Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers at his New York criminal trial recently portrayed his estranged former fixer Michael Cohen as a liar and Trump-hater noting he acted alone to pay off a p*rn star, but legal experts say prosecutors have largely backed up his testimony with the accounts of others, phone logs and other hard evidence via Reuters.
It has been noted that Trump’s onetime lawyer, Cohen testified for the prosecution this week that Trump directed him to pay adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet ahead of the 2016 election about an alleged 2006 sexual encounter. He testified that Trump then approved a plan to fudge records to cover up the deal.
During the cross-examination, defense lawyer Todd Blanche undermined Cohen’s credibility by portraying him as a turncoat falsely implicating his former boss out of spite. The defense laid the groundwork to argue that Trump was not involved in the details of the reimbursements to Cohen at the heart of the case.
Although prosecutors failed to fully corroborate Cohen’s versions of his one-on-one conversations with Trump, they largely established that Trump was aware of the scheme, portraying him as a micromanager of his family business and finances, said Professor Rebecca Roiphe at New York Law School.
A longtime New York businessman whose first entry into politics was a run for the White House, Trump wrote books, the jury was told, with such statements as: “Ask to see all of the invoices” and “If you don’t know every aspect of what you’re doing, down to the paper clips, you’re setting yourself up for some unwelcome surprises.”
A former prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, Roiphe said: “Part of what the prosecution did well is to corroborate other pieces of Michael Cohen’s testimony so completely,” adding: “There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence connecting Trump to the payments.”
