Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law professor emeritus, told Newsmax Wednesday that the prosecutors in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan misled the jury in closing arguments.
Trump is charged with falsifying business records on a $130,000 payment to Michael Cohen. Trump’s former attorney to reimburse him for paying adult film star Stormy Daniels to stop saying she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied all charges and said the encounter never occurred.
The prosecutors told the jury they could find all the elements of a crime committed without believing Michael Cohen, their star witness.
“That’s just not true,” Dershowitz told “The National Report.” “The only evidence that Donald Trump knew of this at all comes from an uncorroborated conversation with Michael Cohen that could have been corroborated by Alan Weisselberg.”
But prosecutors never called Weisselberg, Dershowitz said.
“There is a lack of corroboration for a crucial conversation that might criminalize what was otherwise innocent behavior,” Dershowitz said.
Dershowitz also attacked a New York State law that allows the prosecution to go last when presenting closing arguments, calling it unconstitutional.
“How does a defense go first when it doesn’t even know what the crimes are that turned a misdemeanor into a felony?” Dershowitz said. “They had to wait until they heard it from the prosecutor’s closing argument and then had no chance to rebut.”
Dershowitz said if he was on the defense team, he would’ve said he had nothing to say and that he would wait for the prosecutors to present their case and then respond to it.
“You can’t make me respond to a case I haven’t heard yet,” Dershowitz said. “The defense was forced to go first, which imposed a burden on them which the jury will take into the room.”
In closing arguments, Dershowitz said the defense should’ve focused on prosecutors not calling Weisselberg as a witness.
“I would’ve put up a life-size blown-up picture of Allen Weisselberg on the witness stand,” Dershowitz said. “What did the prosecution hide from you?”
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Former President Trump’s legal team was slated to call on a former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission to testify in the NY v. Trump case, but the expert’s testimony was not heard after the presiding judge curbed the scope of what he could discuss before the jury.
“Judge Merchan has so restricted my testimony that defense has decided not to call me. Now, it’s elementary that the judge instructs the jury on the law, so I understand his reluctance,” former FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith posted on X on Monday.
“But the Federal Election Campaign Act is very complex. Even Antonin Scalia – a pretty smart guy, even you hate him – once said ‘this [campaign finance] law is so intricate that I can’t figure it out.’ Picture a jury in a product liability case trying to figure out if a complex machine was negligently designed, based only on a boilerplate recitation of the general definition of ‘negligence.’ They’d be lost without knowing technology & industry norms,” he continued.
Smith is an election law expert who Trump has called the “Rolls-Royce” of experts in his field, but he will not testify after Judge Juan Merchan ruled that Smith could speak before the court on the basic definitions surrounding election law but not expand beyond that scope.
Former President Trump sits in the courtroom during his trial at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City on May 21, 2024. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Trump was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree in the case. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg must prove to the jury that not only did Trump falsify the business records related to payments to former porn actress Stormy Daniels but that he did so in furtherance of another crime: conspiracy to promote or prevent election.
Smith served as an FEC commissioner and chair between 2000 and 2005. The FEC is the U.S. agency dedicated to enforcing campaign finance laws. His testimony was slated to shed light on prosecutors’ allegations that Trump falsified business records, which is a misdemeanor that has already passed the statute of limitations, in order to cover up an election violation.
Smith wrote on social media that while the prosecution’s star witness, Michael Cohen, was allowed to go “on at length about whether and how his activity violated” the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), he was barred from broadening the scope of his previously anticipated testimony, which “effectively” led to the jury getting “its instructions on FECA from Michael Cohen!”
Bradley Smith was supposed to be a defense witness in the NY v. Trump case. (Douglas Graham/Roll Call/Getty Images/File)
Smith spoke with the Washington Examiner on Monday and discussed what he would have said in court if he testified.
“Judges instruct the juries on the law,” Smith told the outlet. “And they don’t want a battle of competing experts saying here’s what the law is. They feel it’s their province to make that determination. The problem, of course, is that campaign finance law is extremely complex and just reading the statute to people isn’t really going to help them very much.”
Smith said he anticipated “to lay out the ways the law has been interpreted in ways that might not be obvious” while noting election laws are very complicated matters.
Michael Cohen is questioned by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger on redirect during former President Trump’s criminal trial in New York City on May 20, 2024. (Reuters/Jane Rosenberg)
“You read the law, and it says that anything intended for the purpose of influencing an election is a contribution or an expenditure,” Smith said. “But that’s not in fact the entirety of the law. There is the obscure, and separate from the definitional part, idea of personal use, which is a separate part of the law that says you can’t divert campaign funds to personal use. That has a number of specific prohibitions, like you can’t buy a country club membership, you can’t normally pay yourself a salary or living expenses, you can’t go on vacation, all these kinds of things. And then it includes a broader, general prohibition that says you can’t divert [campaign funds] to any obligation that would exist even if you were not running for office.”
“We would have liked to flag that exception for the jury and talk a little bit about what it means,” Smith said. “And also, we would have talked about ‘for the purpose of influencing an election’ is not a subjective test, like, ‘What was my intention?’ It’s an objective test.”
Michael Cohen and former President Trump (Getty Images)
The case surrounding Trump’s payments is one that both the Justice Department and FEC rejected to prosecute in recent years. The Justice Department in 2019 “effectively concluded” its investigation into Trump’s payments. While in 2021, the Federal Elections Commission announced that it had dropped a case looking into whether Trump had violated election laws for the payment to Daniels.
Smith has previously joined Fox News, where he also noted that the “Federal Election Commission chose not to act on this.”
Bradley Smith testifies during a House subcommittee hearing on lobbying reform on March 1, 2007. (Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty Images)
“DA Bragg in this case waited, I think it was almost a year, before even bringing the charges. And I think that’s because the charges were flimsy. And as you point out, they’ve been, you know, the prior DA had said, ‘No, we’re not going to bring this.’ The DOJ said no. The Federal Election Commission said no. And when he got increased political pressure, he brought the case,” Smith told Fox News host Mark Levin earlier this year before the trial kicked off.
Smith also wrote an opinion piece published by The Federalist last month, when the trial kicked off, arguing that Bragg’s office had “one big problem” with the case.
Former President Trump sits in the courtroom in New York City on May 21, 2024. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“The [prosecution’s] theory is that Trump’s payments to Daniels were campaign expenditures and thus needed to be publicly reported as such. By not reporting the expenditure, the theory goes, Trump prevented the public from knowing information that might have influenced their votes,” he wrote in the opinion piece.
“There is one big problem with this theory: The payments to Daniels were not campaign payments.”
He said political candidates frequently act in ways that could be interpreted as serving a “purpose of influencing an election,” that politicians could get their teeth whitened or buy a new suit with campaign funds to look snappy on the campaign trail.
Rhona Graff testifies as former President Trump watches during his criminal trial in New York City on April 26, 2024. (Reuters/Jane Rosenberg)
“That’s because, in campaign finance law, these types of expenditures are known as ‘personal use.’ FECA specifically prohibits the conversion of campaign funds to personal use, defined as any expenditure ‘used to fulfill any commitment, obligation, or expense that would exist irrespective of the candidate’s election campaign,’” he wrote.
Smith continued on X on Tuesday that Bragg’s case hinges on prosecutors proving that Trump tried to influence an election through “unlawful means,” but the office has to rely on their own evidence as the DOJ and FEC both denied pursuing the case.
Judge Juan Merchan (AP Photos/File)
“If that’s the case, isn’t it entirely relevant (not dispositive, but relevant) to the jury’s fact-finding on that question that neither DOJ nor FEC chose to prosecute? But Judge Merchan won’t allow that in,” he wrote. “He will, though, allow in numerous references to Cohen’s guilty plea, and allow Cohen to testify as to how he thinks he and Trump violated FECA – though it appears that Cohen is a dunce about campaign finance laws.”
The defense team rested Tuesday, with Merchan dismissing the jury until after Memorial Day. Closing arguments are anticipated to kick off next Tuesday following the holiday.
The prosecution in Donald Trump’s legal expenses trial “has not proven a crime,” but Judge Juan Merchan is going to force the trial to the jury, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Newsmax.
“I don’t think the judge is going to do the right thing,” Leavitt told Tuesday’s “National Report.” “If he had done the right thing, he would have recused himself from this case from the very beginning because he is a highly conflicted, partisan judge.
“He’s a Democrat who voted for Joe Biden. He should have never been overseeing this case in the first place, but our defense team is 100% right to file this motion to dismiss the charges.”
“They’ve spent 20 days on the stand, and they never proved a crime,” she continued. “They didn’t even come close to proving the 34 felony counts that they are charging President Trump with, and it’s because President Trump never committed the crimes that they are alleging. The prosecution has known this all along.”
Leavitt, who has been in the courtroom with Trump several times during the course of his trial, said that Tuesday is “just another sad day to watch President Trump back in that courtroom, talking to the media and not really able to fully speak about the case because he has an unconstitutional gag order that is hampering his ability to really talk about what’s going on in that courtroom.”
“I can’t even get into that with you guys either because of the unconstitutional gag order, which is just, it’s a travesty of justice,” she said. “As you mentioned, legal experts on both sides of the aisle, even on CNN and MSNBC, which I’m sure kills them to admit it, but it’s the truth: The prosecution has not proven a crime and we expect this case to rest very soon, and it will ultimately be in the hands of the jury, and we hope that they do the right thing based on the evidence, based on the law, and also for this country.
“This is a witch hunt, and our country has never seen anything like it.”
Trump’s lawyers rested their defense Tuesday without the former president taking the stand to testify. Members of the jury were sent home until May 28, when closing arguments are expected.
The jury could begin deliberating as early as next week to decide whether Trump is guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal legal payments to Michael Cohen to allegedly silence Stormy Daniels’ allegations of an extramarital affair.
The former president has pleaded not guilty and denied any wrongdoing in the case.
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
After his disastrous testimony in Manhattan, Michael Cohen lost even hosts and legal analysts at MSNBC and CNN. MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin described Cohen as a “fabricator, liar or forgetful person.” CNN’s Anderson Cooper discussed how the testimony was “devastating for Michael Cohen’s credibility.” CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig said that Cohen had his “knees chopped out” by the defense. All of that was before Cohen admitted that he committed grand larceny in stealing tens of thousands from the Trump company. Most analysts honestly expressed disgust at the admission and expressed shock that he was not prosecuted. The question is whether anyone could find a way to excuse grand larceny to spare viewers in the echo chamber. That is when host Lawrence O’Donnell stepped forward.
So, to recap. Here is what Cohen said under oath under questioning by Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche:
Blanche: “So you stole from the Trump Organization, right?”
Cohen: “Yes, sir.”
Not much ambiguity but Cohen went on to explain that he intentionally inflated costs to just pocket tens of thousands of dollars. He admitted it was theft, plain and simple.
