How fitting...

The first questions from the jury seemed focus on what they can and cannot "infer" from the evidence.

They also were reread the portion of the jury instructions that suggested as an "accomplice" that you cannot take Cohen's testimony without corroboration. To me, that might be the most damning piece of the jury instructions for the prosecution. Basically anything Cohen says has to have some other factual corroboration to be considered true.

The question in inference is also interesting. This is standard. You can "infer" from facts that are proven. If you went to bed and there was no rain and everything is dry, but you wake up and everything is wet and people are walking around with umbrellas, you can "infer" that it must have rained. But you cannot "speculate" to get to a legal inference. So if there are alternate possibilities then you cannot "speculate" on which might be true, as it is unproven.

To me, this suggests that there must be some people who want infer a little more than others. But in order to convict Trump in this case it would rely almost entirely on speculation or inference depending on your definition. In the closing you heard the prosecution make statements like "this speaks for itself" or "one must assume" or "we all know" as they moved through the evidence.

Now the reading of the testimony could mean many things. I suspect that someone is trying corroborate something Cohen has testified to through the meeting with Pecker. Is it in regards to establishing that Trump knew about what Cohen was doing, were they looking for something from that meeting that talked about payment (the issue at hand). It could also be that they are looking at other things (Pecker suggested that Trump should buy the story because it would cause him personal as well as political harm and testified that he bought these stories for Trump previously). But that seems less likely based on their insistence on hearing information on inference.

I suspect that they are still tackling the actual falsification of documents portion and that there is disagreement on the jury. If there is disagreement on the jury, that is certainly good for Trump.