michael cohen cannot be trusted. >> michael cohen is the greatest liar of all time. >> the judges sharp rebuke to trump's attorney. >> he was livid, right? >> he was livid as he should be. >> and the prosecution tells the story of a conspiracy to corrupt the election. >> this meeting cannot be overstated. >> trump was overtly discussing purchasing the story to keep it from being published. this scheme could very well be what got president trump elected. >> tonight, rachel maddow recaps the closing arguments with lawrence o'donnell, alex wagner, jen psaki, and katie phang, all inside the courthouse. plus nicolle wallace, chris hayes, joy reid, ari melber and stephanie ruhle as special coverage of trump on trial begins now. >> thank you for joining us tonight. we know you have every option in the world for where to follow the news of this remarkable moment in american history. it makes us all the more grout -- more glad you are with us. i am rachel maddow with chris hayes and nicolle wallace. the one-of-a-kind lawrence o'donnell who was in the trial today will be joining us at any moment. he is still down at the courthouse. he will be joining us as soon as he can get to a camera. also onset with us, ari melber is here and katie phang is here. katie was in the overflow room at the courthouse, as well, today. we will be joined by joy reid and alex wagner and jen psaki. andrew weissmann is standing by with us at msnbc headquarters. we will be joining lisa rubin i believe at a camera outside the courthouse, moments from now. this has all been breaking as we have been discussing about it. there is a lot to get to. we know that even though you know this is important news and history in the making, you also have a life, a job, school, childcare. lots of people have traveled to deal with after the holiday weekend. we know you have stuff to do. as this trial draws to a close, as the days in court get longer and longer, tonight going until 8:00 p.m., just moments ago, we know it is hard to follow it all in real time through the course of the day, but that is why you have us. our aim tonight is to catch you up and let's do it. we will talk about the big picture of what happened today. we will talk about where we are in the overall process. when we will learn trump's fate. we will talk about the main points made by both sides in the closing arguments. we will talk about how they are landing legally and more broadly. we then try to answer some of the questions that came up today at trial, like for example why did the judge yell at trump's defense lawyer as soon as he was done with his summation, right as the jury went to lunch? why did he say, i think that statement was outrageous, mr. blanche? we will try to answer that tonight and more, but we need to start with what happened in the last few moments. the summation from the prosecution literally ended in the last five minutes. we do not have an official transcript at this point. i will read to you from our reporters updates about what has happened about the way the prosecution concluded. forgive me for this not being word for word perfect, but this is the best we've got. joshua steinglass is the prosecutor giving the closing argument. he says, quote, listen carefully to the judge's instructions. it is a crime to willfully create inaccurate tax forms. the defendant had an incentive to keep the conspiracy quiet and, postelection, and effort to conceal the same conspiracy and prevent the catch and kill scheme from going public. he had every reason to continue to conceal his election fraud and at the end of 2017 he already announced his intention to run again. any of the things i mentioned is enough for you to conclude that the trump tower conspiracy, meaning the conspiracy that trump hatched with the company that owns the national enquirer, the trump tower conspiracy violated new york state election law and the judge will tell you you don't have to agree, you, members of the jury, do not have to agree with one another on which unlawful means. the defendant's intent to defraud cannot be clear. why didn't he just pay stormy daniels directly? instead they devise to this elaborate scheme. secret fedex packages. an effort to conceal the truth. he didn't want anyone to find out about the conspiracy to steal the election. everything was cloaked in lines. lies in the bank paperwork. lies in the tax forms filed with the irs. lies in the bank transfers, the shell companies, the encrypted apps. the name of the game, steinglass says, was, quote, concealment for the man who benefited most, former president trump. our reporter notes in this moment, steinglass is getting fired up at this point. speaking up and going rapidfire for the above remarks. steinglass says to the jury, quote, you have been a remarkable group. i know this has been a really long summation. no it hasn't. i apologize but we only get one shot. the defendant has a constitutional right to a fair trial. he has a right to make us prove our burden. there are contracts, emails, and texts that corroborate every bit of testimony. in this case, the prosecutor says, the evidence is, quote, literally overwhelming. so now he has the trial, he's had his day in court and remember as the judge will tell you and as mister blanche told you, the law is the law. there is no special law for this defendant. donald trump cannot shoot someone on fifth avenue during rush hour and get away with it. >> objection. >> no kidding. >> judge merchan, sustained. prosecutor, you, the jury have the ability to hold the defendant accountable. you are the ones who had the opportunity to focus on the evidence and the logical inferences that can be drawn from that evidence. use your common sense and follow the judges legal instructions. steinglass then says to the jury, pointedly, come back in here and say guilty. guilty of 34 counts of falsifying counts to cover up a conspiracy to corrupt the 2016 election. and then he concludes, in the interest of justice and the name of the people of the state of new york, i ask you to find the defendant guilty. thank you. and he wrapped up at 7:57 p.m. eastern time, whereupon judge merchan told the court and told the jurors we will get started tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. now why would they be getting started tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. after closing arguments just concluded? it is because a very important thing is about to happen next. we now know it will happen tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. with the jury. it will be the judge instructing the jury about how to deliberate. that sounds like it must be