'Very likely' Trump jury will return a verdict next week: legal correspondent

The jury in former President Donald Trump's criminal trial in Manhattan may not be deliberating for very long, according to a journalist who has been covering the proceedings.

During an appearance on PBS' Washington Week with The Atlantic, Josh Gerstein — a senior legal correspondent for Politico — said he expected jurors to return a verdict by the end of the week.

"I think it's very likely," Gerstein said. "I mean, the jury will probably get two or three days next week to deliberate on the case and I think that will probably be enough for them to come to a decision."

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"I mean, they've been in there for six weeks or so, seven weeks by the time we get into next week," he continued. "They're not physically cooped up but they've been stuck in that courtroom for long enough that I just don't see them wanting to drag this out."

"There's also not, I think, a huge amount of factual dispute for them to sort of chew over," he added. "There are some issues of credibility to talk about, and there are a lot of legal issues to wrestle with, but it's not a question where they need to go through the evidence piece by piece."

Both the prosecution and the defense officially rested their cases earlier this week, and Judge Juan Merchan is expected to reconvene the trial on Tuesday so both sides can present their closing arguments. Merchan instructed jurors that in order to convict the former president of any crimes, there needs to be unanimous agreement that Trump falsified business records to cover up a separate "predicate" crime of either tax-related offenses, state-level campaign finance law violations, or violations of federal campaign finance laws.

Trump's lawyers unsuccessfully fought to include a stipulation that jurors must also unanimously agree on the same predicate crime. But during negotiations, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo pointed out that New York state law does not require that threshold be met in any other instance.

READ MORE: Judge Merchan to jury: Here's what needs to be proven in order to convict Trump of felonies

The former president was indicted last spring on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged Trump orchestrated a hush money payment scheme in which then-personal attorney Michael Cohen would front the money to women who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with Trump in order to buy their silence, and Trump would reimburse him under the guise of paying legal fees.

Cohen, who served a three-year federal prison sentence for his role in the scheme along with other crimes, was one of the prosecution's lead witnesses. He testified under oath that there was no legal retainer being paid with the checks Trump signed, and that the money was meant to reimburse him for his payments he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Former American Media, Inc. chairman and CEO David Pecker testified that Trump explicitly wanted to bury the stories both women planned to tell in advance of the 2016 election in order to help his campaign.

Watch the video of Gerstein's comments below, or by clicking this link.

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