For O’Donnell, it is not that simple. He rushed outside to assure MSNBC viewers that everything is fine and that this is just a form of what Cohen laughingly called “self-help.”
“Cohen [was trying] to rebalance the bonus he thought he deserved, & it still came out as less than the bonus he thought he deserved & the bonus he had gotten the year before.”
It would have been more convincing if O’Donnell, a self-proclaimed socialist, had just called it a redistribution effort from the super-rich to the rich. However, there was a sense of desperation in O’Donnell’s interview in offering viewers an assuring alternative explanation. Larceny did not fit with the past coverage lionizing Cohen. For many viewers, O’Donnell’s account relieved them of the need to question the basis for the prosecution of Trump.
We will have to wait to see if O’Donnell’s defense is picked up in the nearby trial of Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.). It appears that taking those gold bars and other gifts may have been just an effort of Menendez to secure a bonus that he believed was warranted from his public service. It would also mean that anyone who was denied a bonus or received less from their employer can simply steal the difference.
There is a serious aspect to the O’Donnell statement. It is not clear if O’Donnell actually believes that Cohen was justified in stealing this money. However, he does show the level of self-delusion or denial that is common with many citizens who cannot see beyond the identity of the defendant. These are the same citizens who elected candidates like Letitia James as state attorney on a pledge to bag Trump for something, for anything. These are the same citizens who voted roughly 90 percent against Trump in Manhattan. These are the same citizens that are likely represented by some on this jury.
That may explain why the Trump team decided to take the risk of a “kill shot” witness like Robert Costello. Some of us believe that this case is already fatally flawed and that no reasonable jury could convict Trump. Indeed, I cannot see how any reasonable judge could deny a directed verdict. However, the Trump team does not want to wait for a long appeal. Costello comes with a risk of opening up issues on cross examination, particularly the involvement of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
The fact is that the jury has MSNBC viewers and some who likely hold the same bias as O’Donnell. For them, what most of us see unfolding in Manhattan may not be what they see. They may only see one person in the courtroom, and it is not any witness.
Below is my column in the New York Post on the meltdown of Michael Cohen on the stand in the Manhattan trial of former President Donald Trump. In a trial careening out of control, Judge Juan Merchan seemed to be furiously working to just get the matter to the jury as fast as possible. Judge Merchan seems in open denial of the legal farce playing out in his courtroom. He is only the latest person pulled into the vortex of the swirling corruption around Michael Cohen.
Here is the column:
The completion of the testimony of Michael Cohen left the prosecution of Donald Trump, like its star witness, in tatters. In the final day of cross-examination, Cohen admitted to committing larceny in stealing tens of thousands of dollars from his client. Even more notably, he admitted to the larceny on the stand — after the statute of limitations had passed. There will be no dead felony zapped back into life against Cohen, as it was for Trump. Cohen clearly has found a home for his unique skill as a convicted, disbarred serial perjurer.
It was not the first time that prosecutors looked the other way as Cohen admitted to major criminal conduct: In a prior hearing, Cohen admitted under oath that he lied in a previous case where he pleaded guilty to lying. If that is a bit confusing, it was just another day in the life of Michael Cohen, who appears only willing to tell the truth if he has no other alternative. The result is truly otherworldly. You have a disbarred lawyer not only casually discussing lies and uncharged crimes, but prosecutors who proceeded to get him to remind the jury that he is not facing any further criminal charges.
If any one of those jurors had stolen tens of thousands of dollars, they would be given a fast trip to the hoosegow. Yet Cohen then matter-of-factly said he plans to run for Congress due to his “name recognition” — the ultimate proof that it does not matter whether you are famous or infamous, so long as they spell your name right.
As a legislator, Cohen would have the unique ability to say he will not be corrupted by Congress — because he came to Congress corrupted. While most members wait to take office to commit felonies, Rep. Cohen would show up with a self-affirming criminal record. He could then take one of the few oaths that he has not previously violated as the Honorable Rep. Michael Cohen.
Prior witnesses testified that Trump’s payments to Cohen were designated as “legal expenses” not by Trump but by his accounting staff. Moreover, Cohen admitted that he worked for Trump for years in his murky capacity as a fixer. References to payments as a retainer were approved by Allen Weisselberg, a retired executive with the Trump Organization. The “legal expense” label was a natural characterization for a lawyer who was paid monthly and was on-call as Trump’s personal counsel.
In any other district, this case would never have been allowed in trial. It certainly now should be facing a directed verdict by the court. Indeed, with any other defendant, a New York jury would be giving a Bronx cheer in derision. Even CNN hosts and experts have admitted that this case would never have been brought against another defendant or in another district. That is what Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is counting on.
The biggest problem facing the defense is not the evidence, but the judge: Judge Juan Merchan seems to be channeling George Patton’s warning, “May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won’t.”
Merchan has not given any indication that he is seriously considering a directed verdict, which he should clearly grant before this goes to the jury. Merchan’s rulings have largely favored the prosecution, including some rulings that left some of us mystified. Judge Merchan continues to allow the jury to hear references to campaign-finance violations that do not exist.
After gutting any use of a legal expert to testify on the absence of any such violations, the judge allowed the jury to hear Michael Cohen state that the payments to Stormy Daniels were clearly campaign violations. All that Merchan would offer is a weak instruction telling jurors not to take such statements as proof of a violation.
The alleged campaign-finance violations allowed Cohen to try to implicate Trump. However, it is doubtful that Trump could have been convicted on such a charge in any other venue.
It is precisely what the Justice Department tried and failed to do with John Edwards, a Democratic candidate. After that unmitigated failure, the Justice Department dropped this theory of hush money as a campaign contribution. Indeed, after reviewing the Trump payments, not only did the Justice Department decline any charges but the Federal Election Commission did not even seek a civil fine.
On Monday, Judge Merchan’s orders became even more inexplicable when Cohen’s former attorney Robert Costello took the stand. Merchan immediately started to sustain a flurry of prosecutors’ objections as Costello basically accused Cohen of multiple acts of perjury. At one point, Costello — one of the most experienced lawyers in New York and a former prosecutor — exclaimed that one of the judge’s rulings was “ridiculous.” The judge chastised Costello and even challenged him: “Are you staring me down?”
In fact, it was hard not to stare. What is happening in the courtroom of Judge Juan Merchan is anything but ordinary.
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.
Below is my column on Fox.com on the approaching end of the Trump trial in Manhattan. With the dramatic implosion of Michael Cohen on the stand on Thursday with the exposure of another alleged lie told under oath, even hosts and commentators on CNN are now criticizing the prosecution and doubting the basis for any conviction. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper admitted that he would “absolutely” have doubts after Cohen’s testimony. CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig declared “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a star cooperating witness get his knees chopped out quite as clearly and dramatically.” He previously stated that this case would never have been brought outside of a deep blue, anti-Trump district. Other legal experts, including on CNN and MSNBC, admitted that they did not get the legal theory of the prosecution or understand the still mysterious crime that was being concealed by the alleged book-keeping errors. The question is whether the jury itself is realizing that they are being played by the prosecution.
Here is the column:
In the movie “Quiz Show,” about the rigging of a 1950s television game show, the character Mark Van Doren warns his corrupted son that “if you look around the table and you can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.”
As the trial of former President Donald Trump careens toward its conclusion, one has to wonder if the jurors are wondering the same question.
For any discerning juror, the trial has been conspicuously lacking any clear statement from the prosecutors of what crime Trump was attempting to commit by allegedly mischaracterizing payments as “legal expenses.” Even liberal legal experts have continued to express doubt over what crime is being alleged as the government rests its case.
There is also the failure of the prosecutors to establish that Trump even knew of how payments were denoted or that these denotations were actually fraudulent in denoting payments to a lawyer as legal expenses.
The judge has allowed this dangerously undefined case to proceed without demanding greater clarity from the prosecution.
Jurors may also suspect that there is more to meet the eye about the players themselves. While the jurors are likely unaware of these facts, everyone “around the table” has controversial connections. Indeed, for many, the judge, prosecutors, and witnesses seem as random or coincidental as the cast from “Ocean’s Eleven.” Let’s look at three key things.
1. The Prosecutors
First, there are the prosecutors. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg originally (as did his predecessor) rejected this ridiculous legal theory and further stated that he could not imagine ever bringing a case where he would call former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, let alone make him the entirety of a prosecution.
Bragg’s suspension of the case led prosecutor Mark F. Pomerantz to resign. Pomerantz then wrote a book on the prosecution despite his colleagues objecting that he was undermining their work. Many of us viewed the book as unethical and unprofessional, but it worked. The pressure campaign forced Bragg to green-light the prosecution.
Pomerantz also met with Cohen in pushing the case.
Bragg then selected Matthew Colangelo to lead the case. Colangelo was third in command of the Justice Department and gave up that plum position to lead the case against Trump. Colangelo was also paid by the Democratic National Committee for “political consulting.” So a former high-ranking official in the Biden Justice Department and a past consultant to the DNC is leading the prosecution.
2. The Judge
Judge Juan Merchan has been criticized not only because he is a political donor to President Biden but his daughter is a high-ranking Democratic political operative who has raised millions in campaigns against Trump and the GOP. Merchan, however, was not randomly selected. He was specifically selected for the case due to his handling of an earlier Trump-related case.
3. The Star Witness
Michael Cohen’s checkered history as a convicted, disbarred serial perjurer is well known. Now, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., is under fire after disclosing that “I have met with [Cohen] a number of times to prepare him.”
Goldman in turn paid Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, more than $157,000 dollars for political consulting.
Outside the courtroom, there is little effort to avoid or hide such conflicts. While Democrats would be outraged if the situation were flipped in a prosecution of Biden, the cross-pollination between the DOJ, DNC, and Democratic operatives is dismissed as irrelevant by many in the media.
Moreover, there is little outrage in New York that, in a presidential campaign where the weaponization of the legal system is a major issue, Trump is not allowed to discuss Cohen, Colangelo, or these conflicts. A New York Supreme Court judge is literally controlling what Trump can say in a presidential campaign about the alleged lawfare being waged against him.
The most striking aspect of these controversial associations is how little was done to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interests. There were many judges available who were not donors or have children with such prominent political interests in the case. Bragg could have selected someone who was not imported by the Biden administration or someone who had not been paid by the DNC.
There was no concern over the obvious appearance of a politically motivated and stacked criminal case. Whether or not these figures are conflicted or compromised, no effort was taken to assure citizens that any such controversies are avoided in the selection of the key players in this case.
What will be interesting is how the jury will react when, after casting its verdict, the members learn of these undisclosed associations. This entire production was constructed for their benefit to get them to convict Trump despite the absence of a clear crime or direct evidence.
They were the marks and, like any good grift, the prosecutors were hoping that their desire for a Trump conviction would blind them to the con.
Bragg, Colangelo and others may be wrong. Putting aside the chance that Judge Merchan could summon up the courage to end this case before it goes to the jury, the grift may have been a bit too obvious.
