This week was not a good week for Alvin Bragg, the district attorney in New York who has brought charges as former President Trump, claiming that the GOP frontrunner circumvented election laws by paying “hush money” to Stormy Daniels.
The prosecution has long been hoping that Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, would serve as a silver bullet to end the Trump campaign, but what they got instead was potential perjury.
The Daily Caller wrote about the brutal cross-examination of the star witness by Trump’s defense team.
Defense attorney Todd Blanche confronted Cohen on his past lies under oath, including to Congress and a federal judge, asking him whether he took the same oath before testifying then as he did to testify in this trial: a pointed question aimed to raise doubts about his current claims. Cohen’s prospects took a turn for the worse in the final few minutes before lunch break, when Blanche point-blank accused Cohen of lying when he testified Tuesday that he had called Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, on Oct. 24, 2016, to discuss the matter of paying porn star Stormy Daniels.
“That was a lie!” Blanche nearly shouted at Cohen. “You did not talk to President Trump on that night,” Blanche said. “You talked to Keith Schiller.”
Blanche pointed to text messages Cohen sent minutes before the call asking how he should handle a 14-year-old’s harassing phone calls to him, to which Schiller responded “call me.”
Cohen said he believed he also spoke to Trump. Blanche pushed back, asking how that was possible on a call that only lasted just a minute and 36 seconds.
CNN called the testimony “Trump’s best day in court,” writing, “But on Thursday, he got to savor his former fixer-turned-enemy Michael Cohen wobbling on the stand under a fearsome cross-examination. Cohen appeared to be tripped up over an account of a call he’d previously said under oath was to discuss Trump’s hush money payment to adult film Star Stormy Daniels. It emerged under questioning on Thursday that, at least to begin with, the topic of the call was about another matter entirely.
It was the kind of inconsistency that Trump’s attorneys can use to try to sow reasonable doubt about Cohen’s truthfulness and credibility in the mind of a single juror. That’s all it would take for Trump to walk. And now, the prosecution faces a stiff challenge in repairing the damage when they get to their redirect examination of Cohen’s testimony following the close of cross-examination next week. ‘I think what happened today still is so devastating they have to do something,’ Ryan Goodman, a professor at NYU Law, told CNN’s Erin Burnett. ‘If the case ended today and there were final statements, I think there would not be a conviction.’”
The defense’s cross-examination of Cohen largely focused Cohen’s history as a serial liar, showing his testimony should not be trusted.
In his testimony, Cohen acknowledged his history of lies, but claimed he did it to “protect” Trump.
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