Former President Donald Trump has a number of defenses planned at his criminal hush money trial in Manhattan, and one of the biggest is trying to discredit his former attorney Michael Cohen, who arranged the alleged payments and will be testifying about them at trial.
But there's a straightforward way Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg can clap back at that, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told MSNBC's Ari Melber on Friday: pull out the evidence showing there's 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," said Weissmann. "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."
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Furthermore, Weissmann continued, Trump "wrote the checks. 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?"
"Yeah," said Melber.
"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."
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