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MANHATTAN (CN) — The star witness testimony of Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen may have been a risky move for the Manhattan district attorney in the historic first criminal trial of a former president, but legal experts told Courthouse News that prosecutors mitigated attacks on Cohen’s brashness with corroborating independent evidence.
Prosecutors claim Trump directed Cohen to pay hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from telling the media that she had sex with Trump in 2006. Trump is accused of falsifying business records to cover up his reimbursement payments to Cohen in a scheme to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
Cohen’s payments under the scheme were fodder, in part, for the federal charges to which he pleaded guilty in August 2018, in addition to federal campaign-finance violations and other accusations. His three-year prison sentence ultimately was composed of thirteen months in an upstate New York prison followed by a year and a half in home confinement.
While his record made Cohen a riskier bet for prosecutors, they paired his words with “corroborating witnesses’ testimony and documentary evidence that the defense was never able to undermine at all,” veteran election law attorney Jerry Goldfeder told Courthouse News.
“Instead, the defense picked apart Michal Cohen’s credibility and we’ll see how the jury reacts to the central narrative that the prosecution put on versus Michael Cohen’s penchant for lying,” Goldfeder, senior counsel at Cozen O’Connor, said Tuesday.
“I think the jury gets the fact that Michael Cohen has been a liar many times in his life, but the real question — and the only question — is whether he’s telling the truth here at trial with regard to this catch-and-kill scheme relating to his payment, his reimbursement, the coverup and Trump’s involvement,” he said.
During an intermittently vulgar cross-examination last week, Trump’s defense lawyer Todd Blanche grilled Cohen about a litany of inflammatory and vindictive comments about Trump he posted online and in his Trump-centric podcast, Mea Culpa.
Blanche prompted Cohen to admit Monday that he stole at least $30,000 from the Trump Organization. “Did you ever have to plead guilty to larceny?” he asked on cross-examination. “No sir,” Cohen replied. “Have you paid back the Trump Organization the money that you stole from them?” Blanche asked. “No sir,” Cohen said.
Goldfeder said he found Cohen to be a reliable prosecution witness in part because of his candor about his own propensity for dishonesty and criminal chicanery.
“When you look at the fact that he was honest about his own lies and honest about his own thievery, we’re left with the defense essentially arguing, ‘He’s telling the truth about how bad he is, but he’s not telling the truth about the scheme,’ and that’s inconsistent.”
Co-conspirators in the courtroom
Though fraught, Cohen’s role in the trial — a witness who’s also a previously convicted co-conspirator — is not inconsistent with other criminal prosecution of large criminal racketeering and conspiracy cases, like those against the Mafia and drug cartels.
In fact, former District Attorney Cy Vance tapped veteran federal mafia prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to help run a grand jury investigation into Trump’s potential crimes. (It was his successor, District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who ultimately brought the charges against Trump last year.)
Goldfeder said Trump’s trial is not unlike mob prosecutions with insider star witnesses.
“It’s very similar to a mafia trial where there all sorts of bad actors testifying on behalf of the prosecution, who are believed by the jury simply because of who they are,” he said. “And that’s happened many times in the courts in New York.”
For Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor in San Diego who now practices at the Los Angeles firm West Coast Trial Lawyers, told Courthouse News the man who took the witness stand across four days of the Trump trial was “a better Michael Cohen than I expected.”
“Maybe because my expectations were so low — I mean, talk about someone who is, you know, a convicted felon, an admitted liar, not likable at all — I thought he was going to be obnoxious, loud," he quipped.
“Was he an amazing witness? No, absolutely not. But I think the prosecution did a good job of getting a lot of the bad facts out on direct and through other witnesses like David Pecker and Keith Davidson.”
Rahmani, like Goldfeder, also credited the Manhattan district attorney’s office for doing a good job of corroborating Cohen’s direct testimony with independent evidence, “so they didn’t rely on just Michael Cohen alone.”
Trump’s lawyers rested his defense case on Tuesday morning without calling him to the witness stand.
Rahmani said he was surprised that Trump’s defense didn’t put on more witnesses related to the substance of the charged crimes.
“We’re really talking about false business records: How were the payments to Michael Cohen booked and accounted for?” he said.
“If you really just focus on the actual charges in the case, and not the circus and the sideshow, I don’t think the defense did a job of arguing that these were legitimately legal expenses.”
Representatives for Cohen did not immediately respond to requests for comment concerning his trial testimony.
Trial takes a break
Prosecutors say Trump ordered Cohen to pay Daniels $130,000 to keep her story from getting out in the month before the 2016 presidential election, constituting a deliberate effort to interfere with the election, which raises falsifying business records charges from misdemeanors to felonies.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all 34 counts of falsifying business records last year and denies ever having sex with Daniels. He maintains that he was concerned about the rumor’s impact on his family, not the outcome of the election.
After prosecutors rested their case Monday afternoon, the defense called Robert Costello, a pro-Trump attorney who prosecutors claim was part of a pressure campaign to keep Cohen, then Trump’s personal lawyer, from cooperating with authorities after the FBI raided Cohen’s home and office in 2018.
Trump, the current Republican 2024 presidential frontrunner, decried the trial as a “KANGAROO COURT!” in a post Tuesday morning on his Truth Social website.
His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., told reporters outside the courthouse the case featured “arguably the least credible witnesses in the history of, I don’t know, witnesses?"
“A nine-times convicted liar, and now, an admitted thief,” the Trump Organization executive said. “That is who they’re hanging their case on. And the other happens to be a porn star.”
The trial will take a weeklong break before reconvening in lower Manhattan on Tuesday, May 28, for closing arguments.
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