get his perspective on what he observed,” said Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office. “It is a standard victim interview like we would do for any other victim of crime, under any other circumstances.”

Through roughly 450 interviews, the FBI has fleshed out a portrait of the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, that reveals him to be a “highly intelligent” but reclusive 20-year-old whose primary social circle was his family and who maintained few friends and acquaintances throughout his life, Rojek said.

His parents have been “extremely cooperative,” with the investigation, Rojek said. They have said they had no advance knowledge of the shooting, a statement the FBI considers credible since Crooks had not been doing anything public in the weeks prior to the attack that would have aroused their suspicions.

The FBI has not uncovered a motive as to why he chose to target Trump, but investigators believe the shooting was the result of extensive planning, including the purchase in recent months of chemical precursors that investigators believe were used to create the explosive devices found in his car and his home and the use of a drone about 200 yards (180 meters) from the rally site in the hours before the event.

In addition, Rojek said, Crooks looked online for information about mass shootings, improvised explosive devices, power plants and the attempted assassination in May of Slovakia’s populist Prime Minister Robert Fico.

FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last week that on July 6, the day Crooks registered to attend the Trump rally, he googled: “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy?” That’s a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the shooter who killed President John F. Kennedy from a sniper’s perch in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

New details, meanwhile, were emerging about law enforcement security lapses that preceded the shooting, with Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, releasing text messages from members of the Beaver County Emergency Services Unit that showed how local officers had spotted a suspicious-looking man who turned out to be Crooks lurking around in the hour before the shooting.

“Kid learning around building we are in. AGR I believe it is,” one officer wrote to other counter-snipers, including a photograph of Crooks. “I did see him with a range finder looking towards stage. FYI. If you wanna notify SS snipers to look out. I lost sight of him.”

AGR is a reference to a complex of buildings that form AGR International Inc. Crooks scaled the roof of one of the buildings of the compound and fired eight shots at the rally stage with an AR-style rifle. Trump said he was “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear,” and he appeared in the days later with a bandage on the ear. One rallygoer, Corey Comperatore, was killed, and two others were injured. Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service counter-sniper.

In an interview with ABC News, a Beaver County officer who sounded the alarm said that after sending the text, “I assumed that there would be somebody coming out to speak with this individual or find out what’s going on.”

Another officer told ABC News that the group was supposed to get a face-to-face briefing with the Secret Service counter-snipers but that never happened. An email to the Secret Service was not immediately returned Monday.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The 20-year-old Pennsylvania man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump had photos on his phone of the former Republican president, President Joe Biden and other officials, including Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Chris Wray, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Investigators searching Thomas Matthew Crooks’ devices have also found that the shooter looked up the dates for the Democratic National Convention as well as Trump’s appearances, according to the people who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition on anonymity to discuss details of the ongoing probe.

The FBI has been searching for clues into what drove Crooks to open fire at Saturday’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in an attempt to assassinate the GOP presidential nominee. The FBI has said they are investigating the shooting as a potential act of domestic terrorism but have yet to find a clear ideological motive. The FBI gained access to Crooks’ cellphone, scoured his computer, home and car, and interviewed more than 100 people so far.

Crooks killed one rallygoer and seriously wounded two others. Trump suffered an ear injury but was not seriously hurt, appearing just days later at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee with a bandage over the wound.

The shooter had also searched for information about major depressive disorder, according to three people familiar the investigation. But investigators have not yet determined whether he was actually diagnosed with the disorder, one of the people said. Studies have shown that the vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent, and experts say most people who are violent do not have mental illnesses.

On a conference call with reporters Sunday, Kevin Rojek, the special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office, said: “We have no indication of any mental health issues.”

Crooks used an AR-style rifle, which authorities said was purchased legally by his father. Investigators also found he brought multiple loaded magazines. He also bought 50 rounds on the day of the shooting. Authorities found a bulletproof vest in his car and another rudimentary explosive device at his home. Over the past few months he had received several packages there, including some that had potentially hazardous material.

The shooting raised serious questions about why law enforcement was unable to stop the man from getting on a roof and opening fire. Multiple investigations into the security failures are underway, including a Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s probe into the Secret Service’s handling of security.

Local law enforcement had noticed Crooks pacing around the edges of rally, shouldering a big backpack and peering into the lens of a rangefinder toward the rooftops behind the stage where the president later stood, officials have told the AP.

An image of Crooks was circulated by officers stationed outside the security perimeter. Witnesses later saw him climbing up the side of a squat manufacturing building that was within 135 meters (157 yards) from the stage. He then set up his AR-style rifle and lay on the rooftop, a detonator in his pocket to set off crude explosive devices that were stashed in his car parked nearby.

Butler Township Manager Tom Knights said in a statement to The Associated Press on Thursday that officers were searching for a suspicious person around the time Trump arrived. Officers didn’t find him around the building, so a Butler Township officer attempted to gain access to the roof by being hoisted up by another officer, Knights said. The officer spotted a person on the roof, and that person pointed a rifle at the officer, Knights said.

“The officer was in a defenseless position, and there was no way he could engage the actor while holding onto the roof edge,” Knights said. The officer fell to the ground and Butler Township officers “immediately communicated the individuals location and that he was in possession of a weapon,” Knights said.

Moments later, Crooks started firing, sending panicked spectators ducking for cover as Secret Service agents shielded Trump and pulled him from the stage. Two counter-sniper teams were stationed on buildings behind Trump, and the team further away from Crooks fired once, killing him.

_____

Associated Press reporter Michael R. Sisak in Butler, Pennsylvania, contributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge in Florida dismissed the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump on Monday, siding with defense lawyers who said the special counsel who filed the charges was illegally appointed by the Justice Department.

Hours later, special counsel Jack Smith’s office said it would appeal the order, which could result in it eventually being overturned by a higher court. But for now at least, the dismissal by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon brings a stunning and abrupt halt to a criminal case that at the time it was filed was widely regarded as the most perilous of all the legal threats the Republican former president confronted.

Though the case had long been stalled, and the prospect of a trial before the November election already nonexistent, the judge’s order is a significant legal and political victory for Trump as he recovers from a weekend assassination attempt and prepares to accept the Republican nomination in Milwaukee this week.

It’s the latest stroke of good fortune in the four criminal cases Trump has faced. He was convicted in May in his New York hush money trial, but the sentencing has been postponed after a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents. That opinion will cause major delays in a separate case charging Trump with plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Another election subversion case filed in Atlanta has been delayed by revelations of a romantic relationship between the district attorney and a special prosecutor she hired for the case.

In a statement on his social media platform, Trump said the dismissal “should be just the first step” and the three other cases, which he called “Witch Hunts,” should also be thrown out.

