note, i wish you a very good night. from across the networks of nbc news, thanks for staying up late with me and i'll see you at the end of tomorrow. tonight, the defense makes its case for reasonable doubt. >> the real argument was michael cohen cannot be trusted. >> michael cohen is the goat. the greatest liar of all time. >> the judge's sharp rebuke to trump's attorney. >> he was livid. >> he was livid as he should be. >> reporter: and the prosecution tells the story of a conspiracy to corrupt a presidential election. >> steinglass says the value of this corrupt bargain cannot be overstated. trump was overtly discussing the story to avoid it 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 tsaki, and all in the courtroom. plus nicole wallace, chris hayes, ari melber, stephanie ruhle. as 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 glad you are here with us. i'm rachel maddow. i'm here with the great chris hayes and nicole wallace. the one and only lawrence o'donnell who was in the courtroom for closing arguments in the new york election interference hush money trial of former president donald trump. lawrence will be joining us any moment. he is still down at the courthouse. he will join us as soon as he can get to a camera. onset with us, ari melber is here. and katie phang is here. she was in the overflow room at the courthouse as well. we'll be joined over the course of these next two hours by joy reid and alex wagner. jen tsaki. we will be joining lisa rubin. this is all. there is a lot to get to. we know that even know you know this is important news, you have a life. you have a job. child care. as the days in court get longer tonight. we know it is hard to follow it all in realtime over the course of the day. we will talk about the big picture of what happened. where we are in the process. we will talk about the main points made by both sides in their closing arguments and we will talk about how the points are landing legally and broadly and we will try to answer the questions that came up at trial. like why did the judge yell at trump's defense lawyer as soon as he was done with his summation right when the jury went to lunch. why did he say i think that statement was outrageous mr. blanche? we will try to answer that question tonight and more. but we need to start with what has just happened in the last few moments because the summation from the prosecution literally just ended within the last five minutes so i will just read you, we do not have an official transcript at this moment. we will read to you the way the summation concluded. this is the best we have. joshua steinglass is the prosecutor giving the summation. he said listen carefully to the judge's instructions. it is a crime to willfully create inaccurate tax forms. post election, an effort to conceal preelection as part of the same conspiracy. and to pro vent the catch and kill scheme from going public. any single one of the things mentioned, the unlawful means, is enough for you to conclude that the trump tower conspiracy, the conspiracy that trump hatched with the company that owns the national inquirer, the trump tower conspiracy violated new york state election law and the judge will tell you, you don't have to agree. meaning you the members of the jury do not have to agree with one another which unlawful means. the defendant's attempt to defraud in this case couldn't be any clearer. they devised 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 lies. lies in the invoices, lies in the bank paperwork. former president trump benefited the most. steinglass is getting fired up at this point. he says to the jury, quote, you have been a remarkable group. i know this has been a really long summation. boy, has it. i apologize for trading brevity for thoroughness but we only get one shot. the defendant has a constitutional right to a fair trial and he has the right to make us prove our burden. there are contracts, emails, and texts that corroborate every bit of testimony. in this case, the prosecutor said, the evidence is quote literally overwhelming. so now he has gotten that trial. he has had his day in court. and remember as the judge will tell you, and as mr. blanche told you, trump's defense counsel, the law is the law. there is no special law for this defendant. donald trump cannot shoot somebody on fifth avenue at rush hour and get away with it. >> objection! judge merchan, sustained. prosecutor, you the jury have the ability to hold the defendant accountable. remember. you are the ones who had the opportunity to hear every witness. and see every document, focus on the evidence and the logical inferences that can be drawn from that evidence. use your common sense and follow the judge's legal instructions. steinglass says pointedly to the jury, 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 he concludes in the interest of justice, and in the name of the people of the state of new york, i ask you to find the defendant guilty. thank you. judge merchan told the court, 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 the closing arguments just concluded in it is because a very, very, very important thing is about to happen. we know it will happen tomorrow. 10:00 a.m. with the jury. it will with the judge instructing the jury about how to deliberate. and that sounds like oh, that must be a boilerplate thing. that sounds like that must be, you know, the sort of 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 into the defense, he had heard them out in terms of what they wanted from his jury instructions and he had made his decision. he asked them if they had further comment on what his instructions should be. neither of them said they did. and so, he announced at the beginning of today's proceedings, okay then, effectively. you know what my jury instructions will be. it is final. that will happen when you are done with the summations. he said that at the startover what ended up being a very, very long day. lisa, thank you so much for sticking it out for the whole day. thank you for joining us from outside. i want your take on how the two sides did with their summation and the way this trial concluded today. >> reporter: the way the trial