New Yorkers are a curious breed. Yes, they overwhelmingly hate Trump, but they also universally hate being treated like chumps. When they get this case, they just might look around the courtroom and decide that they are the suckers in a crooked game.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is a Fox News contributor.
Below is my column on Fox.com on the approaching end of the Trump trial in Manhattan. With the dramatic implosion of Michael Cohen on the stand on Thursday with the exposure of another alleged lie told under oath, even hosts and commentators on CNN are now criticizing the prosecution and doubting the basis for any conviction. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper admitted that he would “absolutely” have doubts after Cohen’s testimony. CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig declared“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a star cooperating witness get his knees chopped out quite as clearly and dramatically.” He previously stated that this case would never have been brought outside of a deep blue, anti-Trump district. Other legal experts, including on CNN and MSNBC, admitted that they did not get the legal theory of the prosecution or understand the still mysterious crime that was being concealed by the alleged book-keeping errors. The question is whether the jury itself is realizing that they are being played by the prosecution.
Here is the column:
In the movie “Quiz Show,” about the rigging of a 1950s television game show, the character Mark Van Doren warns his corrupted son that “if you look around the table and you can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.”
As the trial of former President Donald Trump careens toward its conclusion, one has to wonder if the jurors are wondering the same question. For any discerning juror, the trial has been conspicuously lacking any clear statement from the prosecutors of what crime Trump was attempting to commit by allegedly mischaracterizing payments as “legal expenses.” Even liberal legal experts have continued to express doubt over what crime is being alleged as the government rests its case.
There is also the failure of the prosecutors to establish that Trump even knew of how payments were denoted or that these denotations were actually fraudulent in denoting payments to a lawyer as legal expenses.
The judge has allowed this dangerously undefined case to proceed without demanding greater clarity from the prosecution.
Jurors may also suspect that there is more to meet the eye about the players themselves. While the jurors are likely unaware of these facts, everyone “around the table” has controversial connections. Indeed, for many, the judge, prosecutors, and witnesses seem as random or coincidental as the cast from “Ocean’s Eleven.” Let’s look at three key things.
1. The Prosecutors
First, there are the prosecutors. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg originally (as did his predecessor) rejected this ridiculous legal theory and further stated that he could not imagine ever bringing a case where he would call former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, let alone make him the entirety of a prosecution.
Bragg’s suspension of the case led prosecutor Mark F. Pomerantz to resign. Pomerantz then wrote a book on the prosecution despite his colleagues objecting that he was undermining their work. Many of us viewed the book as unethical and unprofessional, but it worked. The pressure campaign forced Bragg to green-light the prosecution.
Pomerantz also met with Cohen in pushing the case.
Bragg then selected Matthew Colangelo to lead the case. Colangelo was third in command of the Justice Department and gave up that plum position to lead the case against Trump. Colangelo was also paid by the Democratic National Committee for “political consulting.” So, a former high-ranking official in the Biden Justice Department and a past consultant to the DNC is leading the prosecution.
2. The Judge
Judge Juan Merchan has been criticized not only because he is a political donor to President Biden but his daughter is a high-ranking Democratic political operative who has raised millions in campaigns against Trump and the GOP. Merchan, however, was not randomly selected. He was specifically selected for the case due to his handling of an earlier Trump-related case.
3. The Star Witness
Michael Cohen’s checkered history as a convicted, disbarred serial perjurer is well known. Now, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., is under fire after disclosing that “I have met with [Cohen] a number of times to prepare him.” Goldman in turn paid Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, more than $157,000 dollars for political consulting.
Outside the courtroom, there is little effort to avoid or hide such conflicts. While Democrats would be outraged if the situation were flipped in a prosecution of Biden, the cross-pollination between the DOJ, DNC, and Democratic operatives is dismissed as irrelevant by many in the media.
Moreover, there is little outrage in New York that, in a presidential campaign where the weaponization of the legal system is a major issue, Trump is not allowed to discuss Cohen, Colangelo, or these conflicts. A New York Supreme Court judge is literally controlling what Trump can say in a presidential campaign about the alleged lawfare being waged against him.
The most striking aspect of these controversial associations is how little was done to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interests. There were many judges available who were not donors or have children with such prominent political interests in the case. Bragg could have selected someone who was not imported by the Biden administration or someone who had not been paid by the DNC.
There was no concern over the obvious appearance of a politically motivated and stacked criminal case. Whether or not these figures are conflicted or compromised, no effort was taken to assure citizens that any such controversies are avoided in the selection of the key players in this case.
What will be interesting is how the jury will react when, after casting its verdict, the members learn of these undisclosed associations. This entire production was constructed for their benefit to get them to convict Trump despite the absence of a clear crime or direct evidence.
They were the marks and, like any good grift, the prosecutors were hoping that their desire for a Trump conviction would blind them to the con.
Bragg, Colangelo and others may be wrong. Putting aside the chance that Judge Merchan could summon up the courage to end this case before it goes to the jury, the grift may have been a bit too obvious.
New Yorkers are a curious breed. Yes, they overwhelmingly hate Trump, but they also universally hate being treated like chumps. When they get this case, they just might look around the courtroom and decide that they are the suckers in a crooked game.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney. He is a Fox News contributor.
Michael Cohen raised his right hand on Monday in the Manhattan trial of Donald Trump and swore to tell the truth. It was a meaningless gesture. Cohen has done it before and then proceeded to lie under oath. He went to prison for it after lying to courts, lying to banks, lying to Congress, and lying to the IRS. Yet, once again, Cohen insists that now he’s telling the truth. He wants jurors to believe him. This time.
Cohen presents a contradiction about truth and falsity. In philosophy and logic, it’s known as the “liar’s paradox,” and it bedevils juries whenever habitual liars take the witness stand and promise to tell the truth.
The paradox is this: if a liar indeed lied, then his admission of his lies is truthful. Unless, of course, he is lying about the lie and everything else. You can never really know. The search for truth becomes impossible. In a court of law where the central witness is a chronic fabulist, the “liar’s paradox” equals reasonable doubt.
It was on full display Monday when Trump’s one-time self-proclaimed “fixer” failed to connect the accused to any cognizable crime. But Cohen readily confessed that he often lied and bullied people. He also deceived his own client, Trump, by secretly recording him shortly before the 2016 election.
Without permission, Cohen then shared it with the publisher of the National Enquirer. It was a sleazy maneuver that would merit disbarment for breaching the attorney-client privilege. No matter. Cohen was long ago disbarred over his criminal convictions.
When the recording was played in court it seemed to help, not hurt, the defense. Cohen refers cryptically to payments made to kill a story, which is not a crime. Trump appears somewhat in the dark and is heard asking, “What financing?” Cohen assured him that he was taking care of everything. His boss didn’t need to know the details. “I’ve got it…I’m on it,” said Cohen.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg knows that he is teetering dangerously close to suborning perjury. But he is wholly committed to convicting Donald Trump for crimes not committed or fully revealed.
It is bewildering why the prosecution ventured there, except to smear Trump with the illusion of some amorphous wrongdoing. It was utterly irrelevant since the matter dealt with former Playboy model Karen McDougal who was never called as a prosecution witness and is unconnected to the charges. Trump refused to pay her money over a purported affair that he denies.
Cohen then moved on to his tangle with ex-porn star Stormy Daniels, who was intensifying her apparent extortion scheme as voters were soon heading to the polls. Cohen admitted that it was his idea to pay $130,000 for her silence accompanied by a lawful non-disclosure agreement. As Trump’s lawyer, Cohen handled the negotiated contract which was later booked as “legal expenses” because that is what they were.
In fact, Cohen confirmed the accuracy of the bookkeeping when he explained that the money he received was compensation for his work on the legal settlement with Daniels, reimbursed payments to him, plus a retainer for his legal services as Trump’s newly named personal attorney.
Michael Cohen is questioned by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger during former President Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan state court in New York City, May 13, 2024, in this courtroom sketch. (Reuters/Jane Rosenberg )
So, where exactly is the original fraud that forms the basis for the 34 misdemeanor charges alleged by the prosecution? Nowhere.
Cohen later testified that Trump was concerned about how Daniel’s story might impact his 2016 electoral chances. Not surprisingly, that nugget is contradicted by other witnesses who informed the jury that the candidate’s main concern was his wife and family.
Either way, it doesn’t matter. Bragg’s argument is legally flawed because Trump used his own money, not campaign funds. The law imposes limits on the latter, but not on the former.
That is one of the principal reasons why the Federal Election Commission (FEC) determined there was no campaign finance violation. The Department of Justice agreed. No civil fine was levied or criminal charge rendered. Those two entities have exclusive authority over federal elections. Not a local prosecutor such as Alvin Bragg.
But that did not stop the Manhattan DA from usurping federal jurisdiction by bringing a campaign case that he has no power to enforce and for violations that don’t exist.
Under normal circumstances, the DOJ would have intervened to stop it. Instead, Attorney General Merrick Garland tossed a going away party for his deputy, Matthew Colangelo, who abandoned his prestigious job at the Department to become Bragg’s lead prosecutor.
Undeterred by the limits of the law, these ethically bankrupt prosecutors have cobbled together a lawless case by asserting that Trump falsified his own private business records with the felonious intent to conceal another crime that they still refused to identify. Presumably, it’s campaign finance. But it’s actually not.
Former FEC Chairman Bradley Smith put it this way in his column for The Wall Street Journal: “The ‘crime’ that Mr. Bragg claims is being covered up isn’t a crime at all.”
Even if the DA’s warped legal theory proceeds, he must still prove that Trump himself understood campaign finance laws and deliberately intended to violate them. There’s no evidence of that. Even experienced candidates struggle to comprehend the mind-numbing web of campaign regulations. That’s why they depend on lawyers.
Bragg wants to put Trump in prison for relying on the advice of his legal counsel. There’s a legal term for that. Nutty.
On cross-examination, Cohen will surely be confronted with his myriad of lies, which I’ve recounted in earlier columns. One in particular is worth remembering. In February of 2018, he told the New York Times, “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure.”
Shortly thereafter, Cohen changed his tune. It’s changing still. When he retakes the witness stand on Tuesday he’ll regurgitate more lies and misinformation. None of it is worth a damn because Cohen represents the quintessential “liar’s paradox.” He’s told so many fibs that even his recantations are self-contradictory.
In the trial at hand, Cohen has a personal interest in lying —hatred and greed. When he isn’t trolling for dollars on TikTok by trashing Trump, he’s hawking a proposed reality show that he calls, “The Fixer.” Cohen needs to fix himself.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg knows that he is teetering dangerously close to suborning perjury. But he is wholly committed to convicting Donald Trump for crimes not committed or fully revealed. By calling Cohen as his star witness, the DA has forsaken his duty to seek the truth. He is aiding and abetting a convicted perjurer by enabling more lies.