The classified documents case had been seen as the most legally clear-cut of the four given the breadth of evidence that prosecutors say they had accumulated, including the testimony of close aides and former lawyers, and because the conduct at issue occurred after Trump left the White House in 2021 and lost the powers of the presidency.

The indictment included dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding classified records from his presidency at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. He had pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.

Defense lawyers filed multiple challenges to the case, including legally technical ones that asserted that special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment by Attorney General Merrick Garland violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause because it did not go through Congress and that Smith’s office was improperly funded by the Justice Department. She said Garland had exceeded his bounds by appointing a prosecutor without Senate approval and confirmation and had undermined the authority of Congress.

“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon wrote in a 93-page order that granted the defense team’s request to dismiss the case but did not dissect the substance of the allegations against Trump.

“If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so,” she added.

That mechanism is through congressional approval, she said.

A spokesman for Smith, Peter Carr, said the Justice Department had authorized an appeal.

“The dismissal of the case deviates from the uniform conclusion of all previous courts to have considered the issue that the Attorney General is statutorily authorized to appoint a special counsel,” Carr said in a statement.

The order is the latest example of the Trump-appointed judge handling the case in ways that have benefited the ex-president.

She generated intense scrutiny during the FBI’s investigation when she appointed an independent arbiter to inspect the classified documents recovered during the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, a decision that was overturned months later by a unanimous federal appeals panel.

Since the charges were filed, she has been slow to issue rulings — favoring Trump’s strategy of securing delays in all his criminal cases — and has entertained defense motions and arguments that experts said other judges would have dispensed with without hearings. In May, she indefinitely canceled the trial date amid a series of unresolved legal issues.

Smith’s team had vigorously contested the Appointments Clause argument during hearings before Cannon last month, saying Justice Department leadership has full authority to name and fund a special counsel. Attorneys general appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents have named special counsels without the permission of Congress, going back years.

Prosecutors had also noted that Trump’s position had been rejected in other courts involving other prosecutions brought by other Justice Department special counsels.

For instance, Trump-appointed judges in the federal tax and firearms cases against President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, dismissed similar arguments several months ago. The younger Biden was convicted of three felonies in the gun case in June and is scheduled for trial in September in the tax case.

The appointment of another special counsel Robert Mueller, selected by Trump’s Justice Department to investigate potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign, was also upheld as lawful by a District of Columbia judge.

But Cannon remained unpersuaded, and she called the prosecution’s claims “strained.” The Trump team’s position got a boost this month in a Supreme Court ruling that said former presidents enjoy expansive immunity from prosecution, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing a separate concurrence questioning whether Smith had been legally appointed.

No other justice signed on to the concurrence, which Thomas said he wrote to “highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure.” Thomas wrote that lower courts should weigh whether the office had been “established by law,” and Cannon cited that concurrence several times in her order.

“Both the Appointments and Appropriations challenges as framed in the Motion raise the following threshold question: is there a statute in the United States Code that authorizes the appointment of Special Counsel Smith to conduct this prosecution?” she said. “After careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no.”

Trump lawyer Chris Kise praised Cannon for what he said was a “courageous and correct decision.”

“Judge Cannon today restored the rule of law and made the right call for America. Jack Smith is not above the law and must be held accountable under the Constitution,” Kise said.

___

Associated Press writers Alanna Durkin Richer and Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington contributed to this report.

The opponents’ statements followed an attack that shook the firmament of the American political system, causing at least a temporary detente in a heated presidential campaign expected to resume again in earnest amid the pageantry of the upcoming Republican National Convention.

A full day after the shooting, the gunman’s motive remained a mystery, with investigators saying they believe he acted alone before he was fatally shot by Secret Service agents. Biden ordered an independent security review of the attack, which killed a bystander, critically wounded two others and prompted questions about how a gunman was able to open fire from a rooftop near a Pennsylvania campaign rally. The FBI was investigating the shooting as a potential act of domestic terrorism.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said the upper part of his right ear was pierced by a bullet. His aides said he was in “great spirits” and doing well. He arrived in Milwaukee on Sunday evening for the convention, which begins Monday. He told the Washington Examiner that he had rewritten his speech for the event to focus more on national unity than on the policies of Biden.

In a post Sunday on his social media site, Trump said: “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win.”

In a prime-time address, Biden urged the public to recommit to civil debate. “There is no place in America for this kind of violence — for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception,” he said. “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”

Trump on Saturday night spoke briefly with Biden, whose Sunday night speech marked his third time addressing the shooting.

The rallygoer who was killed was Corey Comperatore, a former fire chief from the area, according to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who said Comperatore “died a hero.”

“His wife shared with me that he dove on his family to protect them,” Shapiro said. The two wounded bystanders were listed in stable condition.

FBI investigates shooting as possible domestic terrorism

The FBI identified the gunman as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the scene of the shooting.

The gunman had his father’s AR-style rifle and was perched atop a nearby roof when some rallygoers pointed him out to local law enforcement, said two law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal probe.

A local law enforcement officer climbed to the roof and found Crooks, who pointed the rifle at the officer. The officer retreated down the ladder, and the gunman quickly fired toward Trump, the officials said. That’s when U.S. Secret Service gunmen shot him, the officials said.

Questions abounded about how the gunman got so close in the first place. Kevin Rojek, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, said “it is surprising” the gunman was able to open fire on the stage before the Secret Service killed him.

Bomb-making materials were found inside both Crooks’ vehicle and at his home, officials said. The FBI described the devices as “rudimentary.”

His motive remained unclear. Crooks wasn’t on the FBI’s radar, and he was believed to have acted alone. Investigators combed through his social media accounts but found no immediate threatening writing or posts, or communications indicating an ideological motive. His family was cooperating. Relatives didn’t return messages seeking comment from AP.

Crooks’ political leanings weren’t clear. Records show him registered as a Republican voter in Pennsylvania, but federal campaign finance reports also show he gave $15 to a progressive political action committee on Jan. 20, 2021, the day Biden was sworn in.

The absence of a clear ideological motive added to deepening questions about the shooting.

Biden urged Americans to stay patient. “Please, don’t make assumptions about his motives or his affiliations,” he said.

Most serious assassination attempt since 1981

The attack was the most serious attempt to kill a president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. It drew new attention to concerns about political violence in a deeply polarized U.S. less than four months before the election.

FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate said agents have seen increasingly violent rhetoric online since the rally, along with people posing online as the dead shooter. He said the FBI was focused on the upcoming political conventions in Milwaukee and Chicago.

Biden on Sunday ordered a security review of operations for the Republican National Convention, which is proceeding as planned. The Secret Service said it was “confident” in the security plan, and no additional changes were planned.

