What It Was Like at Donald Trump’s Arraignment

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It's all you can ask. It's going to be a long day, it's going to be like mid-sixties. No jacket.

M Tuesday, April 4th. And you and I are standing at the bottom of what is essentially a small neighborhood of legal buildings and courthouses. That if you've ever watched a procedural on TV, you recognize it feels like every episode of Law Order has some scene shot at the steps of one of these courthouses. And this is where history is going to be made today. This is where Donald Trump is going to show up in his motorcade with the Secret Service, get out and surrender himself to the Manhattan District Attorney.

And this is where, a few hours later, Donald Trump is going to be arraigned in court. Charges are going to be read to him. He's going to have to enter a plea.

That's the moment everyone's waiting for. In the meantime, people have gathered across the street from the courthouse to protest this indictment and this impending arraignment. As well as express support for it. And say that it needs to happen. And that is where we are headed now.

That's not entirely surprising. We are in Manhattan.

Why are you here?

It's unjust.

Here we come, police car has just made the turn, here it is. The motorcade has arrived from the New York Times. I'm Michael Bilboro.

This is the daily. OK. There he is. I can see the back of Trump's head.

Today, what it was like as Donald Trump was charged with 34 felony counts. Trump is now in the building, he is surrendering himself, he's here. This is all very, very real.

Right now, literally right here, at this corner of this street in Lower Manhattan, we are entering unchartered territory. My colleague Jonah Bromwich takes us inside the courthouse where Trump was arraigned.

It's Wednesday, April 5th.

Jonah, Just to begin, how did you even get inside this courtroom? Because as I left Lower Manhattan for the day, I noticed all these reporters, some of them very famous TV personalities, waiting in a line, looking really crestfallen because they hadn't gotten into this courtroom.

So the first assumption we made that was wrong was that the line would start sometime overnight, like kind of early Tuesday morning. The line started at 2 p..m. on Monday. Wow, you know? More than 24 hours before the arraignment was scheduled.

And Sean said, There's a line, there's three people in it, I'm number four.

And we had him and another of our colleagues, Nate Schweber, joined him. So we had spots number four and number seven in line, and we coordinated reporters throughout the night, and I got there shortly before seven.

This is Jonah Bromwich, a courts reporter with The New York Times. Now I can see the tents and the line of journalists who have been waiting since yesterday afternoon. So I showed up on Tuesday, I took over Brittany Kriegstein's spot, she gave me her beach chair, which I later carried into the courthouse. All right, so I'm at the front of the line now, next to Brittany and Jason and five or six other colleagues who have been standing here.

In the meantime, helicopters are circling overhead and the sun is coming up over the Federal Court building to the south. And the tension in the line is just growing because you don't know whether you're going to get in. And then, finally, the court officers are now coming and checking the line and it seems as if we're about to get our tickets. This group of court officers descends out of nowhere and they start handing out these tickets, and there are three ticket colors.

There's green, there's yellow, and there's white. I've got my green ticket, which is essentially the equivalent of the golden ticket into this room, and it felt like getting a golden ticket, basically.

And sit down and wait, you know, I'm sitting in the courtroom, so obviously I can't see anything. But we do hear these faint cheers from the crowd outside. And so what we understood at that point is okay. He seems to have made his way into the building and then we know that he made his way up to the 15th floor. And the prosecutors come in and the defense came in, and then Donald Trump walked into the courtroom.

And I'm so used to seeing Donald Trump on TV or in his social media photo, just kind of seeming larger than life, right? And in that moment, what I see is someone who who looks like a criminal defendant, he looks his age, he looks tired.

He looks a little bit apprehensive. He really felt human. And despite the court officers, despite all the hubbub just seeing him, he looked significantly more normal than I would have expected them to.

He's not speaking, he has to listen to this person he doesn't know. And it really just sets the tone for everything that comes next.

Trump, a court official, reads out the charges for the first time. He's charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.

And the two words are not guilty, so the prosecutors take over, they start to describe the charges and outline them and say what they mean. And it's the first time we've heard this story in a courtroom. So the prosecutor, Chris Conroy, says that Trump falsified business records, and he did so to promote his candidacy in 2016..

And that's why we're here. But then Conroy goes further than that because he also talks about Trump's true social posts of the last few weeks. And this is something that I didn't expect to come up, frankly. But Trump has recently tweeted that death and destruction would ensue were he to be charged. He's tweeted threatening things about the Manhattan District attorney, Alvin Bragg.

Mr. Bragg is black, and Mr. Trump has called him an animal. So the language on truth social has been quite ugly, and Chris Conroy, this prosecutor, brings that up.

And again, I was just so struck. Because Trump, whose language we are talking about, even in the courtroom, is not speaking. And he's being spoken about right, and he's being spoken about by people who have power over him. Both the prosecutor and the judge who's hearing that complaint.

And I have in my notebook this is around 247. Just the words Huge power shift. Trump can't talk in here, can't interrupt. Judge and prosecutors hold sway.

And he's asking the judge to weigh in on that. A defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, stands up and disagrees with. The prosecutor says that these posts were born of frustration, and Mr. Trump has been frustrated by the way this case has been handled.

But then, as happens in a courtroom, both parties turn to look at the judge, and what the judge says to the defense lawyer is. I don't share your view that certain language and certain rhetoric is justified by frustration. And he tells him to warn Trump to refrain from making comments or engaging in conduct that has the potential to incite violence, create civil unrest or jeopardize the safety or well-being of any individuals.

We wait for a little while and then we're released and we rush out of the courtroom. And I turn my computer on and I turn my phone on. And it's only then that we get a bunch of information from the DA's office. That tells us a little bit more about the charges in the case, including the statement of facts. And the statement of facts is what tells us that this is all going to be a little more complicated than we realized.

This is a.

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So, Jonah, what exactly did we learn from the documents released by the district attorney on Tuesday? That has made this case start to feel, as you said, a little more complicated.

So when you look at the false statements made about those payments, in terms of how they were categorized, in terms of what was said about them. At the Trump Organization, that's how you get to the filing, false business records charge, that is this entire case. There's 34 of those.

They're close to the National Inquirer, and it's that organization that pays Karen McDougal, and they pay her for the exclusive rights to her story.

They never intend to write the story, they are catching it and they are killing it.

And the doorman says he has this story about Trump supposedly fathering a kid out of wedlock. And here, again, is an instance where the National Inquirer is the one who gets involved. They pay for the story, they kill the story, and the story doesn't appear. During the 2016 campaign, and later, they determined that the story wasn't even true.

And as of now, we don't know what that crime is. And the reason we don't know what it is is because the prosecutors haven't yet said what it is. And so it may be that by including all three of these stories in the story of the overall case. The prosecutors are trying to present a pattern of behavior that will help them sell that underlying crime to a jury.

So, Jonah, what happens next, based on everything that you learned on Tuesday? Where does this case now go?

And prosecutors don't want him to tweet evidence from the case, they don't want him to disclose things he's not able to disclose. They ask that he not even look at certain material from the case unless he's in his lawyer's office. So we don't know what is going to be in that final agreement. But there is going to be a document that constrains what Donald Trump can do and what Donald Trump can say.

And I'm very curious to see whether he can heed the terms of that document.

For so long, he's conflated his legal problems with political problems, and he's turned legal problems into politics. And it's one thing to do that when you're under investigation, but it's a whole other thing when you're a criminal defendant.

And I never thought anything like this could happen in America, never thought it could happen. The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it.

And despite the warning from prosecutors and the judge in the case, Trump attacked the proceedings and the judge himself, calling him a quote Trump hater.

We'll be right back.

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