Trump’s Defense Rests After He Chooses Not to Testify in Hush-Money Trial

The jury heard his voice, saw his tweets and watched footage of him campaigning for the presidency. But in the end, the 12 New Yorkers weighing the fate of Donald J. Trump did not see him testify.

On Tuesday, the defense rested its case after Mr. Trump declined to take the stand at his own criminal trial, forfeiting his only opportunity to defend himself but also avoiding what could have been a calamitous error. His decision made, his lawyers concluded the testimony phase of the trial, and next week, the jury is expected to begin the momentous task of determining whether the former — and perhaps future — president is a felon.

Defendants rarely testify, but Mr. Trump stands apart as the only American president to ever face a criminal trial, a serial litigant who thinks of himself as his own best advocate. Mr. Trump, who is once again the presumptive Republican nominee, had said repeatedly that he wanted to testify.

But on Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump said in front of television cameras in the courthouse hallway that his lawyers would rest without his taking the stand. The defense would offer only one significant witness, Robert J. Costello, a pugnacious lawyer whose sole task was to attack the credibility of the prosecution’s star witness, Michael D. Cohen.

“We’ll be resting pretty quickly, resting meaning ‘resting the case,’” said Mr. Trump. “I won’t be resting. I don’t rest.” The former president, who spent much of the trial with his eyes closed, added: “I’d like to rest sometimes, but I don’t get to rest.”

Prosecutors accused Mr. Trump of covering up sex scandals to pave his way to the presidency. He faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records stemming from an effort to suppress one of those scandals through a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels.

Mr. Cohen, who was Mr. Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, made the $130,000 payment to Ms. Daniels in the final days of the 2016 campaign, silencing her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. Once the deal came to light in 2018, Mr. Cohen became ensnared in a federal investigation. That strained his relationship with Mr. Trump, who ultimately turned his back on his fixer.

Mr. Cohen flipped, becoming the star witness against his former mentor, offering the only direct evidence linking Mr. Trump to the conduct at the center of the prosecution’s case: the falsifying of the business records.

Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen testified, reimbursed him for the hush money and approved a plan to disguise the true purpose of the repayments. The records — Mr. Cohen’s invoices, Mr. Trump’s checks to Mr. Cohen and entries in Mr. Trump’s ledger — all referred to a legal retainer, implying that Mr. Cohen had received the money for ordinary expenses.

When a prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, asked Mr. Cohen whether those records were true or false, he replied, “false.”

Mr. Cohen was the prosecution’s 20th and final witness of the past five weeks. When he left the stand after four gripping days, the prosecution rested.

Although jurors did not hear the former president’s testimony — his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said Tuesday that his father would not testify “in a kangaroo court” — they saw video of him speaking and were presented with his words. The prosecution introduced clips of Mr. Trump campaigning in 2016, tweets he sent during his presidency and even a selection of quotes from books he was credited with writing.

In one of his on-camera remarks played for the jury, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Cohen as “a good lawyer at my firm.”

Once the case was in the defense’s hands, they called two witnesses: their own paralegal and one of Mr. Cohen’s antagonists, Mr. Costello.

A prosecutor-turned-defense-lawyer, Mr. Costello was once an informal adviser to Mr. Cohen. When not drowned out by a chorus of prosecution objections, Mr. Costello sought to cast doubt on Mr. Cohen’s credibility. Mr. Cohen, he said, had once claimed he had nothing incriminating to offer prosecutors.

“I swear to God, Bob, I don’t have anything on Donald Trump,” he recalled Mr. Cohen’s saying.

But on cross-examination, it was Mr. Costello’s credibility that came under attack, as he sparred with the prosecution for a second straight day.

Ms. Hoffinger, the prosecutor, suggested that Mr. Costello had been trying to ensure that Mr. Cohen would not cooperate with prosecutors, casting him as an agent of Mr. Trump and the then-president’s lawyer at the time, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

She produced a litany of emails underscoring her point, including one in which Mr. Costello wrote to his law partner, saying, “Our issue is to get Cohen on the right page without giving him the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the president.”

Ms. Hoffinger told Mr. Costello that “you lost control of Michael Cohen for the president” once Mr. Cohen turned on Mr. Trump and pleaded guilty to federal crimes for his role in the hush-money deal.

Mr. Costello, defiant, declared: “Absolutely not.”

She also cited Mr. Costello’s first meeting with Mr. Cohen in April 2018, and asked him to confirm that he played up his connection to Mr. Trump’s then lawyer, Mr. Giuliani.

“Not true,” Mr. Costello replied, prompting Ms. Hoffinger to show a pair of emails that appeared to contradict his denial.

“I told you my relationship with Rudy which could be very very useful for you,” Mr. Costello wrote Mr. Cohen two days after their meeting in one of the emails.

Mr. Costello’s session on Tuesday was more placid than his combustible performance the day before.

Shortly after he took the stand Monday, prosecutors objected to a series of questions. When the judge sided with them, Mr. Costello muttered “jeez,” registering his dismay and irking the judge, Juan M. Merchan. Mr. Costello tried to retract his remark, mumbling under his breath that he wanted to “strike” it from the record.

The testimony continued, but after more objections, Justice Merchan again grew frustrated. He dismissed the jury and excoriated the witness: “If you don’t like my ruling, you don’t say, ‘jeez,’ and you don’t say, ‘strike it,’ because I’m the only one who can strike testimony in court,” he said, adding: “Are you staring me down?”

He then cleared the courtroom, dismissing reporters while allowing a group of Mr. Trump’s supporters to remain.

Then, according to a transcript, the judge told Mr. Costello that his conduct was “contemptuous” and said, “If you try to stare me down one more time, I will remove you from the stand,” adding, to the defense lawyers, “I will strike his testimony, do you hear me?”

Mr. Costello asked, “Can I say something, please?” And Justice Merchan replied: “No. No. This is not a conversation.”

After testimony concluded Tuesday, both sides laid out dueling visions for how the judge should instruct the jury as it prepares to weigh the charges. While dry compared with the weeks of testimony about sex and scandal, the so-called charge conference is arguably one of the trial’s most important proceedings.

The instructions are typically meant to translate legal statutes into something intelligible to the 12 jurors who will decide the case. The instructions provide jurors with a road map to help them apply the law to the facts they have gleaned from the witnesses, documents and other evidence presented to them.

Prosecutors proposed instructions that would give the jury what legal experts called unusual flexibility in determining whether Mr. Trump had a role in creating the false records. The prosecutors argued that even if Mr. Trump did not manufacture the records himself, the jury could find him responsible if their creation was “a reasonably foreseeable consequence of his conduct.”

Justice Merchan appeared disinclined to do as prosecutors had asked. He said he would weigh arguments from both sides before reaching a decision.

Defense lawyers appeared to lose arguments as well as they argued over requirements for a guilty verdict. They wanted to mandate that jurors reach unanimous agreement that Mr. Trump had falsified records to conceal a conspiracy to win an election unlawfully. They also wanted jurors to be unanimous about just what those unlawful means were.

Prosecutors fired back that the law did not require that additional hurdle, arguing that Mr. Trump should be treated like any other defendant. Justice Merchan appeared to agree, saying, “There’s no reason to rewrite the law for this case.”

Reporting was contributed by Wesley Parnell, Kate Christobek Nate Schweber and Jesse McKinley.