Trump’s defense is interesting today

It’s not so much that they’re painting Cohen as a liar. Cohen has admitted that he’s a liar, and we know that he’s a liar. The prosecution brought that out, but brought out context and corroboration as to why he’s not lying about serving as Trump’s fixer and how the money to Stormy Daniels was intended to benefit the campaign.

But today instead of attacking him so much as a liar (though Blanche kind of lost his cool when Cohen said that Trump’s bodyguard handed the phone to Trump when Blanche wanted him to admit that he had only spoken to the bodyguard), but rather as a rogue who had acted on his own, and he’s bringing out that the D.A.’s office had repeatedly begged Cohen to stop talking about the case in public. Basically, like Trump, he can’t be controlled. So if they can’t control him, maybe Trump couldn’t either and so he did his own thing, and that could raise a reasonable doubt as to whether he did his own thing with Daniels given that Trump really didn’t want to pay her the money (according to Cohen’s testimony Trump wanted to run out the clock until after the election then stiff her).

It has holes, but again, what he needs is a hung jury, not a convincing case for innocence.

……

Blanche may have drawn some blood here.

He introduced texts between Cohen and a 14-year-old prank caller.

Cohen texts the minor: “This number has just been sent to secret service for your ongoing and continuous harassment to both my cell as well as to the organizations main line.”

The minor replied:

I DIDNT DO IT

Im 14

Please don’t

Cohen then told the person to have their parent or guardian contact him before the Secret Service did.

Cohen’s a f—ing dick! Like his former boss.

……

Blanche brought up that Cohen that his phone records showed around 14,000 calls per year, and that he received between 50 and 60 thousand phone calls between 2016 and now.

How, then, could Cohen claim to remember individual calls from points in 2016?

Cohen – because they were and are “extremely important” and “all-consuming.”

“These phone calls are things that I’ve been talking about the past six years,” Cohen says.

He adds that he kept contemporaneous notes, in addition to secretly recording reporters and others with whom he spoke at the time.

That does make sense, but Blanche has done his job today by highlighting a lot of lies and getting Cohen to give some less than satisfying answers for his inconsistencies. But he’s a sleezebag. We knew this.

…..

Blanche closed out by having Cohen confirm that he was never paid a retainer, so that he can make the argument later that the money wasn’t compensation for the hush money but rather just legal fees given that his usual $35,000 wasn’t paid during one of the months during which the hush money transaction was happening. The math doesn’t pan out, but again, we’re talking about raising reasonable doubt, because why wasn’t Cohen complaining about the missing check at the time? Of course, nobody asked him if he was.

It’s meandering, but Blanche did a much better job today. Definitely the prosecution will have to lean heavily on their corroboration evidence.

54 years ago today

Sometimes I post reminders of the Kent State killings on May 4. Haven’t done that in a few years. It’s been even longer since I’ve posted a May 15 reminder of shootings at Jackson State 10 days later on this date in 1970. It doesn’t get the attention Kent State does – partly I think because of racist bias in media coverage and history, but also because Kent State had drawn national media coverage when the Ohio Governor had called in the National Guard and so there was live coverage in the daylight while the Jackson State incident developed quickly and in the night.

Basically, there had been protests about the war (and about Kent State) which resulted in increased tension on Lynch Street (which bisected the campus) – famous for encounters between black students and white antagonists driving through the campus with objects sometimes being thrown at and from the vehicles. There had been some very intense interactions the night before. On the day of the shootings, a false rumor spread that Charles Evers, the activist brother of the slain activist Medgar Evers, had been killed. In protest, someone set a dump truck on fire on Lynch Street. The fire department showed with an escort of police across the street from a women’s dormitory. About a hundred students were standing around and someone threw a bottle at the police. About 40 police – all of them white – lost their s— and fired over 460 bullets into the dormitory and went on shooting for 30 seconds, shattering every window on that side of the building. They would make up a story about a sniper which the FBI itself debunked.

The end result – two dead – Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, 21, a junior at JS, and James Earl Green, 17, a high school student who was walking home from work. 12 more people received bullet wounds and many more received other injuries from exploding glass.

No charges against police ever made it past a Mississippi Grand Jury.

The Howard Zinn Project has a great page and video on the subject.

What will be the outcome of the Trump NYC trial?

I don’t know, but I’m amazed at how few people – including television talking heads – understand the case.

First – why was Stormy Daniels’s testimony necessary? The defense actually made it necessary – or more to the point – made it an issue. Trump supporters love to ask “what is the crime?” The crime is filing falsified documents to cover up campaign money that should have been reported to the FEC. It sounds “technical,” but it’s a bigger deal than most people want to acknowledge, and it’s a felony, not a misdemeanor as you will hear over and over again on Fox News. The law is New York Penal Code section 175.10 and people have been charged in approximately 10,000 cases since 2015.

