Trump hush money trial live updates: Judge Merchan to rule if Trump violated gag order

On Monday 15 April, Donald Trump made history as the first current or former president ever to be criminally prosecuted in America, as he went on trial in Manhattan on charges of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments made to an adult film star before the 2016 presidential election.

Though the former president is charged with falsifying business records, Mr Bragg alleges that this was only part of a wider “catch and kill” scheme that Mr Trump engaged in to suppress negative stories as he campaigned – successfully – for the White House in 2016.

Here are all the main players in the drama unfolding at a Manhattan courthouse:

Prosecutors in Donald Trump’s historic hush money trial have refused to hand over a list of witnesses in the case in a bid to save them from Truth Social attacks by the former president.

Mr Trump is facing 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election, in exchange for her silence over an alleged affair back in 2006.

On Thursday 18 April – before the first witness, David Pecker, took the stand on Monday – Mr Trump’s attorney Susan Necheles asked for the name of at least one witness that prosecutors intended on introducing the following week.

She was left disappointed…

Manhattan prosecutors have accused Mr Trump of breaching the gag order through at least 10 different posts on his Truth Social platform and campaign website, including posts targeting Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels – likely witnesses in the trial.

Alex Woodward reports from the courthouse in Lower Manhattan:

A tabloid publisher’s secret agreement with Donald Trump and his attorney Michael Cohen helped bury politically compromising stories that he fathered an illegitimate child and had an affair with a former Playboy model, jurors heard in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday.

In his second day of testimony in the former president’s so-called hush money trial, formerNational Enquirer publisher David Pecker outlined what he called a “mutually beneficial” plan to keep the supermarket tabloid loaded with stories that would boost Mr Trump’s election chances – and ensure “negative” stories never saw the light of day.

…that’s not what reporters on the scene saw.

Here’s what the former president wrote on Truth Social:

Thousands of people were turned away from the Courthouse in Lower Manhattan by steel stanchions and police, literally blocks from the tiny side door from where I enter and leave. It is an armed camp to keep people away. Maggot Hagerman of The Failing New York Times, falsely reported that I was disappointed with the crowds. No, I’m disappointed with Maggot, and her lack of writing skill, and that some of these many police aren’t being sent to Columbia and NYU to keep the schools open and the students safe. The Legal Scholars call the case a Scam that should never have been brought. I call it Election Interference and a personal hit job by a conflicted and corrupt Judge who shouldn’t be allowed to preside over this Political Hoax. New York Justice is being reduced to ashes, and the World is breathlessly watching. Hopefully, Appellate Courts can save it, and all of the companies that are fleeing to other jurisdictions. They can no longer take a chance on New York Justice!

Vaughn Hillyard of NBC News was outside the court this morning and reported: “Trump just claimed that the police have shut down the streets around the courthouse for blocks & that his protesters can’t be here.”

He continues: “Just…not true. There is one pro-Trump person here & the main street along the courthouse is open to traffic.”

Perhaps the ultimate totem of Senate Minority Mitch McConnell’s power is that nobody forces him to speak. Where reporters stick their arms out to grab quotes from his fellow Republicans or his gabby Democratic counterpart Chuck Schumer, the same can’t be said for when McConnell takes the handful of steps from his office off the Senate floor to speak in the chamber. Most of the time, journalists don’t bother him at all — they know better.

When he does speak, the mercurial Kentuckian rarely emotes and only gives the bare minimum in terms of information. That’s made McConnell’s remarks both on the Senate floor and during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon so surprising.