Donald Trump's lead attorney, Todd Blanche, may have not done his client any favors during his closing argument on Tuesday and now the damage may be done in the 34-felony count trial that is now in the hands of the jurors.
According to Washington Post political analyst Dana Milbank, Blanche's rhetorical style likely made the 12 jurors feel like he thought they are idiots and then he compounded the problem at the end by earning a rebuke from Judge Juan Merchan.
According to Milbank, "Donald Trump’s lawyers ended their defense of the former president in a way uniquely suited to their client: with a ludicrous and easily debunked lie."
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Before getting to what he called a "whopper" of a lie, Milbank pointed to Blanche concluding multiple statements with a dramatic pause before adding "period" 13 separate times.
As an example, he offered the attorney telling the jury, "The payments were compensation to him — period,” followed by “There is no falsification of business records — period, followed again by “There is no way that you can find that President Trump knew about this payment at the time it was made without believing the words of Michael Cohen — period.”
"Did Blanche realize he used that device 13 times in his closing argument — question mark? Or that his own delivery, like his client’s, relied rather more on exclamation points? He treated jurors as if they were deaf or slow," he suggested.
Putting a pin in Blanche's performance, he noted that the attorney delivered what he called "a final, audacious whopper" by telling jurors, “You cannot send somebody to prison — you cannot convict somebody — based upon the words of Michael Cohen.”
"As Blanche well knows, these jurors don’t have anything to do with deciding punishment, prison or otherwise, and the judge had specifically ordered lawyers not to include anything about punishment in their arguments," he argued before adding, "here in the reality-based community, a lie is a lie, as Blanche himself acknowledged."
"It was a lie to tell the jurors the 'Access Hollywood' debacle was something that 'happens all the time.' It was a lie to tell them there was “nothing unusual' about the Trump campaign’s conspiring with the National Enquirer publisher to buy the silence of Trump’s accusers, hide the origin of the funds and conceal the transactions from the Federal Election Commission," he wrote concluding, "Why tell such obvious lies? That’s just how his client rolls. Period."
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