This is the worst kind of government corruption. Unscrupulous, dishonest, and amoral. It is antithetical to justice and an embarrassment to our once respected legal system.
Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. His recent book, “The Trial of the Century,” about the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial” is available in bookstores nationwide or can be ordered online at the Simon & Schuster website. Jarrett’s latest book, “The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents,” was published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins on November 14, 2023. Gregg is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His follow-up book was also a New York Times bestseller, “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History.”
Below is my column in the New York Post on the first day of the examination of Michael Cohen. He is expected to start his cross examination today. How bad will it be? After lying to Congress, courts, banks, and most everyone else, it will be bad. Years ago, Cohen threatened a journalist and told him “What I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting.” Well, that bad. On cross examination, Cohen faces a reckoning of biblical proportions.
Just before he took the stand, the New York Post revealed that Cohen has been peddling a reality show called “The Fixer,” including working with Colin Whelan, who helped create “Joe Exotic: Tigers, Lies and Cover-Up.” Whelan appears interested to stay within that genre.
The Cohen pitch came with a cheesy promo video where he promised viewers, “I am your fixer.”
His first post-Trump client, Bragg, may have to disagree.
Cohen had only one advantage for Bragg: His notoriously flexible morals and ethics, which allows him to say most anything to support his sponsors.
With the prosecution’s case almost over, Bragg needed Cohen to clearly state that Trump intentionally committed fraud to conceal some still poorly defined crime. The problem is that Cohen only confirmed that Trump knew he was going to pay for the nondisclosure agreement and that it would be buried before the election. None of that is unlawful.
On his reality show promo, Cohen tells viewers that he is now there to fix their problems because “the little guy doesn’t usually have access to people with my particular set of skills.” Those skills seem to have escaped all of the witnesses who were compelled to work with him.
Witnesses detailed how Cohen was ridiculed as someone “prone to exaggeration” and unprofessional. Former Trump associate Hope Hicks said that Cohen was constantly trying to insinuate himself into the campaign and that he “used to like to call himself Mister Fix It, but it was only because he first broke it.”
Cohen only succeeded in confirming that he put together this payment and advised Trump to go forward with it. He assured him that it would effectively kill the story before the election. None of that is illegal. The “Fix it man” assured Trump that he fixed it and now wants Trump to go to jail for following that advice.
This is the man who, according to Stormy Daniels’ attorney, Keith Davidson, expected to be Trump’s Attorney General. Davidson said that Cohen was “depressed and despondent” and “I thought he was going to kill himself” when he realized that he would not be made a cabinet member.
Cohen contradicted Davidson and insisted that he only wanted to be Trump’s personal lawyer.
He also admitted that he was unaware that the publisher of National Enquirer, David Pecker, had long killed negative stories about Trump and other celebrities for decades.
Cohen has yet to fix the problem for Bragg.
More importantly, he has added to the problem for Judge Juan Merchan. Many of us have ridiculed this case as devoid of any criminal act.
Indeed, Merchan has allowed the prosecutors to proceed without clearly stating what crime was being concealed.
It is not even clear why paying one’s lawyer a lump sum for his services and costs (including the NDA payment) was not a “legal expense” or how it was supposed to be entered on a business ledger.
Absent a sudden epiphany in his final testimony on Tuesday, Merchan should rule in favor of a directed verdict — that is, throwing the case out before it goes to a jury. If he instead sends this farcical case to the jury, it is Merchan, not Cohen, who may have a better claim to a reality show as the ultimate “Fixer.”
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s paralegal testified on Friday that his office deleted from their evidence three pages of phone records between convicted liar Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson without notifying former President Donald Trump’s legal team, according to reports.
Trump attorney Emil Bove questioned paralegal Jaden Jarmel-Schneider on Friday about three pages of 2018 phone records between Davidson and Cohen that Bragg’s office had deleted, according to CNN. Additional phone records between Daniels manager Gina Rodriguez and then-National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard regarding Daniels’ claim about her alleged affair were also deleted, according to The Epoch Times.
The altered call records were submitted into evidence, but Bragg’s office did not tell Trump’s team that three pages were missing, The Epoch Times reported. Tampering with evidence is a class E felony in the Empire State under New York Consolidation Laws, Penal Law § 215.40, which states in part:
A person is guilty of tampering with physical evidence when: Believing that certain physical evidence is about to be produced or used in an official proceeding or a prospective official proceeding, and intending to prevent such production or use, he suppresses it by any act of concealment, alteration or destruction, or by employing force, intimidation or deception against any person.
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took to X on Friday calling the developments “insanity.”
“How on earth is this not a felony committed by Bragg and his minions? It sure would be if team Trump did it,” Trump Jr. posted to X.
Insanity! How on earth is this not a felony committed by Bragg and his minions? It sure would be if team Trump did it.
I’d love if we had actual journalists that would report on this ongoing travesty.
Sadly, proper journalism is dead. They’re just scribes for the regime. https://t.co/vQkLDk3t1T
Bragg — who campaigned for office on targeting Trump — indicted the former president in April 2023 on 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records. Bragg alleges Trump’s lawyer at the time, Cohen, paid Daniels before the 2016 election to stay quiet about an alleged affair that the former president denies. Bragg alleges Trump made this payment to help winthe 2016 election so the expenditure should have been classified as a campaign expense rather than a legal expense.
Trump’s defense also made a motion for a mistrial, which Judge Juan Merchan denied. Merchan also kneecapped Trump’s team from defending the former president by limiting what former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith could say when testifying about campaign finance-related issues, noted Steve Roberts and Oliver Roberts in The Federalist Friday.
Smith was expected to testify, as Roberts and Roberts note, that “almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to ‘influence an election’” though “not every expense that might benefit a candidate is an obligation that exists solely because the person is a candidate.”
Merchan ruled Smith can now only testify to the “general background as to what the Federal [Election] Commission is, background as to who makes up the FEC, what the FEC’s function is, what laws, if any, the FEC is responsible for enforcing, and general definitions and terms that relate directly to his case, such as for example ‘campaign contribution.’”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Below is an expanded version of my New York Post column on the appearance of Michael Cohen Monday in the Manhattan prosecution of former President Donald Trump. His testimony will not be for the intestinally weak or ethically strong viewers. It has all the draw of a Nascar race on a rainy day.
Here is the column:
Michael Cohen is to criminal justice what car crashes are to Nascar: few want to admit it, but he is the perverse draw for the wreck-obsessed. The difference is that Cohen was already a rolling smoking wreck when he pulled up to the track.
Even for those of us who have long been critics of this case and its dubious legal theory, it has been surprising to see that the prosecutors had no more evidence than what we previously knew about. The assumption was that no rational prosecutor would base a major criminal case virtually entirely on the testimony of Michael Cohen who was just recently denounced by a judge as a serial perjurer peddling “perverse” theories in court.
The calculus of Alvin Bragg is now obvious. He is counting on the jury convicting Trump regardless of the evidence. He believes that all he needs is to check the boxes on the elements of the crime, no matter how unbelievable the vehicle.
The reason is that Bragg likely fears a directed verdict more than a jury verdict. After the government closes its evidence, the defense will move for a directed verdict on the basis that the evidence is insufficient to sustain a conviction.
In other words, when the prosecution rests this week, Trump’s counsel will stand and ask Merchan to end the case before it is even given to the jury. Many of us agree with that assessment. After three weeks of testimony, there is still confusion on what crime Trump was allegedly seeking to cover up.
Bragg has vaguely referred to using the denotation of payments to Daniels as “legal expenses” as a fraud committed to steal the election. However, the election was over when those denotations were made. Moreover, many believe that such a characterization for payments related to a nondisclosure agreement was accurate. (Hillary Clinton’s campaign claimed in the same election that hiding the funding for the Steele dossier as legal expenses was perfectly accurate).
Judge Juan Merchan, in my view, has failed repeatedly to protect the rights of the accused in this case. However, he can claim that there was enough alleged to give Bragg the chance to make his case. Thus far he has not done so and, if he is truly neutral, Merchan should grant the motion.
Bragg is counting on not only a motivated jury but a motivated judge to keep this anemic case alive. All he hopes that he needs to do is get this to a Trump-loathing jury to set aside any reasonable doubt. To do that, he found the ultimate motivated witness with a record of saying whatever serves his interests and those of his sponsors.
Even with a New York jury, however, you cannot assume that every juror will jettison doubt when it comes to the unpopular defendant. Yet, Bragg first has to show Merchan that someone claimed to have evidence directly tying Trump to an intentional fraudulent scheme to conceal a crime.
Thus far, Bragg is not even close. Indeed, many of his witnesses helped Trump more than they hurt him on the actual charges.
Bragg started with testimony on the killing of a story by David Pecker, former publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid, on an uncharged transaction to kill a story of a Trump affair with a different woman, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model.
The relevancy was marginal but the testimony backfired in that Pecker admitted that Trump told him that he knew nothing about any reimbursement to Cohen for any hush money. He further said that he had killed or raised such stories with Trump for decades before he ever announced for president. He also said that he had killed stories for other celebrities and politicians, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods, Rahm Emanuel and Mark Wahlberg.
For good measure, Pecker noted that Cohen often exaggerates and became loud and argumentative.
Witnesses said that Trump likely had a mix of motivations including sparing his family from embarrassment. Daniels’ own counsel contradicted the prosecution’s reference to the payment as “hush money.”
Prosecutors now need Cohen to check virtually every box on his own. It is not enough to say that Trump wanted to hush up the alleged affair. That is no crime and NDAs are common and legal.
Cohen has to say that Trump specifically knew and approved of the characterization of the payments as “legal expenses.” He further has to establish that Trump intended the denotation to conceal the payments for the purposes of election violations or fraud.
That could make this a “he said, he said” case, but only if Trump were to actually testify. However, Merchan’s earlier rulings make such testimony highly unlikely. The court approved a sweeping scope for cross examination if Trump dares to take the stand. No competent lawyer would advise him to do so after Merchan’s rulings.
That is exactly where Bragg wants to be: with a “he said” not a “he said, he said” case. With Trump effectively silenced, Bragg will argue that that is enough to get this to the jury and he can then allow the New York jury to jettison any notion of reasonable doubt when it comes to Donald Trump.
For most people, this cynical calculation will be immaterial when Cohen is called. Calling a convicted, disbarred, serial perjurer to any court is a spectacle in itself. Cohen seems like he has never met an oath that he does not want to break.
Indeed, he appears eager to expand his collection by announcing in the midst of the trial coverage that he is running for Congress. Given the blind rage of many New Yorkers, he could well succeed with single-issue, anti-Trump voters. If so, we will all be back just to see if a vortex to the netherworld opens up when Cohen stands on the House floor and swears that he is taking the oath “without . . . purpose of evasion.”
But before he becomes Rep. Michael Cohen, he will have to appear for his Nascar moment, though he will be the first wreck in search of a race.
