Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for politically eclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta. And in a little bit, we're going to be talking with Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker about a bunch of different topics. But before we get there, just some news of the day. Obviously, as I speak, we're about nine hours into jury deliberations in Trump's trial here in New York City by the time you hear this.

We may have an outcome, at which point you may want to skip what I'm about to say,

although this will probably be relevant no matter what you hear, especially if there's a

verdict.

The key place that we're in right now is that around 3 p.m. yesterday, the jurors sent out a

note asking to rehear testimony that they'd been presented

during trial on four different topics, which included testimony from David Pecker, who's

a friend of Trump's and a former CEO of the company that owns and publishes the National

Inquirer.

Pecker had testified about his efforts to buy damaging stories about Trump to prevent those details

from harming his candidacy, the sort of catch-and-kill scheme. Specifically, the jury asked to hear

testimony about a phone call between Trump and Pecker, as well as Pecker's testimony on discussions

between the Inquirer and Trump's camp about money paid to Stormy Daniels or a playboy model about an affair

with Trump. And the jury also wanted to rehear Pecker's testimony about a key 2015 meeting at

Trump Tower that prosecutors say was central to the conspiracy and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's

testimony about that same meeting. Generally speaking, right, it's hard

to say with some of these things, but if I were the defense team, I wouldn't love that fact,

that that's what the jury was looking for, although you never know what's happening in that

room. It could be that 11 people are all aligned and that they're trying to convince one

person who's completely unaligned

and maybe this testimony is used to persuade that person and maybe they don't move, right?

You never know what's happening in these rooms right now.

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