How the Manhattan DA won the Trump trial

They used the NY AG playbook for taking down Trump and defeating him in court

It actually happened. No, that was not a dream from which we’re awakening this morning. Donald Trump was really truly convicted by a unanimous jury finding him guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree — felonies under New York law.

How did the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office pull off this seemingly impossible feat? How did Trump go from apparent invincibility to being just another criminal defendant?

The truth is that Trump has been vulnerable for years now, as more and more opponents successfully apply the playbook for how to defeat him in court — a playbook that was devised and honed by the New York Attorney General’s Office, starting with the Trump University case that I worked on a decade ago and continuing through the Trump Foundation case and the more recent Trump Organization civil fraud case. And it’s the same playbook that was followed by E. Jean Carroll and her legal team in their successful cases against Trump.

I laid out this playbook in its entirety in my book, and now we can clearly see how the Manhattan DA applied it.

Rule 1: Total buy-in from the top leadership — then they need to get out of the way and let the prosecutors work.

This first rule was the most precarious to begin with, as Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg kiboshed the case in February 2022, only to revive it a year later. But I continue to maintain that the decisions to halt and to restart the case had nothing to do with the merits of the evidence or the legal arguments and everything to do with politics and media scrutiny. It would appear that Bragg, bruised from battles over bail reform at the beginning of his tenure in early 2022, decided that his office could not afford to go out on a limb on a high-profile case against Trump. It was a question of political and media capital.

Yet once those winds shifted (as we’ll see in Rule 3 below), Bragg and his team appear to have avoided the pitfalls that previously ensnared the Manhattan DA’s case — above all, the myth and syndrome of the Big Dog. Bragg’s predecessor, Cy Vance, decided that he needed to bring in Big Dogs to go up against Trump, heavy hitters from outside the office. The lead Big Dog was veteran criminal defense lawyer Mark Pomerantz, but soon Pomerantz, by his own account, was doing most of the work on the case himself. Worse, Pomerantz then brought in more outside attorneys from a high-end law firm. As I detail in the book, this is a recipe for failure, sure to destroy morale among the Assistant DA’s who actually do all of the heavy lifting on any successful prosecution.

This isn’t to say that experience doesn’t matter. Joshua Steinglass, the first chair on the DA’s team, has been at the office since 1998 and was one of the lead attorneys on the office’s previous tilt against Trump, the successful criminal case against the Trump Organization for tax fraud in executive compensation. The key is that it appears to have been a homegrown team, recruited from within the office. And once the decision was made to green-light the prosecution, the team was able to go do its job.

Rule 2: Trump will try to buy the prosecutors or get to their inner circle — freeze him out and never let him co-opt.

This was potentially the biggest impediment to any kind of criminal accountability for Donald Trump in New York City for decades. Trump successfully made strategic donations to curry the favor of Bragg’s two predecessors, Robert Morgenthau and Cy Vance, who together served as Manhattan DA from 1975 to 2021; Vance dropped what appeared to be a strong case against Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump for fraudulently inflating occupancy rates to juice sales of condos at the now-defunct Trump Soho project. Trump also was a political supporter of Rudy Giuliani, who declined to pursue an investigation of Trump’s Mob connections in the 1980’s.

But more recent prosecutors in New York have seemingly been immune to Trump’s attempts to influence them. Trump very nearly succeeded in co-opting former New York AG Eric Schneiderman via one of his closest allies, but he ultimately failed, as Schneiderman finally green-lit the Trump University case after almost killing it. And Alvin Bragg? And the current New York AG, Letitia James? Trump hasn’t been able to influence them at all. No campaign donations to them. No weaseling his way into the prosecutor’s inner circle. Nothing.

This is a key point to remember. Trump and his allies try to argue that these prosecutors are unfairly targeting him — but this is exactly wrong. Instead, Trump had managed for decades to make sure that prosecutors were unfairly letting him off the hook. He was the one rigging the system. And once his rigging attempts started to fail, he suddenly began to face the justice that he’d evaded for over 40 years.

Rule 3: Try to tilt the political incentives in favor of intervention — either marshal public support, or convince the elected that holding Trump accountable is good politics.

This is where we come in. We the People. This case almost never saw the light of day, and I believe that the public outcry in favor of intervention was a major factor in the revival of this case.

