Former President Donald Trump's legal team made a critical error in their attempt to defend against the criminal hush payment case in Manhattan, former Trump lawyer Tim Parlatore explained in a panel on CNN Thursday evening.
Trump is now the only former U.S. president in history to be convicted of a felony, and his sentencing will take place on July 11, after which he is expected to appeal. He still has three other criminal federal and state cases pending, although they are all varying levels of unlikely to go to trial before the November election.
"Give us your reaction to this historic moment," said anchor Wolf Blitzer.
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"So I'm going to focus on the legal, not the political, aspects, and I say that this case, strikes me from the beginning, is an incredibly defensible case that was not well-defended," said Parlatore.
The big problem, he continued, is that "the amount of time that the defense spent talking about Karen McDougal and 'catch and kill,' and all of these other things that had nothing to do with the actual charge of the falsified business records. And I think that they really fell into the trap of fighting all these things they didn't need to, where it's easier to just kinda concede all that stuff and focus in on this right here."
Parlatore, who told Blitzer that until yesterday he would have bet all his money on a hung jury, added that "it surprised me a little bit how fast they came to a verdict."
"It also surprises me the unanimity of counts, obviously, the unanimity of the vote, but guilty of every single count is something that I was not expect that figured if they came back with a guilty verdict to at least be split, maybe they would try and come to some type of Solomonic splitting of saying, okay, we'll find them guilty of counts up to the amount of the reimbursement but at a minimum, the part where Weisselberg says that it's a bonus or fee to Michael Cohen, well, that one's not really a false count. And so the fact that they came guilty across the board like that does surprise me, and I think it speaks to me, it speaks to the fact that the prosecution had a good theory, a good theme that they carried straight through very long, but the defense didn't have that same thing."
Watch the video below or at the link.
Tim Parlatore explains how Trump messed up his defense www.youtube.com