Maggie, I was just thinking, obviously, you wrote an entire book on Trump and his biography. What is it like now to see that this moment has happened, that he is a convicted felon? Because we didn't know how the verdict was going to go over the last several weeks.

No, although I will say being in the courtroom yesterday, once the judge came back and said the jurors had said they had reached a verdict, it was pretty clear in the room where this was likely going, particularly watching the defense table. I think they all knew.

Because it was so quick, essentially.

It was under two days, and it was very unlikely that this was going to be an acquittal just based on the volume of the evidence and based on all sorts of testimony. Look, this is something that Donald Trump has spent decades trying to avoid. He has lived in this legal gray area for a very long time, and he has played gamesmanship with prosecutors and regulators and people who have overseen his businesses and aspects of his public-facing life. And he befriended prosecutors. He was very proud of his relationship with Bob Morgenthau, who was one of Alvin Bragg's predecessors. So this is a momentous event. Now, what it means long term, we don't know. He could win an election. He's going to appeal this. This appeal is likely if it succeeds, I have no idea if it will or it won't. They are going to throw a lot at it. They're going to try to get it before the Supreme Court. It will drag on for a while. It is highly unlikely that anything gets resolved before the election. So it is likely that Trump is going to head into the election with this conviction on his record, and that just puts us into uncharded territory.

You've reported on him deeply. You've been there at White House briefings, on the campaign trail, obviously in the courtroom. What was it like to actually be sitting in there and to see him as he turned around and walked out knowing what the verdict was?

So we had an obstructive view of him while the verdict was being read. One of the sketch artists, Jane Rosenberg, relayed to us that he shook his head. I think he closed his eyes and shook his head. When he got up, we could see his whole face. He looked as if he had been punched in the gut. I have no other way of describing it. His frown was really, really pronounced. He reached for his son Eric's hand. They clasped hands and shook very hard. Then Eric patted his father on the back, and he walked out. But the air was just entirely still. I should note that there was a massive technical difficulty in the room as well, which added to some of the drama in there where the Internet kicked out for many of us reporters. But it was an incredibly intense moment.

So when we heard from people saying he was in high spirits and ready to fight, that doesn't seem like that's what you saw.

Well, that certainly wasn't what we saw in that moment. I know that he did present that to a bunch of people. I have heard this from a bunch of people he talked to. He's doing what he often does in times of high stress, which is work the phones pretty aggressively, and he's talking to a lot of people. I don't think that he's exuberant and excited about this, and I understand that they're raising a ton of money off of it, and that's significant to their campaign. But Donald Trump doesn't want to be a convicted felon, and there's no world in which he's actually happy about it.

Yeah, and it's interesting because Melania Trump is here. Barron Trump is here. I believe, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are also here based on our reporting. Trump went and dined with these mega donors last night. He just went about his business in the evening. It was two or three hours after he was convicted for the first time.

Yeah, he went straight to a donor dinner with his friend Steve Whitkoff, who was with him in the courtroom when the verdict came down, and a bunch of other folks. This is what we have him do after a number of upheavals, impeachments, and election losses. He just powers forward. We will see him doing that in this campaign.

What did you make of today? I mean, they build it as this news conference, which is always the trick if you're a reporter covering Trump is, you never know if there's actually going to be two hours of questions or if it's going to be today, which was not. He just turned it left.

Yeah, look, I think actually, I talked to a number of people around him who were very happy he didn't take questions because that probably would have led to more problematic areas for him. In their ideal world, he would have just kept it focused on the process, and this is unfair. In the parts of his speech where he talked about this is about the Constitution, and they're trying to make this a much bigger fight, but he can't help himself. And so he attacks the judge, and he attacks Michael Cohen, and he attacks this one and that one, and he says all kinds of other things. Then he starts talking about the January sixth house investigation, which is never a topic his advisors want him talking about. So it turned into a mini rally, and it was filled with grievances. And I think you will see more of that. I think we will see him publicly in some way in the next two days. He's in New Jersey right now at Bedminister. I expect we will see him out there in some fashion.

And he's also someone who responds to things based on not how he actually experience not the experiences them, but the coverage and the perception of them. He was critical of his attorneys today. He said that they never say it is what it is. He also talked about why he didn't ultimately take the stand. We talked to Todd Blanch, his lead attorney here, about what was behind that decision last night. This is what he told us.

Of course, he wanted to testify, and I don't say that because that's what he has said. He wanted to get his story out. I think the judge had made some decisions before the trial or the day the trial started about what would be allowed to be asked of him by the prosecutors if he took to stand. And some of those questions were really complicated to answer because there's still appeals going on. And so there's a lot of decision points that go into whether somebody testifies. Ultimately, it's his decision, and he listened to us, and he relied on our counsel, and he reached the decision that he thought was right, which I very much agreed with.

Yeah, That was true. As far as I know from what was taking place in real-time, he did want to testify. His lawyers were concerned about it for all of the reasons that every other lawyer who has ever represented him has been concerned about him testifying. He ultimately didn't. I think there are things that Todd Blanch decidedly didn't He did do well during this trial, but there were a couple of things he did do well, and one was that he got Trump by some miracle not to essentially self-cut during the proceedings. There were a couple of instances of cursing or shaking his head or doing something. The judge didn't like in front of the jurors, but generally speaking, they got him not to do things like that. And those moments defined the two civil trials that he had in the past year. So I'm not surprised Trump didn't testify at the end of the day. Trump absolutely could have testified if he had wanted to. Only Trump turned this into a big thing by insistently, repeatedly claiming he wanted to testify.

Well, he also complained about... He said that there are witnesses that were exculpatory to him, essentially, and that they weren't called. But I mean, the defense has the right to call. They don't have the burden, but they have the right to call witnesses.

They absolutely could have called Keith Schiller. There are a number of people who they could have called. And one person who they did call, which was a source of controversy within Trump's world, was Bob Costello. And Bob Costello, I don't know a single person around Trump who actually thought that that went well, him being on the stand. Now, the reasons why you hear various different explanations for it, that Castello wasn't prepped well, and that was other people's fault and so forth. But that was a call that ended up confirming a lot of what Michael Cohen was saying about some of the pressure. Even as Castello was denying it, he was doing it in a way that the jurors were paying very close attention during that testimony, and it seemed like a very strange choice. I will say one other thing that Todd Blanch made very clear to you last night in interview was how much the defendant was running the strategy on a lot of fronts in this case, and not every single one, but a lot of them. When that happens, you run into things like Todd Blanch telling the jurors that Donald Trump didn't reimburse Michael Cohen because this was legitimate legal work.

It wasn't a reimbursement. Trump himself called it a reimbursement over and over in 2018, which the prosecutor, Josh Steinglass, in his own closing argument, was able to point to tweets about. I don't know how well this case ever necessarily Probably could have gone for them for a variety of factors, but I don't think they made it easier on themselves either.

What have you heard about Trump's concern about the sentencing? Because who knows if it's going to be jail time? We don't know what Judge Marshawn is going to do. But even if he's on probation, he used to check in with the probation officer. He could get community service. We'll talk about that coming up. But is he worried about the sentencing?

Yeah, he doesn't want to go to jail. No matter how much political upside he sees from it, he doesn't want to go to jail. There's no question.

Maggie Harban, great reporting over the last several weeks. Thank you. Always, thank you for joining us here tonight.