concluded was with a very exhausted group of people upstairs. let's start there. not only the jury, but for example, all the court officers who have been protecting us, protecting this trial. they work as long as the judge says the jury, the trial is going on. the people of the jury are all a little tired. that said, if one was light, the other was the opposite. four hours of excruciating detail. where he ping uponned between call records and text messages and every single contact that could be used to corroborate the witness that hay they didn't want this to rest on. michael cohen. they said it many fewer times than the defense did. if you listened to john steinglass, the star witnesses here were david pecker, hope hicks and all of the records from business records meaning the 34 business records. call records, emails. josh did a thorough of the time line here. starting in august 15th. going all the way through the end of 2018. with michael cohen's plea to two counts of election violations. one involving ami's payment to karen mcdougal, the other to stormy daniels. in between, you got everything from madeline westerhouse talking about how trump signed things in the white house. details about the trump organization in terms of how they processed business records. and anything and everything you can imagine in between. so i feel a little bit whiplashed right now. having witnessed both of these closings, because one was so remarkably short on details and evidence. and just all about sort of poking little holes and cherry picking evidence. including some really obvious cherry picking of the testimony that the prosecution was able to refute. then you have steinglass who went through every possible piece of evidence and maybe didn't make the sort of selective choices that somebody who has a little more disstance wouldn't have made. just to underscore to you how detailed the closing was, at one point, i looked up at the slides he was showing. in the bottom right hand corner, they have numbers on them that i noticed were ticking up each time their trial technician pressed a button to further animate the slides. at last count, they were on slide 420. so, that might give you a sense of how much detail was packed in there. and, why it is hard and in many respect to see that forest from the trees because we were just right in the woods with him 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 just said to our lawyers who were here in the panel with us. katie and ari, you were in the courtroom. what lisa is describing there about two very different approaches to closing, mirrored in a little in some ways by the openings. i was there for opening statements and my feeling about the prosecution's opening statement versus the defense was that the defense's opening statement was hard to follow, very emotional. sort of emotionally unpredictable like why are you yelling now? and also just not very linear. where the prosecution's was calm, linear, and not as exciting in part because it wasn't as weird. it sounds like there was a little bit of that in the closing. it might just be the style of these two legal teams. but, how do as a lawyer, i don't know how to translate that style into effectiveness for the jury. what lisa describes has me worry for the prosecution's sake. did they give them too much to chew on? >> it was a strong day for the prosecution. it was volumous. it was so thorough. that helped them deal with the cohen issue. but if you are asking me straight up, it was too long. it didn't need to be this long. that may or may not matter in the end. bit was longer than it needed to be. that's a fair statement. >> was the defense also too long? too short? that was three hours roughly. the prosecution went four plus hours. what did you think of the length of the defense? >> the defense could have been shorter because it still meandered but it still hammered what it wanted to about cohen. i thought the prosecution reminded everyone why you don't need cohen. i know we are sometimes repeating 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. if the defense is able to serve an edible hot dog, that might be reasonable doubt. i remind everyone at home, we talked about this. it is sort of like wait, 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 for one juror more, they could get a mistrial. >> reasonable doubt for something that matters. >> yeah. reasonable doubt an element of the crime. but being down there watching, i think it was clear to the extent that anything changed, it is clear that the prosecution realized we may have a bigger cohen problem than we even thought. even though we prepared for it and the sign of that was they opened their big closing arguments and you reminded everyone how important it is. let's talk about cohen. we already told you, he can lie. here is more than one way to interpret these things. here is the other things that support what he said. they basically said if you want to throw this guy out, you can still convict. that is fine. those are all true legal statements. but it showed you that by at least the end of the defense's summation, they were at least concerned enough to want to punch back on that and they did their business. >> lawrence has walked out of the courtroom. so i want to go to him next. and katie, i want your take as well. we hear from him. lawrence, you had a very long day in the courtroom. so i want tot get your take. your overall take on what you saw, how things went today. and what you think was important for people to understand about how the summations unfolded. >> longest day i ever had in a courtroom rachel. thanks to the prosecution closing. which i think everyone will agree was much longer than it had to be. he is very easy to listen to. he had some really really powerful moments. he did his own imagined version of the 90-second phone call in dispute in this case where according to michael cohen, he called keith schillar. he spoke to keith schillar about some harassment he was suffering and he spoke to donald trump for the remainder of the 90 seconds. and, we saw the da come up with an entire version of that conversation. it was one of those moments in a courtroom that was very impressive. he