And no, the prosecutor did not miss the statute of limitations to charge for section 175.05, the misdemeanor version. The misdemeanor version doesn’t apply at all. It involves falsifying documents when the defendant:

1. makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise; or
2. alters, erases, obliterates, deletes, removes or destroys a true entry in the business records of an enterprise; or
3. omits to make a true entry in the business records of an enterprise in violation of a duty to do so which he knows to be imposed upon him by law or by the nature of his position; or
4. prevents the making of a true entry or causes the omission thereof in the business records of an enterprise.” N.Y. Penal Code § 175.05

It’s a felony when the defendant “is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when he commits the crime of falsifying business records in the second degree, and when his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.”

The underlying state crimes that he had intended to commit were misdemeanors and it may be that those statutes had run, but it would still be a felony under 175.10 even if the underlying crime is a misdemeanor. As it turns out, the statute had not run on the federal FEC crime, but that was also the more egregious crime – hiding the money from the voting public. And yes, that is a serious crime.

So, why was the Daniels testimony necessary? The jury had to understand why Trump wanted to bury the story to benefit the campaign. He had called her a liar in public, and the defense attorneys (stupidly) doubled down in calling her a liar in opening statement. The defense then they had to bring out details about the sexual encounter in order to shore up her credibility in response to the defense’s attack inside the courtroom and Trump’s years of attacks in the media. This serves as a defense of the prosecutions investigation, and also attacks the the defense’s credibility.

It was stupid for the defense to deny the sexual encounter. And the cross-examination was even more stupid. They assumed she was stupid, and that line about her “faking sex” or whatever on film for a living was just embarrassing. Conservatives think they won the day slut-shaming her and calling her a “prostitute,” but the jury is an educated liberal group from NY City and they aren’t impressed with that crap.

And ultimately, it doesn’t even really matter of Daniels was telling the truth!

Cohen is another matter. We know he’s a liar and has lied under oath. But then so has Trump. The question is the motivation to lie – the context. Lawyers so often assume that when they’ve caught a witness in a lie that a jury is going to dismiss everything else that witness has to say. Not always the case. Especially not an educated jury. The average human being tells three lies a day according to the American Psychology Association, and contexts and motivations bring out certain lies. The prosecution brought out the earlier lying and contextualized it, and set up the context for why he isn’t lying today. Did the defense destroy that context? They established that Cohen doesn’t like Trump anymore. But they will need more than that. They have to come up with a reason that Cohen would have acted on his own, and then why he would lie about it when he really has nothing to gain at this point.

The defense in the meantime really didn’t think through their cross-examination, as this hilarious exchange shows. But the jury does have to believe that Cohen was acting under Trump’s authority to convict Trump – beyond a reasonable doubt. I’ll have to read more of the testimony to have a sense as to whether that’s likely.

“He wasn’t thinking about Melania. This was all about the campaign.”

If the jury believes even half of Cohen’s testimony, the FEC violation elements are met.

“This distinguishes him from those witnesses who remain firmly in Trump’s orbit. They, when asked, said that Trump was deeply worried about the effect that the Stormy Daniels story would have on his relationship with Melania. Westerhout, under further questioning, admitted that it was an assumption she had made — not a worry she ever heard Trump express.“

…..

“Women are gonna hate me. Women will hate me. Guys, they think it’s cool. But this is gonna be a disaster for the campaign,” Cohen recalled Trump saying.

Cohen went on to say that Trump was polling “very poorly with women,” and that, coupled with Access Hollywood, Trump said that it was a “disaster,” telling Cohen: “Get control over it.”

…….

Cohen testifies that Trump told him that the “locker room talk” defense came from Melania.

Recall: Trump’s defense of the Access Hollywood tape is that it was bravado — locker room talk — embarrassing and unfortunate but not reflective of any broader pattern of behavior. It’s not clear why Trump wanted to persuade Cohen that Melania came up with that response.

…….

Cohen testifies to this by saying that he made the tape in part to demonstrate to Pecker that “Mr. Trump was going to be paying him back,” and to ensure that Pecker remained “loyal to Mr. Trump.”

He tells Hoffinger that it was the only time he ever secretly recorded Trump.

There’s an obvious credibility issue: Cohen did something very invasive and untrustworthy by secretly recording his boss. Hoffinger is trying to inoculate jurors against potential cross-examination on that issue by having Cohen walk through his thought process.

…….

Hoffinger is having Cohen explain the dirty details of what it meant to be Trump’s fixer: his job was in part to “renegotiate” bills from vendors and contractors with companies that had performed tasks for the Trump Organization.

More simply put: Cohen’s job was to cajole, coax, and threaten vendors to accept lower payment.

He says that he did this with law firms when Trump “didn’t believe that the invoice was fair, reasonable, or justified.” He also tells Hoffinger that he did it with around 50 vendors to Trump University, the education venture that was found to have been a fraud. Cohen says that Trump was “not going to fund the balance” of what Trump University owed, so instead they paid twenty percent of what was owed to each.

…….

He says that Trump told Pecker at the meeting: “Anything negative comes, you let Michael know.”

As Trump decided to run, Cohen recalls, he understood that his past relations with women would be an issue. Cohen says that Trump told him to “be prepared” because a “lot of women” would be coming forward.