Fox is reporting that Michael Cohen was back on TikTok last night using the Trump trial to troll for dollars. Cohen reportedly appeared in a teeshirt showing Trump in an orange jumpsuit and asked for more followers. He also reportedly announced his candidacy for Congress, which would allow him to take one of the seemingly few oaths that the serial perjurer has not violated.
Who would have thought that District Attorney Alvin Bragg calling a porn star to the stand would be the moral high ground for key witnesses? Next could be a disbarred, convicted perjurer who is still seeking to make money off the case.
Cohen previously pledged not to discuss the trial after many of us objected to Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order as unconstitutional, particularly as to Cohen who has continued to attack Trump on the air while defending the gag order for his own protection.
Cohen’s prior promise lasted a record of a couple days before he broke it on TikTok. Now he is appearing with a tee-shirt mocking Trump and using the moment to pursue a congressional seat.
For Judge Merchan, this is precisely what he was warned about. He has stubbornly enforced his poorly written and excessively broad order. After admitting that this was a “case of first impression” on the extension of gag orders to such things as repostings on social media, Merchan clarified his meaning not with a new order but by imposing sanctions on Trump.
Trump is now appealing the gag order and Cohen is doing his best to undermine not just his residual credibility but that of the court. Between the lurid testimony of Daniels and the continued antics of Cohen, Merchan looks completely feckless, if not farcical, in his own courtroom.
For Merchan and the prosecutors, none of this can come as a surprise.
There is an old fable of a scorpion who wants to cross a river and convinced a hesitant frog to carry him on its back. After all, if he stung the frog in the river, they both would die. That seemed logical so the frog agreed to do so only to have the scorpion deliver a lethal sting halfway across. When the frog asked why the scorpion would doom them both, the scorpion replies: “I am sorry, but I couldn’t resist the urge. It’s in my nature.”
Cohen has always been open as a grifter.
The problem is not Cohen. He continues to act to his nature. The problem is a political and legal system that enables him as a serial liar. It is a system that continues to call Cohen to the stand and ask him to swear to God to offer the “truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” without a signature joke drum roll before his punchline.
Yet, Cohen now wants to take an oath of office in the legislative branch. He seems to collect oaths the way some collect animal heads for a trophy wall. The question is whether other members could suppress laughter when he swears that he is taking the oath of office “without… purpose of evasion.”
Below is my column in The Hill on the expected appearance of Michael Cohen in the Manhattan trial of former president Donald Trump. It will be a scene that is both mesmerizing and repellent for many, particularly in the bar.
Here is the column:
A disbarred, serial perjurer walks into a courtroom and asks to take an oath . . . No, seriously, this is not a joke. Michael Cohen will soon appear in a Manhattan courtroom in what is sure to be one of the most bizarre moments in legal history.
Cohen nearly comprises the prosecution’s entire case against former President Donald Trump under a criminal theory that still has many of us baffled. It is not clear what crime Trump was supposedly trying to conceal by making “hush-money” payments to former porn actress Stormy Daniels. What is clear is that none of the witnesses called in recent weeks has had any direct involvement with Trump on the payments. The witnesses had a lot to say about Cohen, and most of it was not good. They described an unprofessional, self-proclaimed “fix-it man” who created a shell corporation to buy out Daniels with his own money. The money was later paid back by Trump after the election, with other legal expenses.
So, Cohen will now make the pitch to the jury that they should put his former client in jail for following his own legal advice. This would be difficult even for a competent and ethical lawyer. For Cohen, it is utter insanity. But Bragg is betting on a New York jury looking no further than the identity of the defendant to convict.
Cohen has an impressive history of lies and exaggerations that may be unparalleled. Just weeks ago, another judge denounced him as a serial perjurer who was still gaming the system. This is not the defendant, mind you, but Alvin Bragg’s star witness.
When a journalist pursued a story Cohen did not like, he told the reporter that he should “tread very f—ing lightly because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f—ing disgusting. Do you understand me?”
It is not hard to “understand” Cohen. He has long marketed his curious skill of voluntarily saying whatever the highest bidder wants him to say. He is a convicted perjurer who seems to lie even when the truth would do. Each time he is caught lying, he claims to be the sinner who has finally seen the light, seeking redemption.
When he was called before the House to testify against Trump soon after his plea agreement with the Justice Department (for lying), Cohen was again accused of perjury. House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), warned Cohen repeatedly that he had better tell the truth this time. Cohen then testified that Trump wanted him to work in his administration and offered him multiple jobs, which he turned down. He also claimed, “I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump.” Multiple sources have said that Cohen’s lawyer pressed the White House for a pardon, and that Cohen unsuccessfully sought a presidential pardon after FBI raids on his office and residences last year.
Even after being stripped of his law license and sentenced to three years in prison, Cohen continued the pattern. In 2019, Cohen failed to appear to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing an inability to travel due to surgery. He was then seen partying before the hearing date with five friends.
Even while in jail, Cohen was accused of lying to a court, in violation of an order for early release due to medical problems. He was ordered back into custody after being spotted at a high-end restaurant.
But the most impressive moment came when Cohen was put back on the stand under oath and matter-of-factly claimed that he had lied in his prior hearing, when he pleaded guilty to lying.
In his 2018 guilty plea before U.S. District Judge William Henry Pauley III, Cohen admitted to this conduct under oath.
Then, when Cohen was asked by Trump’s counsel, “Did you lie to Judge Pauley when you said that you were guilty of the counts that you said under oath that you were guilty of? Did you lie to Judge Pauley?”
Cohen responded, “Yes.” He was then again asked “So you lied when you said that you evaded taxes to a judge under oath; is that correct?” He again responded, “Yes.”
Most of us expected the Justice Department to bring new perjury charges at that point. It is rare that a defendant will actually take the stand and confess to perjury. However, Cohen was now useful again. This time, he was willing to deliver Trump. The Justice Department and Manhattan prosecutors were clearly willing to tolerate a little perjury for that prize.
Cohen’s conduct has already loomed large in the Manhattan proceedings. When Keith Davidson took the stand — the attorney who represented both Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal — he recounted how Cohen was furious about not being offered a job in the White House. That directly contradicts Cohen’s congressional testimony. Davidson said that Cohen believed he might be named attorney general.
The account, if true, shows that Cohen is not only unethical, but also delusional. Cohen was found incapable of being an attorney, let alone an attorney general.
As prosecutors set the table for the grand arrival of their star witness, the testimony only got worse. David Pecker, the former owner of the National Enquirer, said charitably that Cohen was “prone to exaggeration.”
Davidson described Cohen’s profane and unprofessional conduct, stating that “the moral of the story is nobody wanted to talk to Cohen.” That may be the first time the word “moral” was used in the same line with Cohen.
Former Trump associate Hope Hicks mocked Cohen on the stand. She said that he constantly tried to insinuate himself into the campaign, without success, and that he “used to like to call himself Mister Fix It, but it was only because he first broke it.” Mind you, these were his fellow prosecution witnesses, not the defense.
These witnesses also contradicted the basis for the prosecution. Pecker said that he killed stories for various celebrities for years, and that he did so for Trump for over a decade before he ran for office. Davidson testified that he did not consider the deal to be “hush money” but simply “consideration” to kill bad press.
Hicks testified that she believed Trump wanted to kill the stories in significant part to protect his family from embarrassment.
Cohen could not even maintain a consistent position during the trial. Many of us have denounced the gag order on Trump that prevents him from responding to Cohen’s unrelenting attacks in the media. Cohen then promised to stop any further comments. That promise may have set a record for Cohen. He kept it for roughly three days before being accused of trolling for dollars on social media by attacking Trump.
District Attorney Bragg will now call this disbarred, serial perjurer to make the case against a former president. Under New York law, the oath administered by the court is supposed “to awaken the conscience and impress the mind of the witness in accordance with that witness’s religious or ethical beliefs.”
Before the bailiff administers the oath to Cohen, Judge Juan Merchan may have to warn spectators in the courtroom not to laugh. For anyone familiar with Cohen, it will sound like the ultimate punchline to a bad joke.
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
A witness in the NY v. Trump case in Manhattan testified that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen wanted a job in the 45th president’s administration, despite previously denying wanting a White House role during congressional testimony.
Keith Davidson, an attorney who represented former pornographic actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, continued his testimony before the court Thursday, when he said that Cohen had been hopeful that he would land a position as White House chief of staff or attorney general in the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration.
Davidson also recounted that Cohen had been upset he was “not going to Washington” following Trump’s win in 2016.
“Can you f—ing believe I’m not going to Washington after everything I’ve done for that guy? I can’t believe I’m not going to Washington… I’ve saved his a–…,” Davidson recounted of a conversation he had had with a “despondent and saddened Michael Cohen” in December following the 2016 election.
Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to President Donald Trump, appears outside federal court in New York on Dec. 14, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Davidson testified that Cohen had called him while shopping in a California store memorably decorated with an “Alice in Wonderland”-type theme.
The NY v. Trump case focuses on Cohen paying Daniels $130,000 to allegedly quiet her claims of an alleged extramarital affair she had with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels.
Cohen lamented to Davidson in the December call that he had not yet been reimbursed for the sum he had paid Daniels, according to Davidson’s testimony.
Former President Donald Trump awaits the start of proceedings at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on April 22. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, Pool)
Prosecutors allege that the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen and fraudulently logged the payments as legal expenses. Prosecutors are working to prove that Trump falsified records with the intent to commit or conceal a second crime, which is a felony, in violation of a New York law called “conspiracy to promote or prevent election.”
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Davidson’s testimony that Cohen sought a White House job stands in stark contrast to what the former Trump attorney told Congress back in 2019.
“Sir, I was extremely proud to be personal attorney to the President of the United States of America. I did not want to go to the White House. I was offered jobs,” Cohen told Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, in 2019 during a House Oversight Committee hearing.
Michael Cohen, who is supposed to be a star witness in NY v. Trump, might have “torpedoed” the case before taking the stand by ranting about it on TikTok, according to legal observers. (Getty Images)
“I can tell you a story of Mr. Trump reaming out Reince Priebus because I had not taken a job where Mr. Trump wanted me to, which is working with Don McGahn at the White House general counsel’s office,“ he continued. “What I said at the time — and I brought a lawyer in who produced a memo as to why I should not go in, because there would be no attorney/client privilege. And in order to handle some of the matters that I talked about in my opening, that it would be best suited for me not to go in and that every president had a personal attorney.”
“I did not want to go to the White House,” Cohen added later in his testimony to Congress. “I retained, I brought an attorney in, and I sat with Mr. Trump, with him for well over an hour, explaining the importance of having a personal attorney, that every president has had one in order to handle matters like the matters I was dealing with.”
