This week, the bombshell news we have all been waiting for finally broke, after the Manhattan grand jury officially voted in favor of formally indicting former United States President Donald J. Trump on criminal charges related to the infamous Stormy Daniels hush money payments.
The work and subsequent decision by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, his investigators and prosecutors, and the grand jury made history in this nation this week, serving as the very first time in the history of the United States that a sitting or former US president has ever been charged with a crime.
It’s safe to say that the entire case has been unprecedented, to say the very least.
Not only is the indictment against a former US president categorically historical, in its own right, but the DA’s office’s most crucial witness in this case is also a unique one, at best. Much of the Manhattan hush money case rests on testimony from Michael Cohen — the former personal Trump attorney and “fixer” who personally made the 6-figure payment to the adult film star and former Trump affair partner, under the alleged promise from Donald Trump that he would be reimbursed.
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Michael Cohen has done jail time for lying to Congress.
As the case undoubtedly prepares to go to trial — as indicated by Trump himself and his legal team — there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the ex-president’s defense will be largely reliant on discrediting the DA’s star witness, Donald’s former lawyer. In fact, Trump’s legal team attempted to do just that when they sent Robert Costello as a defense witness before the grand jury, before the indictment was even handed down.
From the outside looking in, it doesn’t seem that Cohen would be difficult to discredit, in the scheme of things.
But one former federal prosecutor is now noting that there is one crucial, damning piece of evidence against the ex-president, in the form of an audio recording, that could absolutely shatter any chance Trump had of using this defense tactic, because the audio hears the now-former president himself saying the words, “Pay with cash.”
Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann sat down with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace to discuss the matter.
“I mean, I watched enough mob movies to know that innocent people don’t say, quote, ‘pay with cash,'” Wallace said, before going on to question, “What are we entering into if this goes to trial, as Trump said he plans for it to?”
“This is one where, obviously, Michael Cohen is a difficult witness,” Weissmann answered. “He is not your ideal government witness for a host of reasons, including the fact he’s still talking, and that differentiates him from anybody I’ve ever dealt with as a cooperating witness. That being said, these are really experienced state prosecutors. They’ve been in this territory, this is their bread and butter doing these kinds of cases. This particular case, not that complicated.”
“So this case is going to be — I think it was mentioned, it’s really going to be made on documents, and that tape recording is one where there are a number of ways that it could be used,” the former prosecutor continued to explain. “Not just for the fact that you have Trump on tape saying pay in cash if it was legit, you would be like, I’ll wire the money or send a check. It makes no sense. The fact that Michael Cohen was taping it shows that Michael Cohen is not going to tape record it as somebody who is going to say, what are you talking about? I don’t know anything about this, what are you doing? That’s not what you hear. What you hear is, wait a second, pay in cash. The very fact of the tape recording is something that the D.A.’s office knows to use very well to corroborate Michael Cohen.”
“And then just one small caveat, which is that Donald Trump has not had his day in court in a criminal case, so it’s true that there has been no refutation by Donald Trump,” Weissmann said. “We have a lot of adjectives, we have a lot of adverbs, we have a lot of epithets about the D.A. and the case, but that’s not an argument. That is not a fact. That is not any legal argument that’s been made. But he will have a place where he can do that … and I do think one of the things the media gets wrong is to just cover adjectives and adverbs as if it’s anything. It’s literally nothing more than the paper it’s printed on.”
You can watch the MSNBC segment here:
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