What happened here? In February 2022, Alvin Bragg halted the prosecution, which at that point encompassed both the hush money wing of the case as well as the larger investigation of fraud in Trump’s financial statements. If the latter sounds familiar, it’s because it is: that became the civil fraud case that was brought by the New York AG.¹

What followed next was a political and media firestorm of epic proportions. Bragg was lambasted by the public, not only in New York City but nationally; legal commentators decried the move, and there were multiple calls for Bragg to resign and for New York Governor Kathy Hochul to take the case away from Bragg and hand it to a different prosecutor.

Yet once the storm had calmed with time, Bragg wisely reversed course, reviving the hush money wing of the case pretty much exactly a year after he’d stopped it.

I would also imagine that there was a debate within Bragg’s team on whether to pursue the case — and public opinion undoubtedly exerted a gravitational pull on that decision-making process, as it must. Bragg is an elected official. He answers to the people of Manhattan, and if the people disapprove of the job he’s doing, he’ll get voted out when he’s up for re-election in 2025.

In other words, public opinion outside the office being so strongly in favor of intervention likely strengthened the position of those inside the office who were in favor of intervention.

And if we had not raised the alarm to demand that Trump be held accountable, I do not believe the case would ever have been brought — and we would not be here today analyzing a successful guilty verdict.

Rule 4: Trump will stonewall you — but fight back. And he outsources everything, so track down his vendors and get the documents from them instead.

Even before Alvin Bragg had made the fateful decisions regarding this case, the Manhattan DA’s office had already done heroic work following Rule 4.

Donald Trump generally refuses to provide materials even when he’s been subpoenaed. This happened in the Trump University case. It’s been happening repeatedly in the classified documents case. And it happened here with the Manhattan DA.

Yet because Trump is cheap, and not capable of managing a large organization, he outsources virtually everything he can (and then often refuses to pay invoices to those outside contractors).

Smart prosecutors have realized this, and they take advantage of it. It’s become a significant Achilles heel for Trump: sure, he’ll stonewall and refuse to provide things, but his third-party contractors are a lot less likely to ride for him no matter what, especially when he underpays them (see Rule 5 next).

Even when those contractors try to stand with Trump, the prosecutor’s job is to fight the fight to get that evidence any way they can, no matter how long it takes or how high up they have to go.

This is what the Manhattan DA’s office did here. Mazars, Trump’s longtime but now erstwhile accounting firm, refused to provide financial records (including the records underpinning all of Trump’s tax filings) pursuant to subpoena — and the Manhattan DA went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court not just once but twice, successfully winning decisions that the records must be produced.

Yes, this drastically lengthened the amount of time that the investigation took, adding years to the timetable. But it was worth it.

Rule 5: Trump constantly screws over his vendors and business partners — these people are all potential allies who can break open your case.

Donald Trump is a cheapskate. It was a habit he picked up from his father, Fred Trump, who never met a corner he wouldn’t cut if it meant trimming costs from a construction project or a building maintenance budget.

Yet Donald Trump applied his father’s lessons incorrectly — and with disastrous results. Fred Trump was cheap so he could run subpar apartment complexes at a profit. Donald Trump’s cheapness extends to his closest allies, even his co-conspirators.

Michael Cohen is the clearest example of this. Trump was constantly behind in his payments to Cohen or found creative ways to screw him. When Cohen made the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, he was to be reimbursed, along with a bonus. Cohen, naturally, thought he was getting an extra bonus for a job well done. Trump had other ideas. Yes, Cohen got his Stormy bonus, but then Trump withheld Cohen’s normal end-of-year holiday bonus. Later, Trump stopped paying Cohen’s legal bills as Cohen took the fall for Trump, in part because of the hush money payments. And even after that, Cohen incurred $1.6 million in outside counsel expenses with other lawyers to help defend Trump from the Mueller Investigation, and Trump refused to pay Cohen; Cohen later had to sue Trump and won a settlement on the eve of trial last year. This was all part of Cohen’s journey from loyal Trump consigliere to Trump’s best-known informant.²

But it wasn’t just Cohen. Trump also tried to screw over David Pecker — which is why the hush money payments were necessary in the first place. If Trump had just paid his obligations to Pecker and American Media in a timely manner, then Pecker would likely have caught and killed the Stormy Daniels story, and the Stormy hush money would have been unnecessary.

The lesson here for prosecutors is unmistakable, and it was followed perfectly by the Manhattan DA in this case. Trump is deeply disloyal, even to the people he claims as his closest confidants and cronies — and once these insiders are disgruntled, they can become assets for the prosecution. Cohen was a willing cooperator. Pecker was legally cornered and had to sign a non-prosecution agreement to save himself, and Pecker became the key corroborating witness to reinforce Cohen’s testimony.

