by Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths:
Star prosecution witness Michael Cohen has proven such obvious liar under cross-examination that a guilty verdict is no longer certain, even from a partisan jury; what happens if Trump walks?
You’d think a guy who lies as much as Michael Cohen would be better at it.
On Thursday, under relentless cross-examination from defense lawyer Todd Blanche, Cohen drove the effort to make Donald Trump a felon for the “crime” of misclassifying accounting records over a cliff.
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To recap: in October 2016, Cohen paid the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence over her alleged affair with Trump. In 2017, Trump and his company paid Cohen $420,000, partly to reimburse Cohen for that payment. Trump is now on trial in Manhattan for 34 felony charges of “falsifying business records” because – in his own ledgers – the payments to Cohen were classified as legal services.
I have written before about the case’s many problems. Local Democratic prosecutors are openly trying to punish Trump for winning the 2016 election. They have twisted the law they claim Trump broke past recognition. (I even suggested last week Trump should consider refusing to participate in the case, since it is so nakedly political.)
But.
The (bizarre) theory underlying the indictment is that Trump committed felonies because he made the payments as part of a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, even though he made them in 2017.
Put aside the fact that local prosecutors do not have clear authority to charge Trump for trying to win a federal election by making a (legal) hush money payment – and in fact have not charged him with doing so. Put aside that Trump might have had other motivations to pay to keep Daniels quiet, such as to avoid damage to his marriage.
For the underlying theory of the case to make even a bit of sense, Trump must have told Cohen to make the payments on his behalf – and to have done so before Election Day. After all, even if Trump agreed to reimburse Cohen secretly after the election was over, his decision to repay Cohen couldn’t have affected its results.
But the only people who know if – and even more crucially, when – Trump told Cohen to make the payments are… Trump and Cohen.
No one disputes this fact. No written written records prove Trump authorized the payments. And even though Cohen secretly recorded Trump (and many other people), he does not have a recording of Trump telling him to make them.
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Again, even assuming everything else the prosecution says is true – and that the legal theory underlying the indictment holds up – the jury must find Trump innocent unless it agrees he told Cohen to pay Daniels before Election Day.
For three weeks, prosecutors have skillfully hidden this fact by presenting a case filled with irrelevancies, including Daniels’ testimony about her encounter with Trump in 2006. In fact, whether Daniels and Trump had sex makes no difference. (I don’t think Trump should have pushed his lawyers to argue the point. He clearly did, and in trying to deny it, he risked undercutting the significance of the far more crucial Cohen testimony. But he’s obviously pretty embarrassed about it.)
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