Cohen’s comments came after he pleaded guilty to five counts of willful tax evasion, one count of making false statements to a bank, one count of causing an unlawful campaign contribution and one count of making an excessive campaign contribution in 2018. He again pleaded guilty in November of that same year to lying to Congress about testimony regarding the work he had done on a project to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
A court sketch depicts former President Donald Trump’s appearance in Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on April 19. (Christine Cornell)
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison and has since been released.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., are currently demanding the Justice Department investigate Cohen. They allege that he committed perjury and “knowingly” made false statements while testifying before Congress in 2019.
Turner and Stefanik argue that Cohen is being used as the prosecution’s “star witness” in the NY v. Trump case, despite his previous conviction.
Trump, meanwhile, has slammed the trial as a “scam” and “hoax” promoted by the Biden administration and led by a “conflicted judge.”
Former President Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower to attend his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments linked to extramarital affairs in New York on April 22. (Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)
“This is a hoax. This is a judge who is conflicted — badly, badly, badly conflicted. I’ve never seen a judge so conflicted and giving us virtually no rulings,” Trump said outside the courtroom on Tuesday morning.
“I’m going to sit in the freezing cold icebox for eight hours, nine hours or so. They took me off the campaign trail. But the good news is my poll numbers are the highest it’s ever been. So, at least we’re getting the word out. And everybody knows this trial is a scam. It’s a scam. The judge should be recused; that he should recuse himself today, he should recuse himself today. And maybe he will,” Trump said.
Fox News Digital’s Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
In opening statements on Monday, Manhattan prosecutors sought to convince a jury that former President Donald Trump “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.” Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the Russia-collusion hoax — the real criminal scheme that was orchestrated to meddle in that election — walk free.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg claims Trump broke the law after he classified payments made by his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pornographer Stormy Daniels, as “legal fees” rather than campaign expenditures. (It is not illegal to purchase negative press about oneself, and Trump likely would have run afoul of campaign finance laws if he had classified such an expense, which benefitted him personally rather than just his campaign, as a campaign payment.)
Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, who formerly held a top post in President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, alleged Monday during opening statements that “this was a planned, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior.”
“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo continued, according to PBS News. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”
Manhattan prosecutors seek to put Trump in jail for up to four years. Meanwhile, the operatives who invented a hoax accusing Trump of being a Russian asset in 2016, commissioned a dossier of fake oppo research, and shopped it to the FBI — which then used the shoddy “research” as a basis to illegally spy on the Trump campaign — have received a light tap on the wrist, if any punishment at all.
Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer who commissioned the discredited dossier, received no punishment. The DNC and the Clinton campaign — which together provided funds for oppo research firm Fusion GPS to hire former British spy Christopher Steele, who put his name on the so-called “Steele dossier” — were fined $105,000 and $8,000, respectively, for labeling the payments as “legal and compliance consulting” and “legal services.” Clinton herself, who personally approved the decision to leak the false accusations to the press, was still suggesting the 2016 election was “stolen” from her as recently as 2022 and has never received any repercussions for the Russia hoax.
Russian national Igor Danchenko, the “primary sub-source” whose testimony Steele relied on in creating the dossier, “fed Steele false information about the Trump campaign, which a Clinton booster had invented.” Danchenko was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI about a 2016 phone call he claimed he received from an anonymous person who he thought was Sergei Millian. Danchenko claimed the anonymous caller revealed a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Russians. These claims were added to the Steele dossier.
Evidence presented to the jury, as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland noted at the time, indicated that “Danchenko did not know Millian and had not received any telephone calls during the relevant time frame that might fit the description of the call Danchenko claimed he received.”
Nevertheless, a jury in a deep-blue Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. acquitted Danchenko in 2022.
Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was also acquitted, despite evidence suggesting he lied to then FBI-General Counsel James Baker in 2016. Sussman “presented Baker with data and whitepapers that supposedly showed the existence of a secret communications network between the Russian-based Alfa Bank and the Trump organization,” Cleveland explained. “According to the indictment [from Special Counsel John Durham], Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe when he met with Baker, but falsely told his friend that he was coming on his own behalf to help the FBI.”
The only person who received any sentence was former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to forging an email to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Clinesmith, according to Federalist CEO Sean Davis’ reporting on Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s findings, “altered an email from a separate U.S. federal agency, believed to be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to falsely state that [Trump campaign affiliate Carter] Page had never worked with the CIA to investigate suspected Russia agents operating within the U.S.”
“In fact,” Davis wrote, “as Clinesmith was told by the operative, Page had worked with the CIA previously, as well as with the FBI.”
Clinesmith was sentenced to 400 hours of community service and one year of probation.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Jury selection for 12 jurors wrapped up Thursday in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s lawfare against former President Donald Trump, with the next phase of the trial expected to begin as early as Monday. But with two selected jurors booted for potential bias and perjury and at least one juror who made clear she doesn’t like Trump’s “persona,” can he really get a fair trial?
Who Are the Jurors?
After two of the initial seven selected jurors were struck from the panel, another seven were chosen Thursday. The jurors will hear Bragg’s claim that Trump broke the law by allegedly classifying payments made by his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pornographer Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement as “legal fees” instead of campaign expenditures. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York declined to charge Trump in 2018.
The final selection of jurors is as follows:
A salesman originally from Ireland who follows MSNBC, The New York Times, the Daily Mail, and Fox News. This juror is reportedly set to serve as the case’s foreman, according to ABC News.
A corporate lawyer from Oregon who reads the NYT, Google News, and the Wall Street Journal. The juror “suggested that he could infer the former president’s intent without ‘reading his mind,’” according to ABC News.
A man who works in finance and follows Michael Cohen — a convicted liar and the prosecution’s star witness— on social media. The juror also said he believes Trump did some good for the nation, The New York Times reported.
A lawyer who told the court he has “political views as to the Trump presidency” in that he agrees with some policies but disagrees with others, according to The Times.
A product development manager who said she did not like Trump’s “persona,” according to ABC News.
A female health care worker who enjoys faith-based podcasts.
A woman who “works in an educational setting” and acknowledged that because Trump “was our president, everyone knows who he is,” according to The Times.
A businessman who likes to listen to podcasts on behavioral psychology.
A retired wealth managerwho claims he has no opinions that would hinder his ability to be impartial.
An engineer who said, “No, not really,” when asked if he has strong feelings about Trump, according to the NYT.
An English teacher from Harlem who appreciated Trump speaking “his mind,” according to ABC News.
A female who works in technology and relies on the NYT, Google, Facebook and TikTok for news. According to the NYT, “she said she probably has different beliefs than Mr. Trump, but that ‘this is a free country.’”
Two jurors were struck Thursday, one who admitted her inability to be impartial and another who had a possible history of vandalizing conservative political posters. One female juror told the court “outside influences” could impact her decision-making and expressed concerns about her identity becoming public, according to the Associated Press (AP).
“Yesterday alone I had friends, colleagues and family push things to my phone regarding questioning my identity as a juror,” the woman reportedly said. “I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision making in the courtroom.”
A second juror was dismissed after the prosecution argued he may have been dishonest about his past when he claimed he had never been arrested. “Prosecutors said they found an article about a person with the same name who had been arrested in the 1990s for tearing down posters pertaining to the political right in suburban Westchester County,” the AP reported.
Will These Jurors Deliver a ‘Common Sense Judgment’?
The Supreme Court held in the 1975 case Taylor v. Louisiana that “The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power — to make available the common sense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor … or biased response of a judge.”
The Sixth Amendment is designed to protect the accused from any arbitrary and capricious trials perpetrated by a weaponized government. A jury of the accused’s peers is meant to check the power of the government, a right created in response to the British courts’ habit of permitting judges to compel juries to change their verdict if the outcome was not favored by the judge.
But from what we know of the Manhattan jury pool, it’s not clear these New Yorkers will be willing to check the government on a case that experts on both sides of the aisle have called “dubious.” New York County, which encompasses Manhattan, voted for Joe Biden over Trump 87 percent to 12 percent in 2020.
Trump’s lawyer objected to one potential juror who posted a video of a crowd of people celebrating Biden’s 2020 victory. Judge Juan Merchan decided to chastise Trump instead and refused to strike the potential juror for cause.
Another potential juror who was excused because of a job conflict told reporters outside of the courthouse that while she believes it is important for Trump to get a fair trial, she did not “approve of what he did as president.“
Meanwhile of the dozen jurors selected, a number said they get their news from corporate media like The New York Times — one of the outlets that spent years disparaging Trump and spreading false information about him.
Three NYT reporters won Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” on the Russia-collusion hoax, which they based on anonymous sources. But FBI official Peter Strzok, who ran the investigation into the alleged collusion, privately acknowledged the report was filled with “misleading and inaccurate” information, as pointed out by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway.
Other jurors cited Google as a news source. Google “interfered” in elections at least 41 times over the past 16 years to harm candidates “who threatened [Google’s] left-wing candidate of choice,” a study from the Media Research Center found. In 2020, corporate media and Big Tech suppressed a bombshell report about the Biden family’s corrupt foreign business dealings mere weeks before the presidential election, adding to a pattern of burying negative press about Trump’s opponent while spreading lies about Trump.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Michael Cohen was back in court this week and it did not go well. The former fixer for Donald Trump was in court seeking a reduction in his federal sentence and to answer for his use of Google’s AI chatbot to submit arguments with fake case authority. However, things went off the rails when his counsel cited his prior testimony as evidence of his rehabilitation. U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman called the argument “perverse” and noted that Cohen is clearly a serial perjurer and cited the need for continued “deterrence.” That is hardly a promising review before Cohen appears as the star witness for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in the prosecution of former president Donald Trump.
Throughout his career, the disbarred lawyer has found powerful clients who valued his reputation for supporting any side that offered the biggest payback.
For full disclosure, I have been a critic of Cohen for years, including columns when he was still representing Trump.
Cohen has been repeatedly accused of perjury. For example, after Cohen turned on Trump, he went from being a pariah to a hero for many Democrats. Yet, he continued the same pattern. When he was called before the House to testify against Trump soon after his plea agreement with the Justice Department, Cohen was again accused of perjury:
The House Oversight Committee chairman, Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, began his questioning by noting that he told him that he had better testify truthfully this time or be nailed to the cross. “Didn’t I tell you that?” Cummings asked. “Yes, you did, more than once,” Cohen replied.
Then Cohen went forward and claimed he had cared nothing about jobs or pardons from Donald Trump. However, a number of news organizations reported that Cohen was upset after lobbying for the White House counsel, chief of staff, or other jobs in the administration. Despite a multitude of such sources, Cohen has insisted, “I was extremely proud to be the personal attorney for the president of the United States of America. I did not want to go to the White House. I was offered jobs.” There is little ambiguity here. Either multiple witnesses lied, or Cohen once again lied to Congress.
Then Cohen stated, “I have never asked for, nor would I accept, a pardon from President Trump.” That also directly contradicts multiple sources who say his lawyer pressed the White House for a pardon, and that Cohen unsuccessfully sought a presidential pardon after FBI raids on his office and residences last year. (Roughly a month later, he decided to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller.).