It’s tough for the king to stand strong if the pieces around him all fall.

Rule 6: Play the long game: Fight the fight on statutes of limitations. Trump uses them to evade justice, so do whatever it takes to extend the scope of his liability.

This one was not an issue here. But it’s proven to be a significant issue in both the New York AG civil fraud case and the E. Jean Carroll cases, as I describe in the book.

Rule 7: Trump is incapable of being quiet and will inevitably inculpate himself — so scour every statement of his you can possibly find and use it against him.

This rule was also followed perfectly by the Manhattan DA, which made masterful use of the audio recording captured by Michael Cohen, capturing Donald Trump discussing the payment to Karen McDougal. It clearly established that Trump was aware of and approved of the overall scheme to intercept the stories of women he’d had extramarital affairs with. The DA played the audio multiple times and made it a centerpiece of the evidence — and I’ve long believed that it was one of the key pieces of evidence that would sway the jury.

Yet it’s not just about the tape from Cohen. Sentencing decisions include consideration of a defendant’s past conduct — and I firmly expect the DA’s sentencing argument will make full use of Donald Trump’s voluminous public statements to show that he has zero remorse for what he’s done and a total disregard for the integrity or sanctity of the court and the justice system. Judge Merchan has already found Trump to have violated the gag order in the case on 10 separate occasions; the DA’s office will surely emphasize this.

Just as Donald Trump’s statements increased his liability in the E. Jean Carroll cases and the New York AG civil fraud case, his statements will likely be considered an aggravating factor increasing his punishment in this criminal case — making it more likely that he will receive a prison sentence, and a longer one than he otherwise might have received if he’d somehow learned to keep his mouth shut.

Rule 8: If at all possible, get Trump under oath — and he will hang himself.

It is so deeply disappointing that we weren’t treated to the delicious spectacle of Donald Trump imploding on the witness stand in this case.

But I’ll take a cold hard conviction over a delicious spectacle any day of the week.

Rule 9: “It has to be perfect” — take the extra effort to make your argument as airtight as possible, and make sure you have a clear story for the media and the public.

This may be the most controversial rule in the playbook. Certainly there is an argument to be made for increased speed, and an understandable frustration that these cases against Trump are taking far too long to bring.

Yet I believe that the Manhattan DA did the right thing in taking the extra time to provide a tight, polished indictment in this case. It is highly likely that Alvin Bragg had quietly revived the case well before that became publicly known — indeed, they would’ve needed to, as they needed to get the case back in front of a grand jury — and that the prosecution team took months just to revise the indictment 27 more times before they finally presented it to the grand jury for approval, and for all of us to dissect.

While I do think that the case could have been even more concise, at every step it was described in very straightforward terms that everyone can understand. The money was paid, it was hidden to look like legal fees, and it was very clearly to influence the election (and without being reported as a campaign finance contribution). They presented a very clean narrative, and it worked.

Donald Trump actually could’ve made this case more complicated and given himself a much stronger chance to win if he’d presented a competing narrative of his own, but he never did. The one that could have worked? Claiming that his real motive for everything was keeping the truth from Melania and protecting his marriage and his family. But that would likely have required Trump to testify — and, done right, it would have required Melania to testify as well.

Rule 10: Trump constantly churns through lawyers and often gets them on the cheap — so be ready for the clown show and focus on the court rather than opposing counsel. Focus on the signal, not the noise, and wait for them to make a mistake.

These next two rules are perhaps the most difficult to execute, but the Manhattan DA’s team pulled it off. Trump’s lawyers wanted to make this case about anything other than the evidence and the testimony — because the evidence and the testimony were so heavily in the prosecution’s favor. And the DA’s team did not let themselves get distracted. The key is to focus on your facts, your witnesses, your arguments, rather than theirs.

Meanwhile, it was only a matter of time before Todd Blanche and Emil Bove made some mistakes. And boy did they ever. They actually referred to the payments to Cohen as a “reimbursement” in the course of questioning former Trump Organization Controller Jeffrey McConney (thus undercutting their entire defense that the disbursements were actually legitimate payments for services rendered). They constantly objected to evidentiary exhibits in front of the jury, which only made them look like they had something to hide. They repeatedly angered Judge Merchan, at one point even prompting Merchan to say that Blanche was losing all credibility with the court because he had clearly not prepared for the argument over Trump’s violations of the gag order. And they somehow decided it was a good idea to praise David Pecker’s testimony during their closing argument, when Pecker’s testimony was absolutely devastating for Trump (and even worse, coming from someone who still claimed to like and respect Trump).

