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What it’s like to watch Trump’s “hush money” trial from inside the courtroom
Everyone but the judge and jurors are seated before Donald Trump and his team enter the courtroom each day in his New York criminal trial.
Reporters, other members of the public, prosecutors and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg himself, must all pass through security screening and be in place, and quiet, as Trump approaches the room.
The group is sometimes settled in before Trump’s motorcade has even pulled up to the 17-story Art Deco-style building. The court officers’ radios suddenly crackle, echoing off the high, 83-year-old ceilings, announcing the arrival of a former president.
Curtis Means-Pool / Getty Images
Reporters are reminded that they will be removed from the room if a court officer sees their phones. They continue to clatter away on their laptops, a glowing sea of screens showing notes, Gmail, Slack and Twitter.
Sometimes, Trump can be heard before he enters the room. A ring announcer ready to rumble in his own prize fight. He’s addressing cameras and a few reporters stationed in a small pen about 50 feet from the courtroom. The unmistakable voice of one of the world’s most famous people, muffled through two sets of doors, reverberates.
Outside the room, Trump rages about Bragg, Judge Juan Merchan and the case. The former president is being tried on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to an alleged “hush money” payment before the 2016 presidential election. He denies the allegations and has entered a not guilty plea.
Once Trump walks through the thick wooden double doors — sometimes setting a brisk pace, sometimes lumbering, always stone-faced — his demeanor changes. He’s accompanied by a team of lawyers, usually campaign staff, too, and of course Secret Service agents, who move to the perimeter after Trump takes a seat at the defense table.
Inside the room, he’s reserved, quiet. Sometimes he appears to briefly nod off. He occasionally whispers with attorneys Todd Blanche, Susan Necheles and Emil Bove.
He stands at attention when Merchan enters the room, and like everyone else, sits only when told he may.
During jury selection, he sometimes craned his neck to the right to watch New Yorkers in the jury pool as they were questioned about their social media habits and their feelings about Trump. He afforded Blanche the same attention during his opening statement Tuesday.
Mostly, Trump stares straight ahead. At what, exactly? The computer monitor he shares with the attorney next to him? Certainly, sometimes. But mostly he seems to be looking above that, beyond it, past the bustling judge’s clerk, whose desk gives him a front row seat second only to Merchan’s. Is he staring at the wall? The bottom third of the wall is wood-paneled, the rest painted solid white. Also, mounted on the wall across from Trump is a flat-screen television, one of four in the room. At all times, it shows Merchan, the lawyers, and Trump himself.
This has been Trump’s posture through most of the proceedings — not just the first six trial days, but also pretrial hearings dating back to his arraignment on April 4, 2023. He’s been warned once, last week, about juror intimidation, after gesturing and shaking his head amid questioning of one former potential juror, but has otherwise been stoic.
Contrast Trump’s behavior in this courtroom with his visible and audible displays of disgust that interrupted proceedings in two recent trials.
After repeated outbursts during a January defamation trial in the civil case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, a federal judge threatened to kick Trump out of the courtroom.
In that case, Trump could be heard from the gallery groaning at times during testimony, and an opposing lawyer said he frequently made comments such as, “It is a witch hunt,” and, “it really is a con job.”
The judge said: “Mr. Trump has a right to be present here. That right can be forfeited if he is disruptive and if he disregards court orders.”
During another recent civil trial, a New York case in which he and others from his company were found liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent profits, Trump often seemed uncontrollable. Lawyers in the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James accused him of witness intimidation one day as his whispers during a real estate executive’s testimony turned toward loud rasps — his head bobbing from side to side, shaking in apparent disparagement.
The circumstances of those civil trials were different. Trump was not required to be present, and could come and go as he pleased — occasionally standing and leaving without warning, his Secret Service entourage scrambling to keep up. The judge in the defamation trial interrupted Carroll’s closing argument to note that Trump had gotten up and walked out. He returned for his lawyer’s closing, and then later exited the courthouse for good about 30 minutes before the jury announced its $83.3 million judgment against him.
Now, Trump is a criminal defendant. He’s required to attend the whole trial, and to sit quietly unless expressly granted permission to do otherwise.
He sought permission to spend Thursday morning in Washington, D.C., watching arguments before the Supreme Court in a matter related to another of his criminal cases. Merchan denied that request.
He asked to adjourn the trial for one day in May to attend his son’s graduation. One of his lawyers made a similar request for a day in June. Merchan said maybe, tacitly hitting at the many attempts Trump’s team has made to delay the trial.
“If everything is going according to schedule without unnecessary delays, then I am sure we will be able to adjourn for one or both of those days, but if we are running behind schedule, we will not be able to,” Merchan said.
Trump complained to reporters outside the courtroom when it was cold on April 18. Inside, Blanche had to lodge the complaint for him.
Merchan’s response included an observation that court staff, lawyers, reporters and others who’ve spent much time in Room 1530 have long acknowledged: The room has two temperatures, cold and hot.
“I would rather be real cold than sweating,” Merchan said.
Trump must rise when Merchan or the jury enters and exits, like thousands of other defendants who have sat in the same seat.
Once, as proceedings were wrapping up on Friday, April 19, Trump rose just a bit too early.
“Sir, can you please have a seat,” Merchan told him. The judge decides when the defendant can leave his courtroom.
But if Merchan is top dog in his courtroom, there’s no mistaking who’s next in the hierarchy. Trump gets up and walks out with his crew in tow. He hands his phone to an aide. The heavy wooden doors close again. He’s back in the hallway defending himself in front of the waiting cameras.
