One of the main defenses that will be employed by attorneys for former president Donald Trump in his Manhattan hush money trial is to suggest that the disgraced ex-president had no idea his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, had paid off Stormy Daniels to buy her silence on the affair she allegedly had with Trump.
But that defense can easily be torn to shreds by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, according to former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.
Weissmann was a guest on MSNBC yesterday, and he told host Ari Melber that all Bragg has to do is to lay out the evidence which shows there’s absolutely no way Trump couldn’t have known what Cohen was doing.
“I think here, one of the things that you’re going to hear about, is first, Donald Trump’s management style,” Weissmann explained. “We’re not talking about a person who is running Exxon, who had hundreds of thousands of people working for him. This is a small family business with somebody who is, I think by all accounts, very hands-on and very focused on the details.”
Also, Weismann noted, Trump wrote the checks in question.
“So you’re going to see checks that he signed, and I think that in itself is going to be very compelling evidence, because he reimbursed Michael Cohen for the hush money payments, is what you’re going to hear. But it wasn’t on a one to one basis. Because they had to say, oh, these are legal fees, that meant that Michael Cohen was going to have to pay taxes on them. So instead of reimbursing Michael Cohen $130,000, he had to true up the amount so that Michael Cohen would actually get the full $130,000. You wouldn’t need to do that if these were actually legal fees. This is not how this would work. So, and as you pointed out, there are a lot of prior inconsistent statements and you’ll hear from the prosecution about, look, if this was an innocent scheme, why is his story changing so much over time?”
Weissmann concluded, “So I think those are all of the kinds of things you’ll hear to undermine an exalted CEO, I didn’t know what David Pecker and Michael Cohen were doing at the ground level.”
Trump has no real defense for what he did regarding Daniels. He was desperate to keep the affair secret, knowing that if news of it broke in the midst of his 2016 bid for the White House, his chances of winning would be doomed.
But if it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump did indeed know about the payments, then he’s guilty not only of falsifying business records to hide his actions, but also of election interference, which could land him in a New York prison for several years.