Biden said the two men had a “short but good” conversation Saturday night. Biden returned to Washington from his Delaware beach home where he met with leaders in the Situation Room about the attack.

Many Republicans blamed the violence on Biden and his allies, arguing that sustained attacks on Trump as a threat to democracy have created a toxic environment.

It’s unclear whether Biden will be forced to recalibrate a campaign largely focused on Trump as a threat to democracy. It is a situation the U.S. has not seen since Teddy Roosevelt was shot a month before the election in 1912 while campaigning to regain the White House as a third-party candidate.

A rally disrupted by gunfire

Trump was showing off a chart of border crossing numbers when the gunfire began after 6:10 p.m. Saturday.

As the first pop rang out, Trump said “oh,” raised his hand to his right ear and looked at it, then quickly crouched to the ground. People in the stands behind him also crouched as screams rang out.

Someone could be heard near the microphone saying, “Get down, get down, get down, get down!” as agents rushed to the stage. They piled atop Trump to shield him as other agents took up positions on stage to search for the threat.

Afterward, voices were heard saying, “Shooter’s down” several times, before someone asked, “Are we good to move?” and “Are we clear?” Then someone ordered, “Let’s move.”

Trump got to his feet moments later and could be seen reaching with his right hand toward his face, streaked with blood. He then pumped his fist in the air and appeared to mouth the word “fight” twice, prompting cheers and chants of “USA. USA. USA.”

His motorcade left moments later. Video showed Trump turning back to the crowd and raising a fist right before he was put into a vehicle.

Witnesses heard multiple gunshots and ducked for cover

When the firing began, “everybody went to their knees or their prone position,” said Dave McCormick, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, who was sitting to Trump’s right on stage.

As he saw Trump raise his fist, McCormick said, he looked over his shoulder and noticed someone had been hit in the bleachers behind the stage.

Eventually, first responders were able to carry the wounded person out, McCormick said.

Reporters heard five or six shots, and many ducked for cover, hiding under tables. After the first two or three bangs, people in the crowd looked startled but not panicked. An AP reporter described the noise as sounding like firecrackers at first, or perhaps a car backfiring.

When it was clear the situation was contained and Trump wouldn’t return to speak, attendees started filing out. Police soon told everyone to leave, and Secret Service agents described the site as “a live crime scene.”

Republican Rep. Mike Kelly, who represents the area where the shooting occurred, attended with his wife and grandchildren and was just behind Trump when he was wounded. Kelly said he was “in a state of bewilderment of how and what has happened to the United States of America.”

“I just wish people — tone it down,” he said. “Quit trying to find, to blame somebody. The blame lies somewhere in the psyche of America.”

Colvin, Balsamo and Price reported from New York. Long reported from Washington. Tucker reported from Westport, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Will Weissert, Michael Biesecker, Alanna Durkin Richer, Lisa Mascaro and Tara Copp in Washington, and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.

All are U.S. citizens now behind bars in Russia on various charges.

Arrests of Americans in Russia are increasingly common with relations sinking to Cold War lows. Washington accuses Moscow of using U.S. citizens as bargaining chips, but Russia insists they all broke the law.

While high-profile prisoner exchanges have occurred, the prospects of swaps are unclear.

“It seems that since Moscow itself has cut off most of the communication channels and does not know how to restore them properly without losing face, they are trying to use the hostages. … At least that’s what it looks like,” said Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who quit after Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Who is known to be in Russian custody?

EVAN GERSHKOVICH — The 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter faces trial Wednesday on espionage charges that he, his employer and the U.S. government deny. He was detained in March 2023 while reporting in the city of Yekaterinburg and accused of spying. Russia alleges Gershkovich was “gathering secret information” at the CIA’s behest about a facility that produces and repairs military equipment. It provided no evidence to support the accusations.

PAUL WHELAN — The 54-year-old corporate security executive from Michigan was arrested in 2018 in Moscow where he was attending a friend’s wedding, convicted two years later of espionage, and sentenced to 16 years in prison. He maintains his innocence, saying the charges were fabricated.

TRAVIS LEAKE — The musician was arrested in 2023 on drug charges. An Instagram page describes him as the singer for the band Lovi Noch (Seize the Night). Court officials have said he is a former paratrooper.

MARC FOGEL — The Moscow teacher was sentenced to 14 years in prison, also on drug charges. The Interfax news agency said Fogel taught at the Anglo-American School in Moscow and had worked at the U.S. Embassy. Interfax cited court officials as saying Fogel has admitted guilt.

GORDON BLACK — The 34-year-old staff sergeant stationed at Fort Cavazos, Texas, was convicted June 19 in Vladivostok of stealing and making threats against his girlfriend, and was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison. He had flown to Russia from his U.S. military post in South Korea without authorization and was arrested in May after she accused him of stealing from her, according to U.S. and Russian authorities.

ROBERT WOODLAND — Woodland, a dual national, is on trial in Moscow on drug- trafficking charges. Russian media reported his name matches a U.S. citizen interviewed in 2020 who said he was born in the Perm region in 1991 and adopted by an American couple at age 2. He said he traveled to Russia to find his mother and eventually met her on a TV show. Woodland was charged with trafficking drugs as part of an organized group — punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

ALSU KURMASHEVA — Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian national, was arrested in 2023 in her hometown of Kazan. The Prague-based editor for the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Tatar-Bashkir service was visiting her ailing mother. She faces multiple charges, including not self-reporting as a “foreign agent” and spreading false information about the Russian military.

KSENIA KHAVANA — Khavana, 33, was arrested in Yekaterinburg in February on treason charges, accused of collecting money for Ukraine’s military. Independent Russian news outlet Mediazona identified her by her maiden name of Karelina, and said she had U.S. citizenship after marrying an American. She returned to Russia from Los Angeles to visit family. The rights group Pervy Otdel said the charges stem from a $51 donation to a U.S. charity that helps Ukraine.

DAVID BARNES — An engineer from Texas, Barnes was arrested while visiting his sons in Russia, where their mother had taken them. His supporters say the woman made baseless claims of sexual abuse that already had been discredited by Texas investigators but he was convicted in Russia anyway and sentenced to prison.

What’s the process for negotiations?

Gershkovich and Whelan have gotten the most attention, with the State Department designating both as wrongfully detained. The designation is applied to only a small subset of Americans jailed by foreign countries.

Those cases go to a special State Department envoy for hostage affairs, who tries to negotiate their release. They must meet certain criteria, including a determination the arrest came solely because the person is a U.S. national or part of an effort to influence U.S. policy or extract concessions from the government.

The U.S. successfully negotiated swaps in 2022 for WNBA star Brittney Griner and Marine veteran Trevor Reed — both designated as wrongfully detained. Moscow got arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was serving a 25-year sentence, and pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko, serving 20 years for cocaine trafficking.