a boilerplate thing. that must be the sort of, you know, do your job, don't be biased kind of generic, patriotic instructions they always get. no, the instructions to the jury is very much a contested matter. it has been hotly fought over by both sides. judge merchan started today's proceedings by saying essentially to the prosecution and the defense that he had heard them out in terms of what they wanted for jury instructions and he made his decision. he asked if they had further comment and neither of them said they did, so he announced at the beginning of today's proceedings, okay then, effectively, you know what my jury instructions will be. it is final and that will happen when you are done with summation. he said that at the very start of what ended up being a very, very long day in court today, starting in the 9:00 hour and not ending until just now. we have so much to talk about. it was such a big day. let's start by going right to the courthouse. msnbc legal correspondent lisa rubin has been at the courthouse for the entire trial. she has been earning her kibble today. lisa, thank you for sticking it out through the whole day today. thank you for joining us from outside. right now i have to ask your big picture take overall on how the two sides did and what we think is most important for the country to understand about the way the trial concluded today? >> reporter: i think the way the trial concluded today, rachel, was with a very exhausted group of people upstairs. let's start there. not only the jury, but for example all of the court officers who have been protecting us, protecting this trial. they work as long as the judge says that the trial is going on. i asked, at what point do you change shifts? one of them looked at me and said i'm here until the trial closes today, so you are looking at a group of people from reporters to the jury who are all a little bit tired. that said my big take away at the end of the day is that i feel a little bit like goldilocks still in search of the right to bed. that is because todd blanche is closing was light on detail and long on hyperbole. you got the exact opposite from josh steinglass. four hours in excruciating detail where he went from call records and text messages and every single contact that could be used to corroborate the witness that they did not want to think the jury this whole case -- did not want the jury to think this whole case rests on. if you were to listen to josh steinglass the star witnesses were david pecker, hope hicks and all of the records. from business records, meaning 34 business records that are part of the felony counts, to call records, text messages, emails. josh did a very thorough timeline start again august 2015 at the trump tower meeting where the conspiracy was formed and going through the end of 2018 with michael cohen's plea to two counts of election violations. one involving amis payment to karen mcdougal and the other involving his own payment to stormy daniels and in between you got everything from madeleine wester hout talking about how trump signed things in the white house, to details about the trump organization and how they process business records and anything and everything you can imagine in between. so i feel a little bit of whiplash right now having witnessed these closings because one was so remarkably showed -- remarkably short on details and evidence and all about poking holes and cherry picking including obvious cherry picking the prosecution was able to refute. then you have steinglass who went through every possible piece of evidence that maybe did not make the selective and judicious choices that someone who has more distance would have made in trying to convince a jury who has been sitting here for six weeks that they can convict on something less than every little bit of evidence. to underscore how detailed his closing was, at one point i looked up at the slides he was showing. they encapsulate or summarize evidence. in the bottom right-hand corner they have notice -- they have numbers on them that i noticed was going up every time they pushed the button to animate the slides. at the last count when i left the courtroom they were on slide 420, so that might give a sense of how much detail was packed in there and why it is hard in many respects to see the forest for the trees because we were right in the woods with it today. >> lisa, thank you for that. i know we will be speaking with lawrence as well, who was also just in there. i want to put what you said to our lawyers on the panel. you are both in the courtroom as well today. what lisa is describing about two very different approaches to closing, mirrored in some ways with the difference in the openings. i was there for opening statements and my feeling about the prosecution's opening statement versus the defense opening statement was that the defense statement was hard to follow, very emotional. sort of emotionally unpredictable, like why are you yelling now? i don't know where this is coming from. also not very linear, where the prosecution was calm, linear, and not as exciting, in part because it was not as weird. that may just be the style of these legal teams, but as a non- lawyer, i don't know how to translate that into effectiveness for the jury. what lisa was describing makes me worry for the prosecutions sake, that maybe they give them too much to chew on. what did you think? >> i thought it was a strong day for the prosecution because it was voluminous and thorough. if you are asking me straight up, it was too long. it did not need to be this long and that may or may not matter in the end, but it was longer than it needed to be, i think that is a fair statement. >> was the defense summation, which was first, was it also too long or too short? i was like three hours roughly. the prosecution went for four hours. >> the defense could've been shorter, because it still meandered, but it still hammered what it wanted to about cohen and poking holes for reasonable doubt. i think the prosecution reminded everyone why you don't need michael cohen and it is a records case and there are all of these records. i would also remind everyone and sometimes we repeat ourselves, but if this were a cooking show it is not like both contestants have to make a great meal. the prosecution has to have a five course, perfect meal with every ingredient and if the defense is able to serve an edible hotdog, that might be reasonable doubt. we've talked about this. why are we being so nice to the defense? we are not being nice. the defense has to do less. if they can poke reasonable doubt they could get a mistrial. >> reasonable