And Sumi, I can just tell you, Donald Trump has been found guilty on count one. Donald Trump, the first former president to be convicted

in a criminal trial. But

that was just the beginning. first was made up of 34 scandalous parts. From

our

producer inside, we're hearing guilty on one through five.

Count six, guilty. Count seven, guilty. This jury in New York City, a jury of his peers finding the former president guilty on every single felony count brought against him by the men. I

don't have to keep using the word allegedly. Mr. Trump has been convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records, a string of misdemeanors made into felonies through a complicated legal argument. It's just the first of four felony cases he has on his packed agenda, but it's likely to be the only one to conclude before November's election. For seven weeks, Kenneth Werner has been following this trial for us, right up to its somewhat sudden conclusion.

Well, first of all, we didn't think that we were going to get a conviction. I mean, this was the second day of jury deliberations. It was at the very end, and the judge said, I'm about to send the jurors home, and they'll come back for a third day on Friday. But right before he was about to do it, the jury said, actually, we're about to come to a verdict. Give us 30 more minutes to fill out the form. So we were all waiting there. I mean, huge anticipation in this room. It was so tense. The jury then files back in and the jury foreman reads out 34 times guilty. And I mean, it was just the sense in the room that history was being made. It was really pretty stunning. Trump then gets up and he walks out of the courtroom looking incredibly angry. Normally Trump has, you could call it a kind of orange glow about him, and this time he was totally red in the face. The question now is, what does this mean for his campaign? How much does it hurt? Okay,

Kenneth, before we get to what it means, just sketch out maybe one last time what this case was about. The

case goes back to 2016, during Trump's first run for office. Before the election, his personal lawyer at the time, a guy named Michael Cohen, paid Stormy Daniels, a porn star, $130,000 to sign a nondisclosure agreement. She said that back in 2006, she had sex with Donald Trump and Cohen was paying her to keep quiet about it. Donald Trump, after the election, then paid Cohen back. And he did it in a series of installments. And he marked the reimbursement to Cohen as payment for legal services in his company account books. Prosecutors said that these were false business records and they charged him with that felony. And throughout the trial, Trump denied all of it. But

those denials, whatever Mr. Trump's lawyers gave as a defense, clearly didn't cut it. Trump's

lawyers made some really implausible claims at the trial. They said first that Trump had never slept with Stormy Daniels in 2006. They said that Michael Cohen paid her of his own volition. Trump hadn't ordered him to pay it. And that other executives at the Trump organization dealt with the payment to Michael Cohen, and that Trump at this point was president and he was too busy and he had no knowledge of how Michael Cohen was being paid. In addition to these rather impossible arguments, there was a lot of testimony at the trial that made Trump seem like a real sleaze, frankly. Witnesses described how he wouldn't use email because he was worried that it could be incriminating. The combination of all this stuff, the impossible arguments, and then just the muck of the case really, I think, stuck with jurors and led to this conviction.

Right. And talk me through Mr. Trump's reaction to this conviction. After

Trump left the courtroom in the hallway, he attacked the judge, he attacked the prosecutors, and the whole trial, he said the whole thing was rigged. And he's done that for weeks since the indictment was announced actually last year. This

was a rigged, disgraceful trial. The real verdict is going to be November 5th by the people. And

they know what happened here and everybody knows what happened here. He

falsely accused Joe Biden of being behind this indictment.

This was done by the Biden administration

in order to wound or hurt an opponent, a political opponent.

So what do we know about the wound, the hurt, at least as regards to the judicial system? Like, is Mr. Trump at any risk of going to prison?

So he's probably not going to go to prison. I mean, these are really low-level felonies. He's a first-time felon. Sentencing will come on July 11th. That will be done by the judge in this case. Trump is obviously going to appeal against this verdict. And even if in the very, very off chance that the judge sentenced Trump to prison, that sentence probably wouldn't start until the appeals have been exhausted, and that appeal process will take years to play out. And

in the meantime, there's going to be something of a consequential election, right? What about the political hurt or wounds? Are there any? Or will this, in a way we've seen many times before, actually help him? There

will be independents who will say they can't vote for a convicted felon. The Biden campaign sent out an email right after the verdict was announced urging people to vote. So they're hoping that people will be turned off by this. But there are a lot of reasons to think that the damage will be limited and Trump could weather this. The trial was really salacious. There was a lot of embarrassing testimony. But Americans have heard all of this before. What was being discussed at this trial has been public since 2018. And it certainly hasn't hurt Trump yet. When the indictment first came down a year ago, his poll numbers actually rose. After the verdict, he sent out a fundraising email saying that he was a political prisoner, come vote for me. So this is very much part of his narrative that he's the victim of a witch hunt. The other reason to think that the damage from this verdict will be limited is the fact that it was quite a confusing case. The legal argument used by the prosecutors to advance their case was very convoluted because to charge someone with falsifying business records, that would be a misdemeanor. So in order to do it as a felony, prosecutors have to show that the records were falsified to commit or conceal another crime. And so in this case, the prosecutors said the other crime was this state law that makes the crime to conspire to influence an election through unlawful means. And then they posited three unlawful means. They said that the hush money was a campaign finance violation, that it was an undeclared contribution to Trump's campaign, essentially, that the reimbursement to Michael Cohen wasn't properly reported for tax purposes, and that other business records had been falsified in order to pay the hush money. So because the case is so complicated, it offers the defense a lot of opportunities to poke holes in the legal argument and to seek a reversal of

the conviction.