It’s unclear how many Americans are jailed in Russia or if negotiations are in the works for them.

Kurmasheva’s husband, Pavel Butorin, told The Associated Press after her arrest he hoped the U.S. government would use “every avenue and every means available to it” to win her release, including designating her as wrongfully detained.

Is the West holding anyone Russia wants?

In December, the State Department said it had made a significant offer for Gershkovich and Whelan but Russia rejected it.

Officials did not give details, although Russia has been said to be seeking Vadim Krasikov, serving a life sentence in Germany in 2021 for the killing of Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, a Georgian citizen of Chechen descent who had fought Russian troops in Chechnya and later claimed asylum in Germany.

Beyond that, Russia has stayed silent. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says such swaps “must be carried out in absolute silence.”

Historically, when relations are better, “the exchanges seem to be smoother,” said Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York and the great-granddaughter of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

She cited prisoner swaps between the USSR and Chile in the 1970s, as well as those with the U.S. and Germany shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev took office in the 1980s involving dissidents Vladimir Bukovsky and Natan Sharansky.

Ultimately, the decision “is only in Putin’s hands,” Khrushcheva said.

In Gershkovich’s case, an exchange might also involve concessions, possibly related to Ukraine, said Sam Greene of the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“Even if the immediate reason to get people around the (negotiating) table is Evan and a prisoner exchange, that allows them to get right up to the line and to say: ‘OK, we’ve got 98% of the deal, but if you really want to get this done, there’s this other thing we’d really like to talk about,’” like sanctions or another Ukraine-related issue, he said.

“The Kremlin is perfectly happy to hold onto Evan as long as it possibly can. And so its incentive is to get as much for him as possible,” Greene said.

Tucker reported from Washington.

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes Thursday as a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

Trump sat stone-faced while the verdict was read as cheering from the street below could be heard in the hallway on the courthouse’s 15th floor where the decision was revealed after more than nine hours of deliberations.

“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” an angry Trump told reporters after leaving the courtroom. “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people. They know what happened, and everyone knows what happened here.”

Judge Juan M. Merchan set sentencing for July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where GOP leaders, who remained resolute in their support in the aftermath of the verdict, are expected to formally make him their nominee.

The verdict is a stunning legal reckoning for Trump and exposes him to potential prison time in the city where his manipulations of the tabloid press helped catapult him from a real estate tycoon to reality television star and ultimately president. As he seeks to reclaim the White House in this year’s election, the judgment presents voters with another test of their willingness to accept Trump’s boundary-breaking behavior.

Trump is expected to appeal the verdict and will face an awkward dynamic as he returns to the campaign trail tagged with convictions. There are no campaign rallies on the calendar for now, though he traveled Thursday evening to a fundraiser in Manhattan that was planned before the verdict, according to three people familiar with his plans who were note authorized to speak publicly.

He’s expected to appear Friday at Trump Tower and will continue fundraising next week. His campaign was already moving quickly to raise money off the verdict, issuing a pitch that called him a “political prisoner.”

The falsifying business records charges carry up to four years behind bars, though Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would not say Thursday whether prosecutors intend to seek imprisonment, and it is not clear whether the judge — who earlier in the trial warned of jail time for gag order violations — would impose that punishment even if asked.

The conviction, and even imprisonment, will not bar Trump from continuing his White House pursuit.

Trump faces three other felony indictments, but the New York case may be the only one to reach a conclusion before the November election, adding to the significance of the outcome. Though the legal and historical implications of the verdict are readily apparent, the political consequences are less so given its potential to reinforce rather than reshape already hardened opinions about Trump.

For another candidate in another time, a criminal conviction might doom a presidential run, but Trump’s political career has endured through two impeachments, allegations of sexual abuse, investigations into everything from potential ties to Russia to plotting to overturn an election, and personally salacious storylines, including the emergence of a recording in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitals.

The case’s general allegations have also been known to voters for years and, while tawdry, are widely seen as less grievous than the allegations he faces in three other cases that charge him with subverting American democracy and mishandling national security secrets.

Ahead of the verdict, Trump’s campaign had argued that, no matter the jury’s decision, the outcome was unlikely to sway voters and that the election would be decided by issues such as inflation.

Even so, the verdict is likely to give President Joe Biden and fellow Democrats space to sharpen arguments that Trump is unfit for office, though the White House offered only a muted statement that it respected the rule of law. Conversely, the decision will provide fodder for the presumptive Republican nominee to advance his unsupported claims that he is victimized by a criminal justice system he insists is politically motivated against him.

Trump maintained throughout the trial that he had done nothing wrong and that the case should never have been brought, railing against the proceedings from inside the courthouse — where he was joined by a parade of high-profile Republican allies — and racking up fines for violating a gag order with inflammatory out-of-court comments about witnesses.

After the verdict, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche said in television news interviews that he did not believe Trump received a fair trial and that the team would appeal based on the judge’s refusal to recuse himself and because of what he suggested was excessive pretrial publicity.

Republicans showed no sign of loosening their embrace of the party leader, with House Speaker Mike Johnson lamenting what he called “a shameful day in American history.” He called the case “a purely political exercise, not a legal one.”

The first criminal trial of a former American president always presented a unique test of the court system, not only because of Trump’s prominence but also because of his relentless broadsides on the foundation of the case and its participants. But the verdict from the 12-person jury marked a repudiation of Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in the proceedings or to potentially impress the panel with a show of GOP support.

“While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial and ultimately today in this verdict in the same manner as every other case that comes through the courtroom doors, by following the facts and the law and doing so without fear or favor,” Bragg said after the verdict.

The trial involved charges that Trump falsified business records to cover up a hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the porn actor who said she had sex with the married Trump in 2006.

The $130,000 payment came from Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer Michael Cohen to buy Daniels’ silence during the final weeks of the 2016 race in what prosecutors allege was an effort to interfere in the election. When Cohen was reimbursed, the payments were recorded as legal expenses, which prosecutors said was an unlawful attempt to mask the true purpose of the transaction.

Trump’s lawyers contend they were legitimate payments for legal services. He denied the sexual encounter, and his lawyers argued at trial that his celebrity status made him an extortion target.

Defense lawyers also said hush money deals to bury negative stories about Trump were motivated by personal considerations such as the impact on his family, not political ones. They also sought to undermine the credibility of Cohen, the star prosecution witness who pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges related to the payments, by suggesting he was driven by personal animus toward Trump and fame and money.

The trial featured weeks of occasionally riveting testimony that revisited an already well-documented chapter from Trump’s past. His 2016 campaign, threatened by the disclosure of an “Access Hollywood” recording that captured him talking about grabbing women sexually without their permission, also faced the prospect of other stories about Trump and sex surfacing that could have harmed his candidacy.