Med students avoiding red states

The real depressing statistic is that interest in residency programs in general is dropping slightly, probably because students in red states don’t want to leave home, but just know that they can’t practice ethically under the conditions the extremist politics have generated. The laws put them into the position of having to break either the criminal code or the Hippocratic Oath. So programs are slightly down nationally because that includes red state students who would study in blue state schools. But the drops are exponentially larger in red state schools.

This is just the beginning. It’s already affecting other industries, and Texas is very likely going to lose much of the tech advantage it had built up over the years. Even many young Republicans don’t want to live in the Gilead states.

You can read the article here.

“….the number of applicants to residency programs in states with near-total abortion bans declined by 4.2% between 2024 and 2023, compared with a 0.6% drop in states where abortion remains legal.”

“The AAMC analysis found that the number of applicants to OB-GYN residency programs in abortion-ban states dropped by 6.7%, compared with a 0.4% increase in states where abortion remains legal. For internal medicine, the drop observed in abortion-ban states was over five times as much as in states where abortion is legal.”

Is Aileen Cannon corrupt or just incompetent?

As you know, she has basically put off anything happening in the trial because there are motions pending and she seems to be overwhelmed. I guess. As one of the commentator says she should just rule on them. Whether it’s intentional or she is just in over her head, she has basically assured that if Trump is elected this trial will never happen. It has been suggested that no judge should preside over a case involving someone who appointed them.

There is a growing chorus of calls for her to be removed from the case, and even to be removed as judge. Two of her own clerks have quit in protest. She has only presided over a couple of trials and certainly never over one involving classified documents. But that’s not what amazes me. What amazes me is the lack of legal expert defenders. Usually a judge would have at least a few. In fact, other than reporting on her rulings, the right wing media is dead silent. I waited a few days and then went down the rabbit hole of wandering the terrain of right wing media for conservative academic legal defenders. I went to Fox and OAN. I went to National Review. American Spectator. Human Events. Commentary. Even most elected Republicans are kind of muted on the ruling – one exception is Rep. Steube in Florida as reported by Newsmax. Otherwise, she really has no defenders.

And this is the case where Trump really has no defense. The law says what it says. He had the documents. He was given multiple opportunities to return them. He refused multiple time and lied over and over again about what he had. He forced an FBI raid to recover them. He shared documents with people without security clearance. It’s really open and shut.

The right to a speedy trial is not the defendant’s alone. It is also the general public’s. She is not taking that seriously at all. Is she deliberately pushing the trial back or is she just incompetent? It doesn’t really matter. It’s banana republic corruption.

Dave and I talk about Biden withholding offensive ammunition from Netanyahu; campus protest aftermath; Stormy testimony at the Trump trial; Judge Merchan’s jail threat; and MTG’s slap down in the House

Trump’s attorneys made a motion for mistrial because of the sordid details Stormy Daniel’s went into and in denying the motion a clearly frustrated Judge Merchan told them that they should have objected to the testimony when it was happening. Technically he’s right – you can’t complain about it after the fact. The Judge’s comments are probably not going to improve Trump’s relationship with his attorneys as he’s been pressing his attorneys to be more aggressive. But in the video I explain why I think it was sound strategy to not object in front of the jury. That being said, Trump’s attorneys should have called for a sidebar and then objected in chambers. Instead they just let it happen. All that being said, I think the jury is focused on the issues judging from the reporters accounts of when they’ve been taking notes. Daniels’s testimony is there simply to verify that Trump had some very real issues to hide from the voters – whether or not they were true (it doesn’t matter whether Daniels was telling the truth, only that she had the story to tell, and this is why a number of legal experts are calling Trump’s attorney’s cross-examination a “disaster” as it only underscored the point).

Meanwhile, we also discuss Margerie Taylor Greene’s amateur hour motion to remove Johnson as Speaker, and she got slammed down but hard! 10 Republicans voted along with her and 33 Democrats who got to make their own political points as Johnson now owes the Democrats a huge favor because their promise to save his ass (by not running their own candidate) allowed the vast majority of Republicans to vote for sanity.

Seriously Hill reporters?

The Hill’s headline reads: “Trump attorney blights Stormy Daniels’s credibility in tempestuous cross-exam.”

The following is taken from the article:

Across three hours of questioning over two days, the defense attorney insinuated Daniels’s work in porn made her ready to cash in. 

“You have a lot of experience in making phony stories about sex appear to be real, correct?” Necheles asked Thursday. 

That is among the stupidest questions I’ve seen asked in court and yet it’s the first the Hill highlights as an example of “blighting” her credibility.

As to all sides in the university events across the country, this Rabbi has provided the most profound voice I have heard thus far

Has Netanyahu gone insane?

I support Israel’s right to defend itself, but Hamas has accepted the ceasefire deal. However, even while looking over the deal, the Netanyahu has the IDF making strikes in eastern Rafah. The U.S. is making tepid protests. Netanyahu is caving to hardliners in his coalition according to reports – hardliners who care nothing about the hostages. Civilians have been warned to leave Rafah, but where do they go? That was the last place of refuge.

Meanwhile, agencies say this will bring on famine and mass suffering. It’s insane. If Biden wants to hold office, he has to break away from Netanyahu now. Support the country, break from the crazy.