In this courtroom sketch, Tuesday, May 28, 2024, Donald Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche, standing right center, gives his summation to the jury. Donald Trump is seated far left, while District Attorney Alvin Bragg is seated foreground left. Judge Juan Merchan is at the bench, seated upper right. (Elizabeth Williams via AP)
Donald Trump’s lead defense attorney Todd Blanche is a former federal paralegal and prosecutor who worked for years with the Southern District of New York. On Tuesday morning, he slammed former New York City lawyer Michael Cohen, 57, as a venal liar and, by both implication and declaration, rubbished the prosecution’s reliance on him to make the Empire State’s case against the former president.
Blanche began the defense’s closing statement by repeatedly referencing a theme developed throughout the trial: that Cohen could not be trusted because he had admittedly and repeatedly lied in the past; to prosecutors, a judge, the U.S. Congress, and others. And, the defense argued, Cohen lied to the jury during his testimony this very month.
As the closing wore on, the defense attorney sought to throw several additional would-be wrenches into the works of the narrative told by the state — arguing for a simple explanation of a highly complex case involving multiple players and mountains of documentary evidence.
For the defense, and the state, the credibility of Cohen looms large.
“You should want and expect more than the testimony of Michael Cohen,” Blanche told the assembled Manhattanites who will, in several hours, be asked to impose judgment on the 45th president, according to a report by MSNBC personality Katie Phang.
Blanche framed the case before jurors as one that is fundamentally about documents — the 34 different internal invoices, checks, and ledger entries that make up the 34 corresponding fraud charges. And, importantly, the defense attorney noted, the invoices in question were generated by Cohen, according to a report by Just Security fellow Adam Klasfeld.
“It’s a paper case,” Blanche said, according to a report by Newsweek reporter Katherine Fung. “This case is not about an encounter with Stormy Daniels 18 years ago, an encounter that President Trump has repeatedly and unequivocally denied.”
The defense insisted jurors could not possibly find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt “on the word of Michael Cohen.”
In service of the major point about Cohen’s lack of trustworthiness, Blanche brought up the claim advanced by Cohen, as the state’s star witness, that he performed “minimal,” if any, legal work for Trump during 2016. Later, Cohen would have to clarify that the work he did do for Trump was work he did not expect to be paid for.
“He lied to you,” Blanche said once, and then twice, reportedly repeating the words as four-sentence fragments. “He. Lied. To. You.”
Another alleged lie from Cohen’s lips highlighted by the defense had to do with a conversation the witness said he overheard between Trump and David Pecker, 72, the onetime CEO of the National Enquirer‘s parent company, American Media Inc., who testified about the contours of the so-called “catch-and-kill” arrangement in which the tabloid giant bought and bottled up prurient stories — true or not — that could negatively impact Trump’s 2016 candidacy, which he framed innocently as an “agreement among friends.”
“I don’t buy any stories,” Trump allegedly told Pecker, rebuking the publisher’s suggestion that Trump himself buy up the rights to one such lurid tale. “Anytime you do anything like this, it always gets out.”
Blanche pitted the word of Pecker, still considered a friend of Trump’s, against that of Cohen, Trump’s former fixer. The defense reminded jurors that, quite oppositely, Cohen testified that Trump told Pecker during that conversation: “No problem. I will take care of it.”
Again, the defense said, Cohen “lied to you,” addressing the jury.
The story Trump and Pecker were discussing was being peddled by former Playboy model Karen McDougal — who claimed she had a nearly yearlong relationship with Trump. In the end, AMI worked out a $150,000 agreement that included hiring McDougal as a writer and model in exchange for the rights to her story, Pecker testified.
When Cohen took the stand, he said the plan was always for AMI to be reimbursed for the money spent on the McDougal affair. Jurors also heard from a tape-recorded conversation between Cohen and Trump which the witness said was about paying back the $150,000.
But, Cohen also testified that he eventually cut off the recording to answer a phone call from a bank employee. As it turns out, that did not happen. The defense showed jurors evidence that Cohen forwarded the call to voicemail.
“He lied to you when he said he answered that call,” Blanche told the jury.
The defense also questioned why the conversation was recorded in the first place. Cohen admittedly never gave the recording to Pecker — despite claiming that he and the publisher had a lunch, just days earlier, during which Pecker was “very angry” about not being repaid.
Blanche directly offered the jury another alleged Cohen lie: “Ladies and gentlemen, that lunch did not happen. Mr. Cohen made it up.”
Turning to another key witness for the state, the defense sought to cast Stormy Daniels, 45, as similarly unreliable when she testified about the agreement she and Cohen signed in exchange for the $130,000 that she was paid by Cohen in late October 2016.
In turn, Daniels would issue statements denying she ever had an affair with Trump.
“The evidence makes clear that Ms. Daniels lied to you about it,” Blanche said.
“The government wants you to believe those statements were coerced — that Ms. Daniels was either forced to sign them, or didn’t have a say … but she decided to go public after these statements supposedly because she was trying to protect herself from what she said was a threat someone made to her in a gym parking lot in 2011,” Blanche said, according to a courtroom report by ABC News. “But there are recordings where you know that’s just not true.”
The attorney went on to play a recording between Cohen and Daniels’ then-attorney Keith Davidson in which the two lawyers discussed an offer from Larry Flynt for $1 million. Blanche said this conversation shows Daniels had “settler’s remorse” for not obtaining a bigger payout.
The defense later pivoted back to Cohen’s ongoing relationship with the truth and circa 2016 relationship with Trump — casting the witness as yet unreliable and, back then, an overeager employee who overreacted to the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape and took up the Daniels effort on his own accord to help his boss.
Noting that Trump himself never signed the Daniels agreement, Blanche asked out loud how it could be enforced in the first place.
“They want you to believe that President Trump thought this was going to cost him the election yet he never even signed the agreement,” Blanche told jurors. “What President Trump knew in 2016, you only know from one source.”
If the reference was not clear, the defense made it so: the only source for the defendant’s direct involvement in, or knowledge of the Daniels payoff as the election drew near, came by way of Cohen.
During one particularly notable day of cross-examination, the defense unraveled some of Cohen’s claims about a phone call that the witness claimed was more or less proof of Trump’s involvement.
The jury had previously heard Cohen talk about a brief phone call to Keith Schiller, Trump’s former bodyguard, at 8:02 p.m. on the night of Oct. 24, 2016.
Dueling narratives have emerged as to what was said — and to whom — during that phone call. To hear the state tell it initially, Cohen made that call simply to relay the details of a pending settlement to the threat posed by Stormy Daniels, 45. The defense, however, forced a telling omission: text messages showed Cohen had actually called Schiller to discuss a 14-year-old prank caller who would not let up.
The state later showed jurors an image of Trump and his former bodyguard together on the night in question in an effort to clean things up. The defense had objected to that picture being shown.
But it was the words, not the picture, the defense brought up on Tuesday.
“He told you he talked to President Trump on October 24 at 8:02 p.m. updating him about the Daniels situation,” Blanche said of Cohen. “That was a lie and he got caught red-handed. We all know he called Keith Schiller to talk about the fact that a 14-year-old had been harassing him for several days and forgot to block his number and Mr. Cohen wanted to fix that. That is perjury.”
“He’s literally like the MVP of liars,” Blanche pressed on. “He lies constantly.”
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