Trump did not testify, but jurors heard his voice through a secret recording of a conversation with Cohen in which he and the lawyer discussed a $150,000 hush money deal involving a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who has said she had an affair with Trump. Trump denies that affair.

Daniels herself testified, offering a vivid recounting of the sexual encounter she says they had in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite. The former publisher of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, testified about how he worked to keep stories harmful to the Trump campaign from becoming public at all, including by having his company buy McDougal’s story.

Jurors also heard from Keith Davidson, the lawyer who negotiated the hush money payments on behalf of Daniels and McDougal. He detailed the tense negotiations to get both women compensated for their silence but also faced aggressive questioning from a Trump attorney who noted Davidson had helped broker similar hush money deals in cases involving other prominent figures.

The most pivotal witness, by far, was Cohen, who during days of testimony gave an insider’s view of the hush money scheme and what he said was Trump’s detailed knowledge of it.

“Just take care of it,” he quoted Trump as saying.

He offered jurors the most direct link between Trump and the heart of the charges, recounting a meeting in which a plan to have Cohen reimbursed in monthly installments for legal services was discussed.

And he emotionally described his dramatic break with Trump in 2018, when he began cooperating with prosecutors after a decade-long career as the then-president’s personal fixer.

“To keep the loyalty and to do the things that he had asked me to do, I violated my moral compass, and I suffered the penalty, as has my family,” Cohen said.

The case, though criticized by some legal experts who called it the weakest of the prosecutions against Trump, took on added importance not only because it proceeded to trial first but also because it could be the only only one to reach a jury before the election.

The other three — local and federal cases in Atlanta and Washington alleging that he conspired to overturn the 2020 election, as well as a federal indictment in Florida charging him with illegally hoarding top-secret records — are bogged down by delays or appeals.

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Associated Press journalists Ruth Brown, Joseph B. Frederick, John Minchillo, Mary Conlon, Ted Shaffrey, Cedar Attanasio, Julie Walker, Seth Wenig and Julia Nikhinson in New York and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington contributed to this report.

NEW YORK (AP) — The jury in Donald Trump’s hush money trial ended its first day of deliberations without a verdict Wednesday but asked to rehear potentially crucial testimony about the alleged hush money scheme at the heart of the history-making case.

The 12-person jury was sent home around 4 p.m. after about 4 1/2 hours of deliberations. The process is to resume Thursday.

Jurors also asked to rehear at least part of the judge’s instructions meant to guide them on the law. The notes sent to the judge with the requests were the first burst of communication with the court after the panel of seven men and five women was sent to a private room just before 11:30 a.m. to begin weighing a verdict.

“It is not my responsibility to judge the evidence here. It is yours,” Judge Juan M. Merchan told jurors earlier in the day before dispatching them to begin deliberations, reminding them of their vow during the selection process to judge the case fairly and impartially.

It’s unclear how long the deliberations will last. A guilty verdict would deliver a stunning legal reckoning for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee as he seeks to reclaim the White House while an an acquittal would represent a major win for Trump and embolden him on the campaign trail. Since verdicts must be unanimous, it’s also possible that the case ends in a mistrial if the jury can’t reach a consensus after days of deliberations.

Trump struck a pessimistic tone after leaving the courtroom following the reading of jury instructions, repeating his assertions of a “very unfair trial” and saying: “Mother Teresa could not beat those charges, but we’ll see. We’ll see how we do.”

He remained inside the courthouse during deliberations, where he made a series of posts on his social media network complaining about the trial and quoting legal and political commentators who view the case in his favor. In one all-capital-letters post, he proclaimed that he didn’t even “know what the charges are in this rigged case,” even though he was present in the courtroom as the judge detailed them to jurors.

Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records at his company in connection with an alleged scheme to hide potentially embarrassing stories about him during his 2016 Republican presidential election campaign.

The charge, a felony, arises from reimbursements paid to then-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen after he made a $130,000 hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels to silence her claims that she and Trump had sex in 2006. Trump is accused of misrepresenting Cohen’s reimbursements as legal expenses to hide that they were tied to a hush money payment.

Trump has pleaded not guilty and contends the Cohen payments were for legitimate legal services. He has also denied the alleged extramarital sexual encounter with Daniels.

To convict Trump, the jury would have to find unanimously that he created a fraudulent entry in his company’s records, or caused someone else to do so, and that he did so with the intent of committing or concealing another crime.

The crime prosecutors say Trump committed or hid is a violation of a New York election law making it illegal for two or more conspirators “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.”

While the jury must unanimously agree that something unlawful was done to promote Trump’s election campaign, they don’t have to be unanimous on what that unlawful thing was.

The jurors — a diverse cross-section of Manhattan residents and professional backgrounds — often appeared riveted by testimony in the trial, including from Cohen and Daniels. Many took notes and watched intently as witnesses answered questions from Manhattan prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers.

Jurors started deliberating after a marathon day of closing arguments in which a prosecutor spoke for more than five hours, underscoring the burden the district attorney’s office faces in needing to establish Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Trump team need not establish his innocence to avoid a conviction but must instead bank on at least one juror finding that prosecutors have not sufficiently proved their case.

Earlier Wednesday, the jury received instructions in the law from Merchan, who offered some guidance on factors the panel can use to assess witness testimony, including its plausibility, its consistency with other testimony, the witness’ manner on the stand and whether the person has a motive to lie.

But, the judge said, “there is no particular formula for evaluating the truthfulness and accuracy of another person’s statement.”

The principles he outlined are standard but perhaps all the more relevant after Trump’s defense leaned heavily on questioning the credibility of key prosecution witnesses, including Cohen.

Jurors asked to rehear testimony from Cohen and former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker about an August 2015 meeting with Trump at Trump Tower where the tabloid boss agreed to be the “eyes and ears” of his fledgling presidential campaign.

Pecker testified that the plan included identifying potentially damaging stories about Trump so they could be squashed before being published. That, prosecutors say, was the beginning of the catch-and-kill scheme at the heart of the case.

Jurors also want to hear Pecker’s account of a phone call he said he received from Trump in which they discussed a rumor that another outlet had offered to buy former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s alleging that she had a yearlong affair with Trump in the mid-2000s. Trump has denied the affair.

Pecker testified that Trump told him, “Karen is a nice girl” and asked, “What do you think I should do?” Pecker said he replied: “I think you should buy the story and take it off the market.” He added that Trump told him he doesn’t buy stories because it always gets out and that Cohen would be in touch.

