George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley criticized MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday for defending Michael Cohen’s admitted theft of $30,000 from former President Donald Trump’s company.
Cohen, a one-time attorney for Trump, admitted during cross-examination on Monday that he took the $30,000 from the Trump Organization by overstating the amount of money needed to reimburse him for expenses related to a tech company.
Turley took issue with O’Donnell calling the theft a way to “rebalance” a bonus that Cohen was allegedly owed.
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“We had a host of another network yesterday actually coming out and saying Cohen was fantastic on the stand,” Turley told “America’s Newsroom” co-hosts Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino. “That even though Cohen said he stole the money, it was really just ‘self-help’ in him getting his bonus back.”
Perino interrupted Turley to play O’Donnell’s remarks about Cohen’s admission, who pled guilty to charges of lying to Congress in 2018 and who was accused of perjury by a federal judge.
“It didn’t really sound like stealing $30,000,” O’Donnell claimed. “It sounded like Michael Cohen doing the little that he could within that calculation to rebalance the bonus he thought he deserved and it still came out as less than the bonus he thought he deserved and the bonus he’d gotten the year before.”
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“That left many of us really dumbfounded, but I wrote about it this morning on the blog because I think that we need to see the serious aspect of what O’Donnell said, which is there is a level of delusion and denial that you heard in his words, is not going to be unique,” Turley told Perino after the clip aired. “There are members of this jury that actually cited MSNBC as their main news source and they likely are bringing that same baggage in. So, what people see in that courtroom could be heavily distorted by what they brought to the courtroom before. Most everyone else, including people on other networks, have said it has been a disaster and we ultimately have to deal with the fact that this guy just admitted to grand larceny.”
MSNBC hosts and guests routinely hyped the claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. MSNBC repeatedly had Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who often made claims about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, on the air. The Steele Dossier, which was used to further allegations of collusion, was later discredited.
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MSNBC host Jen Psaki, formerly the White House press secretary for the Biden administration, claimed in a book that President Joe Biden did not glance at his watch during a ceremony honoring servicemembers killed in an Aug. 26, 2021, bombing as American forces were evacuating from Kabul. Psaki later retracted the claim.
First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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