Everyone inside the room waits for the radio crackles, this time to signal that the area is clear. Until then, no one is allowed to stand up. Reporters are admonished to not speak loudly.
As the minutes dragged on Monday, during and after Trump’s hallway speech, Bragg and his team of prosecutors tried to escape through a side door typically used by courtroom staff. They returned a minute later, appearing frustrated and annoyed, unable to depart.
Finally, the radio chorus. Bragg, his head down, quickly heads out through that same side door. The rest of the room is then allowed to file out.
Trump has left the building.
Roger Carstens, the Biden administration’s top official for freeing Americans held overseas, on Friday arrived in Damascus, Syria, for a high-risk mission: making the first known face-to-face contact with the caretaker government and asking for help finding missing American journalist Austin Tice.
Tice was kidnapped in Syria 12 years ago during the civil war and brutal reign of now-deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. For years, U.S. officials have said they do not know with certainty whether Tice is still alive, where he is being held or by whom.
The State Department’s top diplomat for the Middle East, Barbara Leaf, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, accompanied Carstens to Damascus as a gesture of broader outreach to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, known as HTS, the rebel group that recently overthrew Assad’s regime and is emerging as a leading power.
Near East Senior Adviser Daniel Rubinstein was also with the delegation. They are the first American diplomats to visit Damascus in over a decade, according to a State Department spokesperson.
They plan to meet with HTS representatives to discuss transition principles endorsed by the U.S. and regional partners in Aqaba, Jordan, the spokesperson said. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Aqaba last week to meet with Middle East leaders and discuss the situation in Syria.
While finding and freeing Tice and other American citizens who disappeared under the Assad regime is the ultimate goal, U.S. officials are downplaying expectations of a breakthrough on this trip. Multiple sources told CBS News that Carstens and Leaf’s intent is to convey U.S. interests to senior HTS leaders, and learn anything they can about Tice.
Rubinstein will lead the U.S. diplomacy in Syria, engaging directly with the Syrian people and key parties in Syria, the State Department spokesperson added.
Diplomatic outreach to HTS comes in a volatile, war-torn region at an uncertain moment. Two sources even compared the potential danger to the expeditionary diplomacy practiced by the late U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who led outreach to rebels in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and was killed in a terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound and intelligence post.
U.S. special operations forces known as JSOC provided security for the delegation as they traveled by vehicle across the Jordanian border and on the road to Damascus. The convoy was given assurances by HTS that it would be granted safe passage while in Syria, but there remains a threat of attacks by other terrorist groups, including ISIS.
CBS News withheld publication of this story for security concerns at the State Department’s request.
Sending high-level American diplomats to Damascus represents a significant step in reopening U.S.-Syria relations following the fall of the Assad regime less than two weeks ago. Operations at the U.S. embassy in Damascus have been suspended since 2012, shortly after the Assad regime brutally repressed an uprising that became a 14-year civil war and spawned 13 million Syrians to flee the country in one of the largest humanitarian disasters in the world.
The U.S. formally designated HTS, which had ties to al Qaeda, as a foreign terrorist organization in 2018. Its leader, Mohammed al Jolani, was designated as a terrorist by the US in 2013 and prior to that served time in a US prison in Iraq.
Since toppling Assad, HTS has publicly signaled interest in a new more moderate trajectory. Al Jolani even shed his nom de guerre and now uses his legal name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.
U.S. sanctions on HTS linked to those terrorist designations complicate outreach somewhat, but they haven’t prevented American officials from making direct contact with HTS at the direction of President Biden. Blinken recently confirmed that U.S. officials were in touch with HTS representatives prior to Carstens and Leaf’s visit.
“We’ve heard positive statements coming from Mr. Jolani, the leader of HTS,” Blinken told Bloomberg News on Thursday. “But what everyone is focused on is what’s actually happening on the ground, what are they doing? Are they working to build a transition in Syria that brings everyone in?”
In that same interview, Blinken also seemed to dangle the possibility that the U.S. could help lift sanctions on HTS and its leader imposed by the United Nations, if HTS builds what he called an inclusive nonsectarian government and eventually holds elections. The Biden administration is not expected to lift the U.S. terrorist designation before the end of the president’s term on January 20th.
Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder disclosed Thursday that the U.S. currently has approximately 2,000 US troops inside of Syria as part of the mission to defeat ISIS, a far higher number than the 900 troops the Biden administration had previously acknowledged. There are at least five U.S. military bases in the north and south of the country.
The Biden administration is concerned that thousands of ISIS prisoners held at a camp known as al-Hol could be freed. It is currently guarded by the Syrian Democratic forces, Kurdish allies of the U.S. who are wary of the newly-powerful HTS. The situation on the ground is rapidly changing since Russia and Iran withdrew military support from the Assad regime, which has reset the balance of power. Turkey, which has been a sometimes problematic U.S. ally, has been a conduit to HTS and is emerging as a power broker.
A high-risk mission like this is unusual for the typically risk averse Biden administration, which has exercised consistently restrained diplomacy. Blinken approved Carstens and Leaf’s trip and relevant congressional leaders were briefed on it days ago.
“I think it’s important to have direct communication, it’s important to speak as clearly as possible, to listen, to make sure that we understand as best we can where they’re going and where they want to go,” Blinken said Thursday.
At a news conference in Moscow Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he had not yet met with Assad, who fled to Russia when his regime fell earlier this month. Putin added that he would ask Assad about Austin Tice when they do meet.
Tice, a Marine Corps veteran, worked for multiple news organizations including CBS News.
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