The publisher said he came away from the conversation thinking Trump was aware of the specifics of McDougal’s claims. Pecker said he believed the story was true and would have been embarrassing to Trump and his campaign if it were made public.

The National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., eventually paid McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story in an agreement that also included writing and other opportunities with its fitness magazine and other publications.

The fourth item jurors requested is Pecker’s testimony about his decision in October 2016 to back out of an agreement to sell the rights to McDougal’s story to Trump through a company Cohen had established for the transaction, known as an “assignment of rights.”

“I called Michael Cohen, and I said to him that the agreement, the assignment deal is off. I am not going forward. It is a bad idea, and I want you to rip up the agreement,” Pecker testified. “He was very, very, angry. Very upset. Screaming, basically, at me.”

Pecker testified that he reiterated to Cohen that he wasn’t going forward with the agreement.

He said that Cohen told him: “The boss is going to be very angry at you.”

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Follow the AP’s coverage of former President Donald Trump at https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump.

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump engaged in a conspiracy “to hoodwink voters” in 2016, a prosecutor told jurors Tuesday during closing arguments in the former president’s hush money trial, while a defense lawyer branded the star witness as the “greatest liar of all time” and pressed the panel for an across-the-board acquittal.

The lawyers’ dueling accounts, wildly divergent in their assessments of witness credibility, Trump’s culpability and the strength of evidence, offered both sides one final chance to score points with the jury before it starts deliberating the first felony case against a former American president.

The landmark case, the only one of four criminal prosecutions against Trump to reach trial, centered on allegations that Trump and his allies conspired to stifle potentially embarrassing stories during the 2016 presidential campaign through hush money payments — including to a porn actor who alleged that she and Trump had sex a decade earlier.

“This case, at its core, is about a conspiracy and a cover-up,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told jurors, who are expected to begin deliberations Wednesday. He later added: “We’ll never know if this effort to hoodwink voters made the difference in the 2016 election, but that’s not something we have to prove.”

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche told jurors that neither the actor, Stormy Daniels, nor the Trump attorney who paid her, Michael Cohen, can be trusted.

“President Trump is innocent. He did not commit any crimes, and the district attorney has not met their burden of proof, period,” Blanche said.

Following more than four weeks of testimony, the summations tee up a momentous and historically unprecedented task for the jury as it decides whether to convict the presumptive Republican presidential nominee ahead of the November election. The political undertones of the proceedings were unmistakable as President Joe Biden’s campaign staged an event outside the courthouse with actor Robert De Niro while Blanche reminded jurors the case was not a referendum on their views about Trump.

In a marathon five-hour argument that stretched deep into the evening, Steinglass stressed to jurors the trove of evidence they had viewed but also sought to defray potential concerns about witness credibility. Trump and his legal team, for instance, have repeatedly denounced Cohen as a liar.

The prosecutor acknowledged that Daniels’ account of the alleged 2006 encounter in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite, which Trump has denied, was at times “cringeworthy.” But he said the details she offered — including about decor and what she said she saw when she snooped in Trump’s toiletry kit — were full of touchstones “that kind of ring true.”

He said the story matters because it “reinforces (Trump’s) incentive to buy her silence.”

“Her story is messy. It makes people uncomfortable to hear. It probably makes some of you uncomfortable to hear. But that’s kind of the point,” Steinglass said. He added: “In the simplest terms, Stormy Daniels is the motive.”

The payoff unfolded against the backdrop of the disclosure of a 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump could be heard bragging about grabbing women sexually without their permission. Had the Daniels story emerged after that recording, it would have undermined his strategy of spinning away his words, Steinglass said.

“It’s critical to appreciate this,” Steinglass said. At the same time he was dismissing his words on the tape as “locker room talk,” Trump “was negotiating to muzzle a porn star,” the prosecutor said.

Blanche, who spoke first, sought to downplay the fallout by saying the “Access Hollywood” tape was not a “doomsday event.”

Steinglass also maintained that the prosecution’s case did not rest solely on Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer who paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. Cohen later pleaded guilty to federal charges for his role in the hush money payments, as well as to lying to Congress. He went to prison and was disbarred, but his direct involvement in the transactions made him a key trial witness.

“It’s not about whether you like Michael Cohen. It’s not about whether you want to go into business with Michael Cohen,” Steinglass said. “It’s whether he has useful, reliable information to give you about what went down in this case, and the truth is that he was in the best position to know.”

Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, charges punishable by up to four years in prison. He has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.

The two sides also differed on a recording Cohen made of himself and Trump discussing what prosecutors say was a plan to buy the rights to the story of a Playboy model, Karen McDougal, from the National Enquirer, after the publication’s parent company paid her $150,000 to keep quiet about an affair she says she had with Trump. Trump has denied that affair too.

Blanche said the September 2016 recording, which cuts off before the conversation finishes, is unreliable and isn’t about McDougal at all, but rather about a plan to buy a collection of material the tabloid had hoarded on Trump. Steinglass said the recording was part of a “mountain of evidence” against Trump.

Though the case featured sometimes seamy discussion of sex and tabloid industry practices, the actual charges concern something decidedly less flashy: reimbursements Trump signed for Cohen for the payments.

The reimbursements were recorded as being for legal expenses, which prosecutors say was a fraudulent label designed to conceal the purpose of the hush money transaction.

Defense lawyers say Cohen actually did substantive legal work for Trump and his family. But Steinglass said that argument is undermined by a 2018 Trump tweet in which the then-president described the arrangement with Cohen as a “reimbursement” while insisting it was unrelated to his candidacy.

“Mr. Cohen spent more time being cross-examined at this trial than he did doing legal work for Donald Trump in 2017,” Steinglass quipped. “Do you think there’s any chance Donald Trump would pay $42,000 an hour for legal work by Michael Cohen?”

In his own address to the jury, Blanche castigated the case’s entire foundation.

He said Cohen, not Trump, created the invoices submitted to the Trump Organization for reimbursement, and he rejected the prosecution’s caricature of a details-oriented manager, suggesting instead that Trump was preoccupied by the presidency and not the checks he was signing. And he mocked the idea that the alleged hush money scheme amounted to election interference.

“Every campaign in this country is a conspiracy to promote a candidate, a group of people who are working together to help somebody win,” Blanche said.

He reserved his most animated attack for Cohen, with whom he tangled during a lengthy cross-examination.

Mimicking the term “GOAT,” used primarily in sports as an acronym for “greatest of all time,” Blanche labeled Cohen the “GLOAT” — greatest liar of all time — and called him “the human embodiment of reasonable doubt.”

“He lied to you repeatedly. He lied many, many times before you even met him. His financial and personal well-being depend on this case. He is biased and motivated to tell you a story that is not true,” Blanche said, a reference to Cohen’s social media attacks on Trump and the lucrative income he has derived from books and podcasts about Trump.