Even after being stripped of his bar license and sentenced to three years in prison, Cohen continued the pattern. In 2019, Cohen failed to appear to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing the inability to travel due to a medical surgery. However, he was seen partying before the hearing date with five friends with no apparent problems.
Even in jail, Cohen was accused of lying to a court in violation of an order for early release due to medical problems. He was ordered back into custody after being spotted at a high-end restaurant.
After Cohen admitted to various criminal acts in federal court to secure his plea agreement, he then declared that he lied. In his 2018 guilty plea before U.S. District Judge William Henry Pauley III, Cohen admitted to this conduct under oath.
Cohen was later asked by Trump counsel “Did you lie to Judge Pauley when you said that you were guilty of the counts that you said under oath that you were guilty of? Did you lie to Judge Pauley?”
Cohen matter-of-factly responded “yes.” He was then again asked “So you lied when you said that you evaded taxes to a judge under oath; is that correct?” He again responded “yes.”
Despite just admitting to a federal crime of perjury, the Justice Department and specifically the Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s office declined to prosecute.
Cohen was useful again and had found powerful allies who valued his curious skill set of being able to say anything at any time to help his patrons.
One judge, however, had had enough. In his court order, U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman stated:
“It gives rise to two possibilities: one, Cohen committed perjury when he pleaded guilty before Judge Pauley or, two, Cohen committed perjury in his October 2023 testimony. Either way, it is perverse to cite the testimony, as Schwartz did, as evidence of Cohen’s ‘commitment to upholding the law.’”
He went on to criticize Cohen’s other lawyer, E. Danya Perry, in trying to excuse his perjury:
“These efforts to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse fall flat. Cohen’s testimony was not, as Perry contends, a ‘clumsy’ or ‘poorly worded’ attempt to argue that… the government abused its prosecutorial discretion in charging those crimes. To the contrary, he unambiguously testified that he ‘didn’t’ commit tax evasion and that he ‘lied’ to Judge Pauley when he said that he had…Moreover, when given multiple opportunities to retreat from or clarify that testimony later, he stuck to his guns.”
He added that
“Specifically, Cohen repeatedly and unambiguously testified at the state court trial that he was not guilty of tax evasion and that he had lied under oath to Judge Pauley when he pleaded guilty to those crimes…This testimony is more troubling than the statements that Cohen had previously made in his book and on television — statements that the Court had specifically cited in denying Cohen’s third motion for early termination of supervised release… because it was given under oath…Either way, it is perverse to cite the testimony, as Schwartz did, as evidence of Cohen’s ‘commitment to upholding the law.’”
Indeed, that is the unique perversity of Michael Cohen. He has continued to game the system and play the media to his own advantage. Even admitting perjury on the stand did not produce a criminal charge. He has found new allies who need his unique ability to support their cause without the burden of accuracy or veracity.
What will be truly amazing is to see Bragg call Cohen to the stand in light of this record. Bragg’s weak criminal case will turn in great part on a serial liar and disbarred lawyer. Defense counsel need only read from past transcripts to establish a self-impeaching record of contradictions and lies. For Bragg to present Cohen as credible is incredible, particularly given this latest finding in 2024 by a federal judge. It is hard to present a witness as a redemptive sinner when he does not have a single redemptive moment to show a jury.
None of this may matter to a New York jury. Cohen learned long ago that you need to know your audience. No one looks to Michael Cohen for the truth. They look to him to say what needs to be said to rationalize a result. What is most perverse about Michael Cohen is the continued perverse need for Michael Cohen.
N.B.: Cohen responded to a tweet yesterday where I incorrectly referenced Judge Pauley rather than Judge Furman. I later deleted the tweet. Cohen however objected “Wrong you idiot (@JonathanTurley). Judge Pauley didn’t make the statement, Judge Jesse Furman did.” Indeed, you are right Michael, I did confuse the two names on X. It was Judge Furman who called you a perjurer. Of course, I have long admitted to being a serial offender of “Twitter” typos. That is bad but it is not quite as bad as being accused of being a serial perjurer.
Two Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee issued a criminal referral letter to the Justice Department recommending charges against Michael Cohen for his contradictory testimony in court last month. Cohen, former attorney to former President Donald Trump, testified under cross-examination last month that he lied under oath before the House Intelligence Committee in 2019 when asked in a deposition about Trump’s personal financial statements.
House Intelligence Chair Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and committee member Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who chairs the House Republican Caucus, sent the letter accusing Cohen of committing perjury and of having” knowingly made false statements” before Congress four years ago.
“That Mr. Cohen was willing to openly and brazenly state at trial that he lied to Congress on this specific issue is startling,” the letter reads, according to The Hill. “His willingness to make such a statement alone should necessitate an investigation.”
In 2019, Cohen told a House panel that Trump did not direct him to inflate financial statements for Trump Organization assets. He testified in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial last month that he lied under oath in 2019, claiming that Trump “speaks like a mob boss” and gives directions “without specifically telling you” what to do.
A Manhattan grand jury has indicted former President Donald Trump, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office confirmed following late-Thursday media leaks. While the indictment remains under seal, one thing seems certain: America has now entered the era of “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” politics.
The Democrat district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, breathed new life into the infamous boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, when the Manhattan prosecutor targeted the former president in connection to a 2016 payment made to Stormy Daniels. Bragg’s decision to push for an indictment against Trump, presumably for falsifying business records, promises to herald in a new political age — one in which local prosecutors will target partisan enemies, big and small, making a mockery of the criminal justice system in the process.
The fact that news of the charges leaked to the left’s favorite scribes at The New York Times, while the indictment remained still under seal, punctuates perfectly the Sovietesque times in which we live: The legacy media may not be state-run, but they peddle propaganda, nonetheless.
Guesswork
Until the indictment is unsealed, any discussion of the charges requires some guesswork, and with sources late Thursday reportedly telling CNN the grand jury charged Trump with more than 30 counts, the prognostication is much more difficult. But from earlier reports, it appears the D.A.’s criminal case against Trump revolves around Sections 175.05 and 175.10 of the New York penal code.
Both sections define the state crime of “falsifying business records,” with Section 175.05 providing “a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with the intent to defraud, he makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” Section 175.10 converts the “second degree” misdemeanor to a felony if the person falsified business records with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
The factual theory for charging the former president with falsifying business records seems to rest on “Trump allegedly causing the Trump Organization to falsely report payments made to Michael Cohen in 2017 as ‘legal expenses,’ when the money instead reimbursed (and then some) Cohen for the $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep the porn star from publicly claiming she had sex a decade earlier.” The Trump Organization then reportedly paid Cohen $35,000 a month for “legal services” in 2017, while Cohen never provided any legal work for the business.
Legal pundits believe the indictment will ratchet up the alleged falsifying of “legal expenses” offense to a felony by charging Trump with lying about the payments to Cohen to conceal a violation of federal election law. Cohen has already admitted to paying off Daniels to advance Trump’s electoral chances, and he appears poised to be a star witness against Trump. Another possibility, however, is that the Manhattan D.A.’s indictment accuses Trump of falsifying the organization’s “legal expenses” to aid in tax fraud.
The U.S. attorney has already declined to charge Trump with federal election law violations, making any attempt by Bragg to tie the federal offense to the state charge of falsifying business records reek of political payback.
Bragg’s expected use of Trump’s physical absence from New York — ironically because he was serving as commander-in-chief in D.C. — to sidestep the five-year statute of limitations that applies to a felony of falsifying business records, will also add to the stench of the case. And a public that watched Trump hounded since he first announced his candidacy for president isn’t likely to focus on the legal technicalities of the statute of limitations. Rather, the average American will consider the delayed charging of Trump to be a desperate ploy to concoct a crime.
Trump himself was quick to advance this theory, opening his press release by calling the indictment “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history.” “From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower,” the former president continued, the “Radical Left Democrats … have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement.”
“You remember it just like I do,” Trump stressed, ticking off the attacks: “Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.”
30-Count Craziness
Trump will reportedly appear in a Manhattan court on Tuesday for his arraignment. Whether the indictment is unsealed before then is unknown. But the leaks continue, including, as noted above, news that the grand jury reportedly charged Trump with more than 30 criminal counts.
Unless Bragg has uncovered something much beyond the details already reported about the Daniels payment, the Manhattan prosecutor will have only made matters worse by pushing for an indictment of the former president on more than 30 criminal counts. Given the lack of leaks about anything new, the most likely scenario is that the grand jury got to 30-plus counts by charging Trump with separate counts for each of the monthly payments made to Cohen in 2017. Then, the grand jury could add additional counts for each month Trump allegedly made the payment to “aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
With this approach, it isn’t hard to see how easily the grand jury could convert one hush-money payment into some 30 crimes. And while the left and the Never Trump right might see a lengthy indictment as further proof of Trump’s malfeasance, if the indictment contains no new details, the piling on to reach the reported 33 counts against the former president doesn’t make Trump look more guilty — it makes Bragg look more like Beria.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
A Manhattan grand jury appears poised to indict Donald Trump, according to news reports and the former president himself. Here’s what you need to know to understand the chatter about the anticipated criminal charges against Trump—and why the move to indict a former president for the first time in our country’s history will make political prosecutions the new norm in America.
While only the grand jury and prosecutors know for certain what charges against Trump, if any, are being considered, the consensus is that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, a Democrat, is pursuing a criminal case against Trump for allegedly falsifying business records, in violation of Sections 175.05 and 175.10 of the New York Penal Code.
Section 175.05 provides “a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with the intent to defraud, he makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” Falsifying business records in the second degree is a misdemeanor, subject to a two-year statute of limitations.
A violation of Section 175.10, however, is a felony, subject to a five-year statute of limitations. That section defines the offense of falsifying business records in the first degree and provides that if a person falsifies business records with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime, the offense is one in the first degree.
The underlying factual theory for charging the former president rests on Trump allegedly causing the Trump Organization to falsely report payments made to Michael Cohen in 2017 as “legal expenses,” when the money instead reimbursed (and then some) Cohen for the $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep the pornography performer from publicly claiming she had sex with Trump a decade earlier. In total, the Trump Organization reported legal expenses of $420,000 paid to Cohen in 2017, at a monthly rate of $35,000. Cohen, however, had provided no legal services for the Trump Organization that year.
To bump what would be a misdemeanor under New York law to a felony, pundits are suggesting the D.A. will argue Trump caused the Trump Organization to falsify its business records to conceal the commission of one or more federal election crimes. The Manhattan prosecutor, however, might also advance the theory that Trump caused the Trump Organization to falsely report the payments with the intent of committing tax fraud.
Even before reaching the merits of the legal theories being bandied about to charge Trump criminally, a public suspicious of the Get-Trump attitude seen over the last seven years will notice the statute of limitations seems to bar Bragg’s prosecution of Trump. But Bragg has two ways to sidestep the two- and five-year statutory time limits.
