Closing arguments began Tuesday in the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, with the former president’s lawyer attacking prosecutors’ key witness Michael Cohen as “the MVP of liars” and the prosecution urging jurors to “focus on the facts.”
“Michael Cohen is the GLOAT. He’s literally the greatest liar of all time,” Trump attorney Todd Blanche told jurors towards the close of his summations.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass noted it’s not Cohen who is on trial, but Trump, the man for whom Cohen worked for a decade. “We didn’t choose Michael Cohen. We didn’t pick him up at the witness store. Mr. Trump chose Mr. Cohen for the same qualities his attorneys now urge you to reject,” Steinglass told the jury.
And, he told the panel, “It’s difficult to conceive of a case with more corroboration.” He said the evidence shows Trump, Cohen and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker engaged in a “scheme” to corruptly hide damaging information about Trump, and it “could very well be what got President Trump elected.”
Blanche, who spoke before Steinglass, contended prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office had not met their burden of proving Trump guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of falsifying business records related to the hush money payment Cohen paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 presidential election.
Steinglass acknowledged that Cohen, once an unfailing Trump loyalist, now hates his former boss, but said that’s because Trump cut him loose and let him take the fall for the Daniels’ payment with federal prosecutors “while the defendant, up until now, has escaped justice.”
Blanche maintained “President Trump is innocent. He did not commit any crimes, and the district attorney has not met their burden of proof. Period.” The trial, he said, was “not a referendum on your views of President Trump,” and “if you focus just on the evidence you heard in this courtroom, this is a very very quick and easy not guilty verdict.”
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Blanche said the money that Trump paid his then-lawyer Cohen was indeed for his legal work, as Trump’s company records show, and not for the Daniels payment, as prosecutors and Cohen have maintained. He noted that Trump was president when he signed the monthly checks for Cohen in 2017, and the idea he was in on a “scheme” to conceal payments at the time was “absurd.”
Blanche said that Cohen testified he’d done “very minimal” legal work for Trump in 2017 but “Cohen lied to you.”
Blanche told the jury that Cohen had worked as a co-lead attorney defending a defamation lawsuit brought by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on Trump’s old reality TV show “The Apprentice.”
“The payments were compensation to him. Nothing more,” Blanche said, adding there’s no evidence — apart from Cohen’s testimony — that Trump was aware of his $130,000 payment to Daniels before it was made. “You can not believe his words,” the attorney said, adding later that he’s “repeatedly, repeatedly lied under oath.”
“He’s literally like the MVP of liars,” Blanche said. “You cannot send someone to prison based on the words of Michael Cohen,” he told the jury later — a remark Judge Juan Merchan told Blanche outside the presence of the jury was “highly inappropriate.” Juries are not allowed to consider the penalty for a crime in their deliberations.
“It’s simply not allowed. Period. It’s hard for me to imagine how that was accidental in any way,” the judge said. When the jurors returned, Merchan told them to disregard Blanche’s comment. He noted that he’d be the one to impose a sentence and that a prison term is not necessarily required if there’s a conviction. Trump faces penalties ranging from a fine to up to four years behind bars.
In his closing, Steinglass noted that Cohen testified he did less than 10 hours of legal work for Trump in 2017. “Cohen spent more time being cross-examined in this trial than he did doing legal work for Donald Trump in 2017,” the prosecutor said.
He also noted that despite Blanche’s current contention, Trump had previously acknowledged the money was a reimbursement, including on social media. “Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA,” he said in one 2018 tweet.
“Because the defendant repeatedly admitted that he knew the payments were reimbursement, that means by definition he knew that the payment records, which disguised the payment as income, were false,” Steinglass said.
He also noted that Trump personally signed the bulk of the $35,000-a-month checks to Cohen himself. “The defendant didn’t ask any questions, because he already knew the answers,” Steinglass said. Blanche had argued that Trump was likely too busy with his presidential duties at the time to focus on the checks.
Cohen had testified that Trump signed off on the payment because his campaign was reeling from the Oct. 2016 release of the so-called “Access Hollywood” tape, where he was caught on a hot mic in 2005 saying he could grope women without their consent. Blanche insisted Trump wasn’t that concerned about the release of the tape, which resulted in top Republicans condemning his remarks and distancing themselves from the then-Republican nominee.
Blanche said it “was an extremely personal event for President Trump” because “nobody wants their family to be subjected to that sort of thing,” but “it was not a doomsday event.”
Steinglass painted a different portrait, showing the jury video of Trump lashing out at women who had accused him of sexual misconduct during the same time period. If Daniels went public with her claim at the time, it “was capable of costing him the whole election, and he knew it.”
”Stormy Daniels was a walking, talking reminder that the defendant was not only words. She would have totally undermined his strategy for spinning away the Access Hollywood tape,” he said.
Blanche said the deal eventually worked out well for Daniels, who he accused of trying to extort the then-presidential candidate. “She wrote a book, and she has a podcast. And a documentary. This started out as an extortion. There’s no doubt about that, and ended very well for Ms. Daniels — financially speaking,” the lawyer said.
He also claimed there was no reason for the DA to have called her as a witness, other than to “try to embarrass President Trump” and “inflame your emotions.”
Steinglass said they called her as a witness because “in the simplest terms, Stormy Daniels is the motive.”
Trump has denied her claim that they had a sexual encounter in 2006, making it important for her to tell her story under oath, and her detailed account of that night “ring true,” Steinglass said. He also questioned why Trump’s attorneys spent so much time trying to knock her claims down if her story was irrelevant.
“Her story is messy,” Steinglass said, “but that’s kind of the point. That’s the display the defendant didn’t want the American voter to see.”
“It’s no coincidence that the sex happened in 2006, but the payoff happened less than two weeks before the 2016 election,” he said.
Blanche also addressed an August 2015 meeting where Pecker told Trump and Cohen he would help them suppress negative stories about Trump while publishing articles to tear down his rivals. Prosecutors described it as the beginning of a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election. “Every campaign is a conspiracy to promote a candidate,” Blanche said. “There is zero criminal intent in that 2015 meeting.”
Steinglass noted that the Enquirer paid to kill two scandalous stories as a result of that meeting, in addition to alerting Cohen to Daniels’ plans to come forward. The paper’s publisher, AMI, spent $180,000 to suppress the two stories — one involving a doorman who falsely claimed to have information about a Trump love child and the other involving a former Playboy model who claimed to have had a months-long affair with Trump. He’s denied the allegation.
Steinglass called the payments “an illegal corporate campaign contribution made by AMI, and it was done in collusion with the candidate.”
Steinglass’s closings were several hours long, and not surprisingly drew a bad review from Trump. “Boring!” he posted on Truth Social during a post 5.p.m. break.
After closing arguments are finished, the judge will give the instructions to the jury. Then, the 12 ordinary New Yorkers who sit on the jury will begin deliberations on whether or not the former president is guilty of the charges against him. “You and you alone are the judges of the facts in this case,” Merchan told them ahead of the arguments.
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, a low-level felony. He has pleaded not guilty.
The trial — which featured testimony from Cohen, Daniels, ex-National Enquirer publisher David Pecker and former White House and Trump Organization staffers — began with jury selection on April 15. Witness testimony, which started on April 22, wrapped up last week. In all, the prosecution called 20 witnesses in the case, while the defense called two. Despite saying before the proceedings began that he would “absolutely” testify, Trump did not take the stand in his own defense.
Source: Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors make final pleas to jury in hush money trial
