Trump's criminal hush money trial begins in Manhattan court

Former President Donald Trump's first of four criminal trials is set to kick off in a Manhattan court on Monday. The first trial is aimed at hush money payments Trump and his company made to cover up an affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels. The trial will take a look at whether those payments were a type of business fraud.

Senior Columnist Rick Newman joins the Morning Brief to break down the details of the trial and what the outcome will mean for Trump's election status.

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This post was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

RICK NEWMAN: For everybody who's lost track, there have been two civil cases going against Donald Trump. Those are basically over. And at this point of appeal, there are four criminal trials. And this is the first one that's actually going to get started. So this is going-- this trial is going to rehash a lot of what we already know about payments, the so-called hush money payments that Donald Trump and his company made to Stormy Daniels to cover up the affair that happened eons ago.

So the New York City district attorney has said that those-- there's business fraud involved here because those were disguised as company payments and accounted for as something that they weren't. So it's really a question of did Trump commit business fraud in the manner in which he made those payments?

This is probably going to take about six weeks. But we are going to have a verdict. This is the important thing. We are going to have a verdict barring something unforeseen in at least one of these four criminal trials before the election. If Trump is guilty, there's no doubt he will appeal. But at least we're going to have an outcome in one trial.