doubt for something that matters. >> yeah, reasonable doubt for an element of the crime. being down there and watching today i think it was clear that the prosecution realized we may have a bigger cohen problem than we thought, even though we prepared for it and the thought of that was that they opened the closing arguments by saying okay, first let's talk about cohen. we told you he can lie. here is more than one way to interpret these things. here is the other way to support what he said. they basically said if you want to throw this guy out you can still convict. that is fine. it showed you that by at least the end of the defense summation they were at least concerned enough about wanting to punch back on that and then they did their business. >> lawrence just walked out of the courtroom, so i want to go to him next and then katie i will go to you. lawrence, you had a very long day in the courtroom today. i know you have just been able to get out to the camera, so i want to get your take, your overall take on what you saw, how things went today and what you think is important for people to understand about how the summations unfolded. >> reporter: the longest day i ever had in the courtroom, rachel, thanks to the prosecution closing which i think everyone will agree was much longer than it had to be. however, the assistant district attorney is a very compelling speaker. he is very easy to listen to, so you could be 2 1/2 hours into it and not feel as if you were two hours into it. by the time you were four hours into it, you knew you were four hours into it. that is inevitable. he had some really powerful moments. he did his own imagined version of the 92nd phone call in dispute in this case, where according to michael cohen he called keith -- he spoke to keith schiller about some harassment he was suffering and then spoke to donald trump for the remainder of the 90 seconds. we saw the d.a. basically come up with an entire version of that conversation and how that could've gone in 49 seconds. so it was one of those moments in a courtroom that was very impressive. very effective. sorry. you know, this is -- he is the kind of student who really fills up the exam paper. you know, does not leave anything out. and oddly enough it did not feel that repetitive. that is the funny thing about it. but the essence of it was basically, look, this was in fact a reimbursement. there was a moment when he rattled off all of the reasons why this was a reimbursement to michael cohen and not a big paycheck. at the end of all of the reasons he gave for being a reimbursement and then going to the trump position that it is not a reimbursement, his loudest moment in the courtroom today was saying, does anyone believe that? i think he is right, there is no one on the jury who does not believe that that was, indeed a reimbursement arrangement for michael cohen. the question for this jury is just is donald trump guilty in a falsifying business records scheme that was entered into in order to corruptly affect an election? that may be, for the jury, a complicated question. >> lawrence, can i just ask you in terms of todd blanche's summation, a lot of lawyers today described that is hard to follow. because he was not going chronologically the way the summation from the prosecution went. that blanche, it was hard to know what he was getting at, other than going liar, liar, liar at michael cohen and trying to make the fact that michael cohen has been proven to lie something that should be fatal to the case. was it, in fact, hard to follow? >> reporter: listen, i have watched an awful lot of criminal lawyers in my life trying and struggling to defend a guilty client. that is what it looks like. there is no good way. there is no easy way. i don't see how todd blanche could have done any better, actually, in his summation today, given the facts that he is loaded down with. given the complexities he failed to deal with and the d.a. pointed out this about the argument, that it is an argument in conflict with itself. because the defense argument is michael cohen was paid this big paycheck that had nothing to do with reimbursement of the $130,000 to stormy daniels, but we know and the defense knows that the calculation of how much he would be paid was based on a document had written -- document handwritten by allen weisselberg. that has never been explained by the defense, not at any point. and then the d.a. made this point when he got up to speak, saying, look, you can't accuse michael cohen of stealing in the reimbursement scheme if you are also saying he was never reimbursed. that is the central problem that the defense has. it has theories crashing into each other and in one side of their theory they are fully adopting the prosecution case, which is michael cohen was reimbursed, but when the defense adopts the idea that michael cohen was reimbursed, they say that in the formula michael cohen lied and they managed to steal $30,000. so you cannot accuse him of stealing and then say he was not reimbursed. you can't have that both ways. so that was one of those things. as a child develops you sit and wait. when there is something really tough for one side you should just sit and wait to hear that side address the most difficult thing they have and the most difficult thing the defense has is that number, $130,000, written in allen weisselberg's handwriting on that document and the defense has never explained it. they have never come close to explaining it and the prosecution made that very clear today, that they have never explained that difficult thing. the difficult challenge for the prosecution today, laid out for them by the defense argument, is michael cohen is a liar. you cannot convict donald trump on the testimony of michael cohen and it is only michael cohen's testimony that says donald trump knew and approved the payment to stormy daniels before the election. that evidence comes only from michael cohen and the defense insisted you cannot find donald trump guilty based on that testimony from michael cohen. so the prosecution did a lot of work on that very point and a lot of work on corroborating michael cohen as much as they could on that very point. so the prosecution was not afraid to go after the most difficult challenge posed by the defense, but the defense never came close to the most serious challenges posed by the prosecution. >> we have the prosecution that was clear to me in the transcript than anything else i have seen in terms of the heart of the case and the fight between the prosecution and the defense, that the prosecution is able to say here are two documents that are smoking