You are likely not mistaken. I haven’t been paying too much attention to the exact dollar amounts. I somehow got the impression that there was a one-to-one correspondence but I’m probably wrong about that.
Thank you, much appreciated. The bit from the judge’s instructions noting that the lawyers are essentially stewards of their client’s case and should not be seen themselves as evidence one way or another is on point, I think. I have more questions but I don’t want to hijack.
Back to the subject of the thread — I am very, very curious to see what kind of defense Trump’s team will attempt to mount once it’s their turn. Probably very little. Assuming that’s the case, I hope the jury will be able to see that, without any need for prompting per my uninformed speculation above.
There is evidence in Allen weisselberg’s handwriting that shows the amount of the loan, then adding in an amount to get the amount of the loan clear of the taxes that would be paid by cohen, then a bonus that cohen was owed took the amount to 400+k. They then divided it by 12 and came up with the false line in the business ledger.
I imagine they will have some paid expert witnesses testify that this is just normal business contract and accounting stuff. Nothing unusual. Done all the time.
Per cnn:
Deborah Tarasoff testified that Trump didn’t always sign checks. Sometimes “he would write void and send it back,” she said.
“If he didn’t want to sign it, he didn’t sign it,” Tarasoff said.
Asked how she knew it was him, she said, “it was signed in Sharpie and it was black and that’s what he uses.”
Tarasoff said that even when CFO Allen Weisselberg would approve them, Trump did not always sign the checks.
Trump attorney Emil Bove and Susan Necheles turned with a smile to the former president at Tarasoff’s comment about his preference for Sharpies.
Deborah Tarasoff is testifying that when Trump took office, they’d send checks he needed to sign to the White House via FedEx.
Trump was the only authorized signatory on his personal account through his presidency, she says.
The checks were returned, Tarasoff says, and she would “pull them apart, mail the check, and file the backup.”
Given that “political targeting” is some part of Trump’s defense, I’d be curious whether it would be admissible for the prosecution to mention that it was Trump’s own government and appointees that prosecuted Cohen for these same crimes?
Because the jury selection has hopefully weeded out anyone clearly partisan toward Trump. The tactics that help him get supporters out of a crowd of millions of random citizens won’t work in this situation.
And as I pointed out before, he has already shown a failure to convince a jury in a different New York case.
While I totally agree with @Procrustus review of standard legal instructions on the issue
I still think that you can obliquely reference this. You can’t re-argue the judge’s ruling, but some line like
is probably ok. It’s vague enough that you aren’t calling out the defense attorneys or trying to argue about the ruling, but certainly references the effort the defense had made to fight their introduction at trial.
That’s scienter
Without being in the courtroom, I would say that I’ve never bought the idea that “Poor Donald, just signed whatever cheques that awful Allen Weissenburg put in front of him.”
I think that they have to get Weissenburg on the stand to close the loop. He could use the fresh air.
Right. There are millions out there who already feel that merely telling him to sit there and shut up is tyranny. And they are just waiting for proof of it.
Trump is a complete moron who certainly doesn’t have 74 million supporters, nor was it his powers of persuasion that got their votes. A majority of those voters would vote for an orange marmoset if it had an “R” after its name (as indeed they did) for ideological reasons like being anti-tax, anti-regulation, just plain anti-Democrat, or wishing to pack the Supreme Court with like-minded ideologues.
Trump’s repetitive and laughably juvenile speaking style doesn’t appeal to anyone with an IQ over about 80 unless what they approve of is his childish scorched-earth rhetoric. His real acolytes are a tiny minority of those who cast their votes for him. Trump himself, absent his lawyers, couldn’t convince an impartial jury of anything unless they were all first-graders, which is why I so much would like to see him try.
It took an election campaign with speeches, campaign ads, social media misinformation, and you know falsifying business records to kill stories like the Stormy Daniels affair, to convince enough people to vote for him. He didn’t convince them by his amazing charisma and rhetorical skills. I am 100% sure he would come across as completely unhinged and very guilty to jurors if he gave the closing address.
Trump actually has a cult of personality followers. More than a few. Maybe not 74 million but you also don’t have to go too far to find one. I have yet to talk to someone who doesn’t have at least one in their extended family.
Each judge will draw the line a little differently. I agree with you that this might slide by.
Bottom line, though, the jury knows which side is trying to show them what happened and which side is trying to prevent that.
Without Trump or Melania testifying, I don’t see how they could go with the “Trump was sparing his wife’s feelings, as she had no idea Trump would ever do such a thing.”
That defense is really not going to fly.
She knew he would do such a thing because she was the other woman herself. The defense would be that he didn’t want her to know because she would be furious at him.
For what it’s worth, my question came out of some speculation by a talking head that Trump’s team, in a desperation move, might start injecting utter nonsense into the proceedings, aggressively idiotic motions and objections, essentially legal horseshit, in a hail-mary attempt to get a mistrial declared. The general consensus in response was that the judge is not an fool and would effectively rein this in; I then asked whether the prosecution, in their closing, could reference those tactics and describe them for what they were, i.e. procedural sabotage in the absence of a real defense. My question was not about the defense attempting to introduce evidence and being barred; my question was about the scenario where the defense attempts to commit legal arson in the courtroom. But based on what you posted about jury instructions, the lawyer’s hypothetical shenanigans would almost certainly be out of bounds, no matter how extreme, because what’s supposed to matter to the jury is the evidence, period, or the lack of it. I’m satisfied with that.
Tarasoff is done and the next witness will be tomorrow.
I am guessing Weissenburg who has to be sprung from the clink.
Please don’t read too much into anything I say when I don’t comment on trial procedure in NY state courts. I don’t know about it. I can comment generally about trial dynamics and general principles that I think are shared by most common law jurisdictions, but as soon as you get into the details of trial process, I will be cautious about commenting, because there can be variations, even in courts that are based on the common law trial process. What happens in one court might strike someone from another jurisdiction as odd.
For example, I mentioned earlier that side-bars in the US sense don’t occur in Canadian courts, because our approach would be to say that’s a breach of the open court principle of fair trials. Procrustus commented that in the US, it’s not considered a breach of open court, because the discussion is transcribed and will be part of the court’s record. Both jurisdictions rely on open court and fair trials as fundamental principles, but as soon as you get into details, there can be variations.
Similarly, the trial judge instructions that Procrustus quoted say that the judge is not to comment at all on the evidence. The Anglo-Canadian tradition is that the trial judge can summarise the evidence for the jury. Two different approaches, both based on the idea that the jury is the fact-finder, but giving different weight to the powers of the judge.
Each jurisdiction will have its own approach to the same issue. Sometimes two jurisdictions will take the same approach, sometimes they will take different approaches. So I just comment on what strikes me as general issues, but I try to avoid commenting on the details of trial process.
And, as always, IANAUSL.