The attorney’s voice became even more impassioned as he revisited one of the more memorable moments of the trial: when Blanche sought to unravel Cohen’s claim that he had spoken to Trump by phone about the Daniels arrangement on Oct. 24, 2016.

Cohen testified that he had contacted Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, as a way of getting a hold of Trump, but Blanche asserted that at the time Cohen was actually dealing with a spate of harassing phone calls and was preoccupied with that problem when he spoke with Schiller.

“That was a lie,” Blanche said, “and he got caught red-handed.”

In his testimony, Cohen acknowledged a litany of past lies, many of which he said were intended to protect Trump. But he said he had subsequently told the truth, at great cost: “My entire life has been turned upside-down as a direct result,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price in New York contributed to this report.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of former President Donald Trump at https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump.

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump was intimately involved with all aspects of a scheme to stifle stories about sex that threatened to torpedo his 2016 campaign, his former lawyer said Monday in matter-of-fact testimony that went to the heart of the former president’s hush money trial.

“Everything required Mr. Trump’s sign-off,” said Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer-turned-foe and the prosecution’s star witness in a case now entering its final, pivotal stretch.

In hours of highly anticipated testimony, Cohen placed Trump at the center of the hush money plot, saying the then-candidate had promised to reimburse the lawyer for the money he fronted and was constantly updated about behind-the-scenes efforts to bury stories feared to be harmful to the campaign.

“We need to stop this from getting out,” Cohen quoted Trump as telling him in reference to porn actor Stormy Daniels’ account of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier.

A similar episode occurred when Cohen alerted Trump that a Playboy model was alleging that she and Trump had an extramarital affair. “Make sure it doesn’t get released,” Cohen said Trump told him. The woman, Karen McDougal, was paid $150,000 in an arrangement that was made after Trump received a “complete and total update on everything that transpired.”

“What I was doing was at the direction of and benefit of Mr. Trump,” Cohen testified.

Trump has pleaded not guilty and denied having sexual encounters with the two women.

Cohen is by far the prosecution’s most important witness, and though his testimony lacked the electricity that defined Daniels’ turn on the stand, he nonetheless linked Trump directly to the payments and helped illuminate some of the drier evidence such as text messages and phone logs that jurors had previously seen.

The testimony of a witness with such intimate knowledge of Trump’s activities could heighten the legal exposure of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee if jurors deem him sufficiently credible. But prosecutors’ reliance on a witness with such a checkered past — Cohen pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the payments — also carries sizable risks with a jury and could be a boon to Trump politically as he fundraises off his legal woes and paints the case as the product of a tainted criminal justice system.

The men, once so close that Cohen boasted that he would “take a bullet” for Trump, had no visible interaction inside the courtroom. The sedate atmosphere was a marked contrast from their last courtroom faceoff, when Trump walked out of the courtroom in October after his lawyer finished questioning Cohen during his civil fraud trial.

This time around, Trump sat at the defense table with his eyes closed for long stretches of testimony as Cohen recounted his decade-long career as a senior Trump Organization executive, doing work that by his own admission sometimes involved lying and bullying others on his boss’s behalf.

Jurors had previously heard from others about the tabloid industry practice of “catch-and-kill,” in which rights to a story are purchased so that it can then be quashed. But Cohen’s testimony, which continues Tuesday, is crucial to prosecutors because of his direct communication with the then-candidate about embarrassing stories he was scrambling to suppress.

Cohen also matters because the reimbursements he received from a $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels, which prosecutors say was meant to buy her silence in advance of the election, form the basis of 34 felony counts charging Trump with falsifying business records. Prosecutors say the reimbursements were logged, falsely, as legal expenses to conceal the payments’ true purpose. Defense lawyers say the payments to Cohen were properly categorized as legal expenses.

Under questioning from a prosecutor, Cohen detailed the steps he took to mask the payments. When he opened a bank account to pay Daniels, an action he said he told Trump he was taking, he told the bank it was for a new limited liability corporation but withheld the actual purpose.

“I’m not sure they would’ve opened it,” he said, if they knew it was ”to pay off an adult film star for a nondisclosure agreement.”

To establish Trump’s familiarity with the payments, Cohen said Trump had promised to reimburse him and called him while the lawyer was on a December 2016 family vacation. Trump told him: “Don’t worry about that other thing. I’m going to take care of it when you get back.”

The two men even discussed with Allen Weisselberg, a former Trump Organization chief financial officer, how the reimbursements would be paid as “legal expenses” over monthly installments, Cohen testified.

And though Trump’s lawyers have said he acted to protect his family from salacious stories, Cohen described Trump as preoccupied instead by the impact they would have on the campaign. He said Trump implored him to delay finalizing the Daniels transaction until after Election Day so he wouldn’t have to pay her.

“Because,” Cohen testified, “after the election it wouldn’t matter” to Trump.

Cohen also gave jurors an insider account of his negotiations with David Pecker, the then-publisher of the National Enquirer, who was such a close Trump ally that Pecker told Cohen his publication maintained a “file drawer or a locked drawer” where files related to Trump were kept. That effort took on added urgency following the October 2016 disclosure of an “Access Hollywood” recording in which Trump was heard boasting about grabbing women sexually.

The Daniels payment was finalized several weeks after that revelation, but Monday’s testimony also centered on a deal earlier that fall with McDougal.

Cohen testified that he went to Trump immediately after the National Enquirer alerted him to a story about the alleged McDougal affair. “Make sure it doesn’t get released,” he said Trump told him.

Trump checked in with Pecker about the matter, asking him how “things were going” with it, Cohen said. Pecker responded: “‘We have this under control, and we’ll take care of this,’” Cohen testified.

Cohen also said he was with Trump as Trump spoke to Pecker on a speakerphone in his Trump Tower office.

“David stated it would cost $150,000 to control the story,” Cohen said. He quoted Trump as saying: “No problem, I’ll take care of it,” meaning that the payments would be reimbursed.

To lay the foundation that the deals were done with Trump’s endorsement, prosecutors elicited testimony from Cohen designed to show Trump as a hands-on manager. Acting on Trump’s behalf, Cohen said, he sometimes lied and bullied others, including reporters.

“When he would task you with something, he would then say, ‘Keep me informed. Let me know what’s going on,’” Cohen testified. He said that was especially true “if there was a matter that was troubling to him.”

Defense lawyers have teed up a bruising cross-examination of Cohen, telling jurors during opening statements that he’s an “admitted liar” with an “obsession to get President Trump.”

Prosecutors aim to blunt those attacks by acknowledging Cohen’s past crimes to jurors and by relying on other witnesses whose accounts, they hope, will buttress Cohen’s testimony. They include a lawyer who negotiated the hush money payments on behalf of Daniels and McDougal, as well as Pecker and Daniels.

