Michael Cohen is “the human embodiment of reasonable doubt,” the “MVP of liars” and “the GLOAT: the greatest liar of all time,” according to Donald Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche.
In his closing arguments to jurors in the former president’s hush money trial on Tuesday, Mr Blanche repeatedly accused Mr Trump’s one-time “fixer” of lying throughout his testimony and suggested that Manhattan prosecutors had willingly offered up a star witness “to commit perjury to lie to you.”
Cohen testified that Mr Trump directed him to pay $130,000 to Stormy Daniels weeks before Election Day in 2016 so she wouldn’t go public with a story about having sex with Mr Trump.
His four-day testimony during Mr Trump’s criminal trial gave jurors the connective tissue for the prosecution’s narrative: Mr Trump warned Cohen to “be prepared” for stories about women when he launched his 2016 campaign, then signed the checks that reimbursed him for his payment to Ms Daniels, all part of a plan drawn up by Mr Trump’s accountants and finalized from the White House, according to Cohen and Manhattan prosecutors.
But defense attorneys have depicted Cohen as an aggrieved, selfish and fame-hungry opportunist who “had an axe to grind because he didn’t appreciate what President Trump did or did not do for him after President Trump became President of the United States,” according to Mr Blanche.
Cohen is out “simply to protect Michael Cohen and no one else, period,” he said on Tuesday.
“He’s repeatedly, repeatedly, lied under oath,” he said. “He’s literally like an MVP of liars. He lies constantly.”
In his final statements, Mr Blanche pulled up a slide labeling him “the human embodiment of reasonable doubt.”
“You know how people say Tom Brady is the GOAT? The greatest of all time?” Mr Blanche said. “Michael Cohen is the GLOAT: The greatest liar of all time.”
Mr Blanche punctuated every segment of his multi-pronged attack on the prosecution’s case with a dig at the credibility of Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and campaign finance and tax violations.
Prosecutors must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Mr Trump not only falsified business records but did so with the intent to promote a conspiracy to corruptly influence the 2016 presidential election
Mr Trump’s reimbursement payments to Cohen were allegedly covered up across 34 business records: 12 ledger entries, Cohen’s 11 invoices, and 11 checks, most of which include Mr Trump’s Sharpie-inked signature.
He is charged with falsifying each of those. He has pleaded not guilty.
On the witness stand, Cohen addressed his past convictions and deceit head-on, and he readily admitted he was a “bully” and a liar for his former boss. “But to keep the loyalty and to do things that he had asked me to do, I violated my moral compass, and I suffered the penalty, as did my family,” he said earlier this month.
The trial isn’t about alleged affairs or nondisclosure agreements but about “whether and to what extent that President Trump, while he was living in the White House as the leader of the free world,” had committed that alleged fraud, according to Mr Blanche.
“There was no conspiracy to influence the 2016 election … The proof there doesn’t add up,” he told jurors on Tuesday. “You cannot convict President Trump on any crime beyond a reasonable doubt on the words of Michael Cohen.”
Cohen’s testimony was full of “lies, pure and simple,” he said.
In his closing statements to jurors, Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass argued that Mr Trump hired Cohen for the exact same qualities that the defense now want jurors to reject his testimony for.
Mr Trump’s distance from his “fixer” allowed him to maintain “plausible deniability” from the scheme at the center of the charges now facing the former president, he said. But in this case, it becomes “implausible deniability.”
He was “the guy with the boots on the ground who could bully people and threaten them with lawsuits, all at the defendant’s direction,” according to Mr Steinglass. “We didn’t choose Michael Cohen to be our witness. We didn’t pick him up at the witness store. The defendant chose Michael Cohen to be his fixer.”
Cohen’s testimony is not about “whether you like Cohen or want to go into business with Cohen but if he has useful reliable information about what went down in this case, he added.
“The truth is he was in the best position to know,” according to Mr Steinglass.
Cohen was the defendant’s “right hand” who could know about the “conspiracy to influence the election and the creation of false business records to hide that conspiracy,” he said.
His testimony provides “context and color” to the documents at the heart of the case, acting as “a tour guide through the physical evidence.”
“But those documents don’t lie, and they don’t forget,” he said.
