I wanted to highlight what I think is a good write up of Trump’s lawyers in his election interference case. It’s from a lawyer and legal analyst for Politico by the name of Ankush Khardori. IANAL, but I saw him give an interview on MSNBC two days ago about Michael Cohen (He TRASHED Cohen as one of the worst types of witnesses for any prosecutor because of the numerous lies and perjury he has committed). Given Khardori’s antipathy toward Cohen, I was surprised by his analysis of the many screw ups by Trump’s lawyers. It was especially refreshing given the BS spewed out by the MSNBC D Team during the day (Katy Tur, Chris Jansing, and Andrea “Would You Fuckin’ Please Retire!” Mitchell). Basically, Trump’s lawyers are letting Trump dictate the legal strategy, and Trump is stupid.
I’m not making that last part up, by the way.
NOTE: I don’t have the link to Khardori’s previous interview on MSNBC (I can’t remember which show he was on to be honest). But Khardori had a devastating list of Cohen’s many flaws as a prosecution witness. Granted, this all was before the last two days of testimony. But Khardori pointed out the many obvious flaws of Cohen: he has shot his mouth off too many times in public, and he has gotten busted for lying (and not just on Trump’s behalf either). To prosecutors, Cohen could have been a nightmare witness who could have sunk the DA’s case.
Then, I got to listen to some of the D Team today, and despite the presence of legal analyts there, I got to listen to all the terrible conventional political “wisdom” from Katy Tur. And to top it all off, the D Team kept repeating that the prosecution has not made its case yet showing that Trump was really, really, really involved or what was going through Trump’s mind.
It’s only when you get away from the D Team that you get the other legal analysts pointing out the illogical absurdities of Trump’s “defense.” And one of the largest holes in Trump’s defense is the laughable “I never had sex with Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal!” And it is because Trump cannot admit that he ever made a mistake that compels him to force his lawyers to — ahem — “defend his honor,” so to speak.
Most devastatingly, lead attorney Todd Blanche, in his opening statement, repeated Trump’s claim that he never had a sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels. That was followed by days of testimony last week that — if you believe Daniels’ very persuasive account — effectively demonstrated that a central plank of Trump’s defense is a lie and has been a lie for years, and that the jury cannot trust even Trump’s lead counsel to tell them the truth….
First, Trump is largely unmanageable. He is unfocused and not as intelligent as he thinks he is. He may have had extensive experience as a civil litigant, but criminal litigation — particularly as a defendant — is very different. Even the lawyers who have joined Trump’s legal team hoping to crack the code with him have ultimately been disappointed, diminished or both. They routinely leave or are fired. In the last year alone, these include: Tim Parlatore, Jim Trusty, John Rowley and Joe Tacopina.
Second, Trump makes the key strategic decisions in his legal cases, including his criminal cases. Yes, he does so on the basis of his attorneys’ advice — the ones working for him at the moment, at least — but he’s the decider, as another former president once said. This is not surprising. It is as it should be, in fact.
Third, Trump has two key strategies for defending himself in legal settings, and they are the same ones that he uses in political settings. First: Deny, deny, deny. And second: Attack, attack, attack. It’s something he learned from Roy Cohn and has been
deploying for 50 years.
And we are seeing all of this in his lawyers cross examination of Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen. Necheles kept trying to prove that Daniels is some grifting, lying, money grubbing woman. This was Trump going on the offense trying to label Daniels as a “lying slut.” Today, we got Blanche making all kinds of attacks on Cohen that missed the entire mark. It doesn’t matter if Cohen HATES Trump. It only matters if Cohen is CREDIBLE with regards to the hush money payments and their purpose, which the documents seem to back up. But Trump wants Cohen shown to be a Trump hater, which only really works in a political setting.
Anyway, Khardori’s assessment made me feel better about how this case is going than the D Team did.