First, if Bragg charges Trump with a felony, the longer five-year period applies. While more than five years have passed since the Trump Organization last recorded a “legal expense” to Cohen, New York’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo, by executive order extended the statute of limitations for one year (or thereabouts) due to Covid-19. That tolling would make a felony indictment against Trump timely.
Alternatively, because New York law provides that any time a defendant remains “continuously outside” of the state is excluded from the statutory period, an indictment against Trump would be timely. From late January 2017 on, Trump was “continuously outside” New York, first in D.C. and then in Florida, meaning the statute of limitations only ran those few times Trump was in New York. That isn’t even close to the two years necessary for the misdemeanor statute of limitations to expire, much less the five-year period applicable to felony offenses.
So, the statute of limitations won’t likely bar one or more falsifying business records counts. But what about the merits?
Cohen already pleaded guilty to federal charges related to his payments to Stormy Daniels. But to convict Trump on the anticipated state charges, the Manhattan prosecutor would need to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump (1) caused the Trump Organization to falsify its business records (2) “with the intent to defraud.”
From public reporting, it appears Cohen is a star witness for the prosecution, likely testifying Trump directed him to make the payments to silence Daniels and promising reimbursement from the Trump Organization. Whether a paper trail supports Cohen’s testimony is unclear, but without one, it will be Cohen’s word—the word of a convicted felon—crucial to establish the crime.
Cohen’s testimony also already appears under fire. A “former legal advisor to Cohen,” Robert Costello, reportedly testified before the grand jury on Monday, “solely to undermine” Cohen’s credibility.
But prosecutors will need to prove more than that Trump caused the Trump Organization to falsify its business records. They will need to establish he also had the “intent to defraud.” Here, the defense can easily counter that Trump’s intent was to avoid embarrassment to his family caused by what he claims is a lie, rather than to “defraud” anyone.
Should prosecutors nonetheless prove their case, it is only a misdemeanor, unless they can further establish Trump intended “to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime. Proving either will be even more challenging.
First, to establish Trump intended to conceal a violation of federal election law, the Manhattan D.A. would need to prove Trump had committed an election-law crime. While Cohen alleged paying off Daniels to advance Trump’s electoral chances, Trump has another justification, namely avoiding any embarrassment for himself and his family, that does not run afoul of federal election law.
Proving Trump intended to commit tax fraud would likely be a difficult case to prove as well, with prosecutors needing to establish Trump’s knowledge of the intricacies of the corporation’s tax filings to show he held the requisite intent.
This inside-the-law analysis reveals an exceedingly weak case, but that is only a fraction of what the public will care about. On top of the questionable charges, the general public will see a man hounded for seven years with false claims of Russia collusion and other supposed crimes. They will see a statute of limitations that on its face appears to have run. And they will see a local prosecutor pushing charges previously rejected by a federal U.S. attorney.
Then there was the public pressure placed on Bragg to indict Trump, best exemplified by the backlash he faced after he apparently backed off charging the former president for crimes supposedly connected to the Trump Organization’s finances. At the time, “two prosecutors quit his office,” and “one of the prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz, wrote a highly critical book that the media has celebrated.”
In short, the public will see a vindictive political prosecution of Trump.
Maybe there will be a time to charge a president or a former president with a crime, but the facts here do not support making that leap. While D.A. Bragg and those pushing for Trump’s indictment may seek cover behind the well-worn American proposition that “no one is above the law,” the corollary is equally important: Our political enemies are not targeted for prosecution.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The decision by President Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen to plead guilty to making false statements to the Senate Intelligence Committee has been described as nothing short of a “bombshell” capable of taking down the Trump administration. This impression has only been bolstered by Trump tweeting about it, essentially calling Cohen a Judas and saying he “lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.”
The political discernment behind those tweets will be debated for some time to come, or at least until the next news cycle starts in about three hours. Regardless, they did make the president sound like a man who had something to be afraid of. And therein lies the great problem with the tweets: At least from what we know so far from court documents, fear is probably not the correct reaction.
Author and commentator Paul Sperry, best known of late for his work with the New York Post, analyzed what we know so far about the indictments in an article published Monday by RealClearInvestigations.
Contrary to the en vogue media theory that Cohen’s guilty plea is — at long last — the falling domino that will topple the entire Trump administration, Sperry wrote that what we know thus far from the Cohen filings is actually exculpatory for the president even as Cohen is admitting he lied about how long he was involved in proposed Trump real estate project in Moscow.
“The nine-page charging document filed with the plea deal suggests that the special counsel is using the Moscow tower talks to connect Trump to Russia,” Sperry wrote.
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“But congressional investigators with House and Senate committees leading inquiries on the Russia question told RealClearInvestigations that it looks like Mueller withheld from the court details that would exonerate the president. They made this assessment in light of the charging document, known as a statement of ‘criminal information’ (filed in lieu of an indictment when a defendant agrees to plead guilty); a fuller accounting of Cohen’s emails and text messages that Capitol Hill sources have seen; and the still-secret transcripts of closed-door testimony provided by a business associate of Cohen.”
And this includes the putative link to Russian leader Vladimir Putin in the indictment everyone seemed to be mesmerized over.
“On page 7 of the statement of criminal information filed against Cohen, which is separate from but related to the plea agreement, Mueller mentions that Cohen tried to email Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office on Jan. 14, 2016, and again on Jan. 16, 2016,” Sperry wrote.
“But Mueller, who personally signed the document, omitted the fact that Cohen did not have any direct points of contact at the Kremlin, and had resorted to sending the emails to a general press mailbox. Sources who have seen these additional emails point out that this omitted information undercuts the idea of a ‘back channel’ and thus the special counsel’s collusion case.”
“Page 2 of the same criminal information document holds additional exculpatory evidence for Trump, sources say. It quotes an August 2017 letter from Cohen to the Senate intelligence committee in which he states that Trump ‘was never in contact with anyone about this (Moscow Project) proposal other than me,’” he continues.
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“This section of Cohen’s written testimony, unlike other parts, is not disputed as false by Mueller, which sources say means prosecutors have tested its veracity through corroborating sources and found it to be accurate.”
Mueller also doesn’t take issue with Cohen’s statement that he “ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia.” Other sources seemed to indicate that there was less than there might appear in the Cohen plea.
“Though Cohen may have lied to Congress about the dates,” a Capitol Hill investigator told Sperry, “it’s clear from personal messages he sent in 2015 and 2016 that the Trump Organization did not have formal lines of communication set up with Putin’s office or the Kremlin during the campaign. There was no secret ‘back channel.’”
“So as far as collusion goes,”he continued, “the project is actually more exculpatory than incriminating for Trump and his campaign.”
Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. The Mueller investigation can be a very tight ship when it wants to be and we don’t know everything the special counsel has. We likely won’t know everything until we see Mueller’s final report. However, what Sperry seems to have collected is a whole lot of evidence that, to quote the inimitable Peter Strzok, “there is no big there there.”
While Cohen was involved with a go-between named Felix Sater who claimed he had some connections with the Russian leader, “the project never went anywhere because Sater didn’t have the pull with Putin he claimed to have. Emails and texts indicate that Sater could only offer Cohen access to one of his acquaintances, who was an acquaintance of someone else who was partners in a real estate development with a friend of Putin’s.”
The Kremlin was never involved with the project in any manner, according to Sperry’s sources, and no one traveled to Russia to try and make the deal happen. In other words, Sater was less connected than that dodgy lawyer who took part in the infamous Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. Both seem to have gone nowhere.
But tell that to the media.
“The actual texts of the plea deal and related materials filed last week in federal court do not jibe with reports and commentary given on several cable news outlets and comments of Democrat leaders,” Sperry wrote.
“CNN said the charging documents, which reference the president as ‘Individual 1,’ suggest Trump had a working relationship with Russia’s president and that ‘Putin had leverage over Trump’ because of the project.
“’Well into the 2016 campaign, one of the president’s closest associates was in touch with the Kremlin on this project, as we now know, and Michael Cohen says he was lying about it to protect the president,’ said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.
“’Cohen was communicating directly with the Kremlin,’Blitzer added.”
Writing under a pseudonym, Cillian Zeal is a conservative writer who is currently living abroad in a country that doesn’t value free speech. Exercising it there under his given name could put him in danger.
Michael Avenatti, porn star Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, released a seven-page dossier on Tuesday containing a list of payments purportedly made to Michael Cohen, the lawyer for President Donald Trump. But there is one problem with the document: two of the allegedly “fraudulent” payments were made to men named Michael Cohen who have no affiliation with Trump.
Avenatti’s report includes a section listing “possible fraudulent and illegal financial transactions”involving Trump’s lawyer. One of the payments is a $4,250 wire transfer from a Malaysian company, Actuarial Partners, to a bank in Toronto. The other is a $980 transfer from a Kenyan bank to Bank Hapoalim — the largest bank in Israel.
Zainal Kassim, a representative for Actuarial Partners, told The Daily Caller News Foundation Avenatti’s report is a case of mistaken identity. He forwarded an email the falsely accused Michael Cohen sent to Avenatti requesting the lawyer “correct this error forthwith and make it known publicly” there is no connection to Trump’s Michael Cohen.
“You are surely aware of the fact that this is an extremely common name and would request that you take care before involving innocent parries in this sordid affair,” wrote Cohen, who told Avenatti he is an international consultant who was paid by Actuarial Partners for work on a project in Tanzania.
“Actuarial Partners have already received inquiries from the press in this regard, and we would like to see this scurrilous rumour spiked as soon as possible.”
Haaretz, the Israeli news outlet, found another case of mistaken identity in Avenatti’s report.
“Mr. Cohen received one wire transfer in the amount of $980.00 from a Kenyan bank from account holders Netanel Cohen and Stav Hayun to an account in Israel at Bank Hapoalim,” Avenatti wrote.
Haaretz caught up with Netanel Cohen, who acknowledged having a bank account in Kenya and transferring money to a Michael Cohen. But the Michael Cohen in questions is his brother, Netanel told the news outlet. And his brother is not Trump’s lawyer.
“I’ve never heard of Michael Cohen, and I have no connection to this affair,” Netanel told Haaretz.
It is unclear how Avenatti obtained the financial records cited in his report. But various news outlets, including The New York Times, also appear to have viewed the documents. The Treasury Department’s office of the inspector general opened an investigation into whether someone leaked Cohen’s financial documents to Avenatti and the press, it was reported on Wednesday.
It remains a mystery how the financial records of a completely separate Michael Cohen would have ended up in the tranche of documents provided to Avenatti.
Other transfers tied to Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer, actually did occur. Several companies, including AT&T, Novartis and Columbus Nova, a firm linked to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, acknowledged paying Cohen’s company, Essential Consultants.
Cohen used that firm to route a $130,000 payment to Daniels in October 2016. Daniels, who claims she had an affair with Trump in 2006, is suing Cohen and the president to get out of a non-disclosure agreement she signed in exchange for the money.
This article has been updated with additional information.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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