is the kind of student who really fills up the exam paper. doesn't leave anything out. it did not feel that competitive. it was in fact a reimbursement. all of the reasons why this was a reimbursement to michael cohen and not a big paycheck. and at the end of it, all the big reasons he gave, going to the trump position it is not a reimbursement. his loudest moment in the courtroom today was saying does anyone believe that? and i think he is right. there's no one on the jury who does not believe that that was indeed a reimbursement arrangement for michael cohen. and the question here for this jury is just is donald trump guilty in a falsifying business records scheme that was entered into in order to affect a corrupt election? that may be a complicated question. >> lawrence, can i just ask you in terms of todd blanche's summation. a lot of reporters described that as hard to follow. as being because he wasn't going chronologically the way the exhaustive summation from the prosecution went. that blanche's summation, it was sometimes hard to know what he was getting at. was it hard to follow? >> well listen, i have watched an awful lot of criminal lawyers in my life trying and struggling to defend a guilty client. that's what it looks like. there is no good way. no easy way. i don't know how todd blanche could have done better. given the facts that he is loaded down with. given the complexities he failed to deal with and the da pointed out this point i have been making steadily. it is an argument in conflict with itself. because, the defense argument is michael cohen was paid this big paycheck in 2017 and it had nothing to do with reimbursement 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 handwritten by alan weisselberg that includes the $130,000 to stormy daniels. that has never been explained by the defense. not at any point did that get explained. and then the da made this point when he got up to speak saying you can't accuse michael cohen of stealing in the reimbursement scheme if you are also saying he was never reimbursed. and so, that is the central problem the defense has. it has theories crashing into each other. michael cohen was reimbursed. in the formula for the reimbursement, he managed to steal $30,000. so you cannot accuse him of stealing and then say he wasn't reimbursed. you can't have that both ways. so that was one of those things as a trial develops, you sit there and you wait. when there is something really tough for one side, you just should sit there and wait to hear that side address the most difficult thing they have. the most difficult thing the defense has is the number. $130,000 written in his handwriting on that document. the defense has never explained it. hate have never come close to explaining it and the prosecution made that very, very clear today. that they have never explained that difficult thing. the difficult challenge for the prosecution today was michael cohen is a liar. you cannot convict donald trump on the testimony of michael cohen. saying he knew about the payments to stormy daniels before the election. that only comes from michael cohen and the defense insisted you cannot, you cannot find donald trump guilty based on that testimony from michael cohen. and so the prosecution did a lot of work on that very point. a lot of work on corroborating him as much as he possibly could. 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 southeast charges posed by the prosecution. >> it was clearer to me in the transcript than anything else i have seen in terms of the heart of the case and the heart of the prosecution. the prosecution is able to say here are two documents that are smoking gun documents and yes, they have something to do with michael cohen getting paid. but we have the documents because they have been corroborated by other trump organization personnel. that is why they are in evidence and there is no contrary evidence from the defense. and that just feels to me to be the sort of unassailable core of where we are. for all the time he spent talking. >> the defense doesn't have any comparable so-called smoking gun. there is no, there is nothing comparable to that on the defense side of the case. >> lawrence o'donnell, i know you need to leave in order to come sit with us. so please travel safely. we'll see you as soon as you get here. all right, katie, on that point, in terms of the overall scope of what each side tried to do, but also, the points the jury will be able to remember and maybe decisive to them. do you agree with lawrence's take there? >> i want to disagree with everybody's take to some extent and i want to kind of bring everybody grounded back into what the realities are. this jury never stayed past 4:30 until now and this trial has taken a lot. it has taken less time than before. so this was a long thing. but this is real life. this is how real trials go. when you have closings, they go long. that said, trump is a style over substance guy. so i'm not surprised that his lawyers are style over substance. and you would think that somebody like todd blanche having the experience that he does, would be able to deliver something that was more compelling so it would be irrelevant if he took two hours or ten if it was going to be compelling and that is where he loses out to the prosecution. so the prosecution not only has the style from joshua steinglass. but he also has the substance. when you have todd blanche saying michael cohen is the mvp of lies. the greatest liar of all time. maybe he was the greatest lawyer of all time? but when you hear that, you're like yeah, you snicker a little bit. maybe you chuckle but that's all you got? that's really what it is. so i take umbrage with the idea this was too long. the prosecutor made it clear this was his only shot. if you are the prosecution, you get the sandwich. you go prosecution, defense, prosecution rebuttal. you don't get that here. here you get the defense, then the prosecution. so you know steinglass had it prepared but he also had to pivoter a little bit based on what he heard or didn't hear. during the defense's closing argument. so that is why you saw it a little bit longer. you saw it in the openings. and lawrence