After Cohen’s home and office were raided by the FBI in 2018, Trump showered him with affection on social media and predicted that Cohen would not “flip.” Months later, Cohen did exactly that, pleading guilty to federal campaign-finance charges.

Cohen later admitted lying to Congress about a Moscow real estate project that he had pursued on Trump’s behalf during the heat of the 2016 campaign. He was sentenced to three years in prison, but spent much of it in home confinement.

NEW YORK (AP) — The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial fined him $1,000 on Monday and, in his sternest warning yet, told the former president that future gag order violations could send him to jail. The reprimand opened a revelatory day of testimony, as jurors for the first time heard the details of the financial transactions at the center of the case and saw payment checks bearing Trump’s signature.

The testimony from former Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney provided a mechanical but vital recitation of how the company reimbursed payments that were allegedly meant to suppress embarrassing stories from surfacing during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and then logged them as legal expenses in a manner that Manhattan prosecutors say broke the law.

McConney’s appearance on the witness stand came as the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president entered its third week of testimony. His account lacked the human drama offered Friday by longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks, but it nonetheless yielded an important building block for prosecutors trying to pull back the curtain on what they say was a corporate records cover-up of transactions designed to protect Trump’s presidential bid during a pivotal stretch of the race.

At the center of the testimony was a $130,000 payment Trump’s then-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen made to porn actor Stormy Daniels in October 2016 to stifle her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier.

The 34 felony counts of falsifying business records accuse Trump of labeling the money paid to Cohen in his company’s records as legal fees. Prosecutors contend that by paying him income and giving him extra to account for taxes in monthly installments for a year, the Trump executives were able to conceal the reimbursement.

McConney and another witness testified that all but two of the monthly checks were drawn from Trump’s personal account. Yet even as jurors saw the checks and other documentary evidence, prosecutors did not elicit testimony Monday showing that Trump himself dictated that the payments would be logged as legal expenses — a designation that prosecutors contend was intentionally deceptive.

McConney acknowledged during cross-examination that Trump never asked him to log the reimbursements as legal expenses and never discussed the matter with him at all. Another witness, Deborah Tarasoff, a Trump Organization accounts payable supervisor, said under questioning that she did not get permission to cut the checks in question from Trump himself.

“You never had any reason to believe that President Trump was hiding anything or anything like that?” Trump attorney Todd Blanche asked.

”Correct,” Tarasoff replied.

The testimony followed Judge Juan M. Merchan’s sober warning to Trump that additional violations of a gag order barring inflammatory out-of-court comments about witnesses, jurors and others closely connected to the case could land the former president behind bars.

The $1,000 fine imposed Monday marks the second time since the trial began last month that Trump has been sanctioned for violating the gag order. He was fined $9,000 last week — $1,000 for each of nine violations.

“It appears that the $1,000 fines are not serving as a deterrent. Therefore going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction,” Merchan said before jurors were brought into the courtroom. Trump’s statements, the judge added, “threaten to interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. I cannot allow that to continue.”

Trump sat forward in his seat, glowering at the judge as he handed down the ruling. When the judge finished speaking, Trump shook his head twice and crossed his arms.

Yet even as Merchan warned of jail time in his most pointed and direct admonition, he also made clear his reservations about a step that he described as a “last resort” and said he would only do so if prosecutors recommended it.

“The last thing I want to do is put you in jail,” Merchan said. “You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president, as well. There are many reasons why incarceration is truly a last resort for me. To take that step would be disruptive to these proceedings, which I imagine you want to end as quickly as possible.”

The latest violation stems from an April 22 interview with television channel Real America’s Voice in which Trump criticized the speed at which the jury was picked and claimed, without evidence, that it was stacked with Democrats.

Once testimony resumed, McConney recounted conversations with longtime Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg in January 2017 about reimbursing Cohen for a $130,000 payment intended to buy Daniels’ silence over her account of a sexual encounter at a 2006 celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe, California.

Weisselberg “said we had to get some money to Michael, we had to reimburse Michael. He tossed a pad toward me, and I started taking notes on what he said,” McConney testified. “That’s how I found out about it.”

“He kind of threw the pad at me and said, ‘Take this down,’” said McConney, who worked for Trump’s company for about 36 years, retiring last year after he was granted immunity to testify for the prosecution at the Trump Organization’s New York criminal tax fraud trial.

A bank statement displayed in court showed Cohen paying $130,000 to Keith Davidson, Daniels’ lawyer, on Oct. 27, 2016, out of an account for an entity Cohen created for the purpose.

Weisselberg’s handwritten notes spell out a plan to pay Cohen $420,000, which included a base reimbursement that was then doubled to reflect anticipated taxes as well as a $60,000 bonus and an expense that prosecutors have described as a technology contract.

McConney’s own notes, taken on the notepad he said Weisselberg threw at him, were also shown in court. After calculations that laid out that Cohen would get $35,000 a month for 12 months, McConney wrote: “wire monthly from DJT.”

Asked what that meant, McConney said: “That was out of the president’s personal bank account.”

McConney testified that he had instructed Tarasoff to record the reimbursements to Cohen as a legal expense, reasoning that “we were paying a lawyer so I said to post it to legal expenses in the general ledger.”

McConney suggested it was his idea alone to log the payments that way, acknowledging under cross-examination that Trump never directed him to log Cohen’s payments as legal expenses, nor did Weisselberg relay to him that Trump wanted them logged that way.

“Allen never told me that,” McConney testified. In fact, McConney said he never spoke to Trump about the reimbursement issue at all. Regardless, Trump lawyer Emil Bove suggested, the “legal expense” label made sense — and was not duplicitous — because Cohen was a lawyer at the time.

“OK,” McConney responded, prompting laughter throughout the courtroom. “Sure. Yes.”

After paying the first two checks to Cohen through a trust, the remainder of the checks, beginning in April 2017, were paid from Trump’s personal account, McConney testified.

With Trump, the only signatory to that account, now in the White House, the change in funding source necessitated “a whole new process for us,” McConney added.

Tarasoff, the other witness who testified Monday, said that once Trump became president, checks written from his personal account had to first be delivered, via FedEx, “to the White House for him to sign.”

The checks would then return with Trump’s Sharpie signature. “I’d pull them apart, mail out the check and file the backup,” she said, meaning putting the invoice into the Trump Organization’s filing system.

Prosecutors are continuing to build toward their star witness, Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money payments, went to prison and has been disbarred. He is expected to undergo a bruising cross-examination from defense lawyers seeking to undermine his credibility with jurors.

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Tucker reported from Washington.