The real secret here? Trump’s lawyers are often just window-dressing. He hires people he can control and micromanage, and then he dictates much of the argument and strategy. Blanche has already admitted that Trump wanted to be the “litigator” and that they worked on everything “together” — which means, of course, that Trump called all the shots.

This means that you really just need to keep making good shots, hitting the ball to the other side of the net, and wait for Trump to make an unforced error. Which he will.

You don’t beat Donald Trump by being flashy or trying some sort of heroic Hail Mary or trying to match him crazy argument for crazy argument. You beat Donald Trump through a steady, workmanlike effort of bricklaying, which is what the DA’s office did here.

Rule 11: Trump will lash out at opponents and their lawyers — ignore it, it means you’re on the right track.

Rule 11 very much follows from Rule 10: while Rule 10 covers Trump’s lawyers, Rule 11 covers Trump himself, outside the courtroom, where he will try to play for media attention and public opinion. He also was very obviously trying to influence and intimidate jurors and witnesses in the case — first, himself, and then later, through a comical series of ineffective surrogates.

Again, the Manhattan DA’s office did not blink. Alvin Bragg did not get in front of the cameras or take to Twitter in order to fight back; Bragg said virtually nothing until the case was won yesterday, and even then, he stuck to a simple script of saying that justice had been won and that he was proud of his team.

This stoic refusal to engage with Donald Trump extended to Michael Cohen, who remained remarkably calm throughout his 25 hours of testimony, even during his lengthy and difficult cross-examination, which was mostly focused on making Cohen look bad. Cohen came across to the jury as reasonable and calm, and away from the courtroom, Cohen has clearly become the very last person that Donald Trump is going to intimidate. He’s fired back a lot of shots at Trump online, but none of that was in front of the jury. Cohen has said that he probably met with the DA’s office over 20 times, and it showed. He was well-prepared.

Rule 12: Regardless of what he says, Trump will settle rather than lose a case outright — but stick to your guns and don’t settle too soon or for too little.

On the surface, this rule would not seem to apply here. But there is something worth noting here.

Trump, of course, did not take a plea deal. Nor was there ever any indicator that the DA’s office would have ever entertained one. But there was a sort of halfway “settlement” that Trump could have pursued here but, interestingly, chose not to. His lawyers could have asked for the jury to consider a “lesser included” charge — here, falsifying business records in the second degree (i.e. without any intent to commit or cover up another crime), which is a misdemeanor. But they did not do so.

Why not? Asking for a lesser included charge is a tacit admission that some crime was committed; the defendant is asking the jury to ratchet down to that lower version of the same crime, seeking to get a lesser punishment as a result. Here, the misdemeanor charges would simply result in fines, rather than risking that Trump may get sentenced to a prison term.

But this would have required Trump to admit wrongdoing — something he seems entirely incapable of doing. In a truly bizarre turn, he’s even refused to admit that he had sex with Stormy Daniels at all.

Is this just a fatal flaw for Trump, that he was unable to fall on his sword in a relatively limited way, so he could escape the possibility of going to prison? Or is Trump making a political and PR calculation that an admission of wrongdoing would hurt his strongman image with his MAGA followers? Or that an admission of sleeping with a pornstar at a golf tournament while his wife was at home breastfeeding their newborn son would perhaps be a bridge too far for his evangelical followers? Is it possible that Trump made a move here that was politically expedient but could be legally devastating?

If so, we should not be surprised. After all, that’s the kind of calculation he made when he made the hush money payments and covered them up in the first place: this is legally problematic, but if I can win the presidency, it’s worth it.

And there we have it. Playbook followed, conviction won. Of course this is going to be appealed, but that’s another tale for another time. Happy Friday!

1. I still believe that the fraud part of the case could have and should have been brought as a criminal case instead of a civil one. Overvaluing a property by 3300% is not a mistake, or mere negligence; it was very obviously an intentional deception. I think a jury could have been convinced to convict, but we’ll probably never know the answer to that one.

2. For now. Mike Pence and Mark Meadows (and, I still believe, possibly even Rudy Giuliani) will be contending for that title in due time.