Trump New York hush money criminal trial: Live updates

Here’s a livestream from the courthouse courtesy of IndyTV.

Here’s another interesting query: does the defendant actually have to be there?

Amelia Neath has this one.

Another fundamental issue at the heart of today’s proceedings: what kind of jeopardy is Donald Trump actually facing?

Here’s a quick look at one of the key questions of the day: what will we actually be able to see?

Here’s the latest from Alex Woodward court-side:

“There are three protesters in the small park across from the courthouse. One sign reads CONVICT TRUMP ALREADY. Another large wooden banner spoofs his campaign logo to read LOSER.”

While that’s a noble effort, it rather pales in comparison to the big turnout that greeted Trump’s arraignment on 4 April last year, about which you can read more below.

Here’s Ariana Baio with what the legal experts have had to say about today’s trial and its significance for the American justice system.

In the weeks after he descended his beloved golden escalator from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to announce his presidential campaign, Donald Trump would arrange a scheme to bury compromising stories of his affairs to clear his path to the White House.

From that very same building, then-candidate Trump allegedly orchestrated a plan to buy up damaging stories that threatened his candidacy, only to ensure they would never be published, and then reimbursed his attorney who paid off an adult film star whose story of an affair with the Republican nominee for the presidency threatened to derail his campaign.

Those reimbursements were allegedly falsified as business expenses – the crime at the centre of an alleged plot to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, one that will come into sharp relief during a weeks-long criminal trial in Manhattan that begins on 15 April.

The People of the State of New York v Donald J Trump is the first-ever criminal trial against an American president, falling in the middle of another election year, in a case that describes an attempt to manipulate the outcome of the election that launched him into political domination.

Here’s Alex Woodward to put the magnitude of it all in context for us.

Trump is out of bed and “truthing” for all he’s worth: citing imaginary legal scholars as he calls for today’s trial to be scrapped and alleging without any evidence at all that “Radical Left Democrats” have brought the cases against him to tie him up in court and eat up his cash to keep him off the campaign trail.

More surprisingly, he’s also been engaging in a little political satire.

Here’s the latest on his brutal case of the Mondays.

Rachel Sharp and Io Dodds have this look at Judge Juan Merchan, the justice who has weathered a blizzard of spurious motions and personal attacks on his daughter to make sure today’s hearing happens on time.

Alex Woodward offers this profile of the New York prosecutor hoping to bring the former president to book.