Trump’s hush money lawsuit lawyers had to discredit Michael Cohen. Did they succeed?

Donald Trump’s chances of avoiding the humiliation of being the first American president to commit a crime depends largely on discrediting his former handyman, Michael Cohen, in the eyes of a Manhattan jury.

But even though Cohen has a track record as a Trump hater and a criminal who admittedly lied under oath – and apparently with an ax to grind after going to prison for a hush money payment central to a case in which the beneficiary went to the White House – some trial observers believe that the defense performed poorly.

Trump’s defender for the last few daysattacked Trump’s longtime confidant-turned-enemy during interrogation as a serial fabulist whose words are worthless – an outraged former employee driven by greed, hatred and revenge for being in prison for paying off Stormy Daniels and being passed over for the top job in the Trump administration.

The only witness directly linked to Trump falsified business books constituting 34 charges, Cohen’s testimony, which prosecutors say concealed evidence of a strategic election fraud conspiracy about never taking action without Trump’s approval is crucial.

Todd Blanche questioned Cohen during a lengthy hearing Thursday about his perjury and why he hated Trump, suggesting he was motivated by revenge.

Legal experts who spoke to The News had differing opinions on whether the defense’s focus primarily on discrediting Cohen’s character – rather than his record – was effective and which side would gain or lose from his reputation as a criminal and liars.

“Michael Cohen is, you know, a scumbag, but he’s not the worst person prosecutors have called to present their case. They call Mafia hitmen, terrorists, mass murderers – father rapists and daughter killers – to testify, and often the jury believes them,” said veteran defense attorney Ron Kuby.

“So in a sense, all of Michael Cohen’s deficiencies, which are too numerous to catalog, are a boomerang for the defense because all the prosecution has to say is, ‘We didn’t choose Michael Cohen.’

“Donald Trump chose Michael Cohen.”

asset, presumptive Republican presidential candidate, pleaded not guilty in the case. His defense argues that the monthly checks he signed with Cohen in 2017 covered the costs of legal legal services and that there was nothing inherently illegal about Daniels’ non-disclosure agreement, which Blanche made Cohen admit. Trump denies being a womanizer, saying in his defense that his concerns about the allegations were about his family, not his political prospects.

His former fixer testified whom he last spoke to a boss he had long considered a mentor just after the FBI raided his Park Ave. office and hotel room. in April 2018. Months later, he pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws on Trump’s orders, lying to Congress about Trump’s business dealings with Russia, and tax fraud in his yellow medallion taxi, receiving a three-year prison sentence.

Jeff Lichtman who represented mafia scion John Gotti Jr. AND Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmanthought Blanche, who had highlighted Cohen’s troubled past enough to discredit his claims against the client.

“What you are doing shows that he cannot be trusted. You say, “Here’s what he said about what Trump told him.” That’s an obvious lie because, what, he told the truth and lied about 14,000 other things under oath to a federal judge? As a witness he is ruined. It’s completely destroyed,“ – said Lichtman.

“I interviewed mob hitmen and found that 75 IQ performed better and were less dishonest than Michael Cohen.”

Cohen claimed he informed Trump that he paid Daniels to keep quiet about her claims about a $130,000 extramarital one-night stand – during a phone call weeks before the election conducted by Trump’s bodyguard – as part of an assignment he was assigned in “catch and remove” framework. kill” developed in 2015 between himself, Trump and former tabloid publisher David Pecker, whom the jury met first.

Kuby believed the most effective way to interrogate Blanche created uncertainty about the purpose of communications between Cohen and Trump’s former bodyguard, Keith Schiller, in October 2016. Cohen, during cross-examination by prosecutors, identified a transcript of conversations with Schiller among hundreds shown in court between him, Trump and others people in Trump’s orbit as the one in which he told Trump that the deal with Daniels was done.

Blanche cited other phone records from the same period that showed Cohen was furious at the jokes he was receiving from the teenager. On Thursday, he said he believed both issues had been resolved and that he received thousands of calls a year whose time stamps he could not realistically determine.

“It’s easy to believe that Michael Cohen was mistaken about the content of this phone call,” Kuby said. “I don’t know if that’s enough to break through this gigantic edifice of Trump complicity.”

Cohen told jurors that convicted former Trump finance chief Allen Weisselberg dictated a payment plan to reimburse him during a January 2017 meeting at Trump Tower that he and Trump attended and that Trump reiterated that he would receive the refund a few weeks later at the White House.

Apart from reporting on hush money talks with Trump and Weisselberg, who is currently serving a sentence for perjury in another case, Cohen’s main role is mainly to corroborate the testimony of other witnesses and piece together documents prepared by prosecutors over the past few weeks. Rather than downplay details about Cohen’s shady reputation, they extracted them from most of the witnesses.

Richard Serafini, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice, believes Blanche’s tactics on Tuesday – starting with asking Cohen whether he called him a “crying little shit” on TikTok – were “truly disastrous” and that Cohen’s hard evidence vindicated , speaks for itself.

“Everything that Michael Cohen has said that is relevant to this case has either been corroborated by the documents or they have been constructed in such a way that there is no other reasonable explanation for what happened,” he said.

The evidence includes a recording of Cohen and Trump discussing a payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal and an affidavit reflecting Cohen’s payment to Daniels sent through her former lawyer, Keith Davidson, who testified several weeks ago that Cohen negotiated the deal in an atmosphere of crisis disastrous leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape threatening the Trump campaign.

Claim contains Weisselberg’s handwritten notes and a recording of Cohen showing the amount he was owed Additional Cost. Jurors also have invoices showing Cohen received them in installments, charging the Trump Org a false “maintenance fee” each month, and corresponding checks signed by Sharpie from Trump.

Kuby didn’t think jurors would have a hard time believing Cohen, given that most of his testimony was corroborated by mountains of undeniable evidence, or that Trump’s page highlighting Cohen’s reputation as a scoundrel would have the intended effect.

“Almost the entire defense was focused on one thing, which was to discredit the witness, but the second thing that needed to be done was to discredit the story. And in this case it is difficult, because most of them are confirmed,“ Kuby added.

“All the bad things that Michael Cohen has done, he claims he did for Trump, and there is significant evidence of them.”

Cohen will return to the stand on Monday as a potential final witness. His lawyer declined to comment.