Look, if we start charging every crime they committed, we’re going to be here all day…
I think it shows how desperate the defense is to try to cast Trump as the victim in all this. The poor little billionaire, that the nasty lawyer stole from! If the jury notices that Trump stiffed Red Finch in the first place, he ends up looking slightly less sympathetic.
That’s my perspective as well.
My take: If I shorted a vendor at work, both my company and the vendor would consider that I stole from them. If I had also negotiated the vendor down, then just my company would feel that way.
But I can appreciate other people might see it differently. It is murky when, as you point out, everyone is a crook.
I think it is more than that. The defense seems to be:
- Cohen paid Stormy off on his own initiative to curry favor with the boss. Trump wouldn’t have paid her since the story was “false”.
- Cohen recouped the cost by over-charging for vanilla legal services, just like he admits to doing with Red Finch.
- He got caught, blames Trump, and is trying to bring Trump down with him.
It is BS, of course, but that’s all they have to work with (except for calling Costello who had nothing to offer and over-shadowed Cohen’s cross-examination).
But over-charging for Red Finch is the only truth in the defense and it will be enough meat for the true believers.
I mean whiles that’s true, and yeah it’s one of the countless of examples where just one tiny incidental detail at the edge of a Trump scandal would alone be fatal for any other presidential candidate.
But also that doesn’t matter, this is a criminal trial the only thing that matters is that 12 people believe Cohen and the other witnesses about what Trump didm
For the first time I can see a guilty verdict as very likely. Can’t rule out a Trumpist juror who will nullify, but there’s a glaring lack of a defense here. “He’s a crook too” wouldn’t get me to vote for acquittal, don’t think it will work with a jury of 12 New Yorkers either.
There’s an interesting twist to New York’s closing arguments; they do them in opposite order of the openings. So, the defense goes first, and then the DA goes second.
(Usually, the prosecution gives the first closing argument, then the defense goes, then the prosecution gets a rebuttal)
That means that the District Attorney’s office will get to respond to every point Trump’s team tries to raise. Apparently, the judge is planning to allot all day Tuesday for the presentations. Should be fun.
I mean, the prosecution showed that Trump knew Cohen was a crook and was fine with it as long as he was working in Trump’s interests.
But this story doesn’t account for all of the testimony from David Pecker, which I find to be very compelling. I hope the jury will too.
I heard several accounts of people noisily entering the courtroom mid-trial and annoying the judge. I’m surprised the bailiff doesn’t lock the door between breaks.
Yeah, I discussed that earlier when talking about Cohen and his credibility. They showed that Trump was intimately involved in these payout schemes with other women. Why then would he be entirely out of the loop this one time?
Come to think of it, the fact that Cohen stole $30,000 “from Trump” kind of proves he probably wouldn’t have dropped $130,000 on another Trump pay off if he didn’t already know Trump was going to pay him back. It’s clear that Cohen is highly money-motivated, and people like that don’t just give away large sums just for funsies.
Trump is now throwing his bookkeeper under the bus via his twuthsocial posts - like -
Let’s put the President in jail for 150 years because a LEGAL EXPENSE to a lawyer was called, by a bookkeeper, a LEGAL EXPENSE to a lawyer!What else could you call it. Crooked Joe Biden Witch Hunt. Election Interference. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!
and
When the Disgraceful District Attorney and his Thugs, WITH FULL APPROVAL, I assume, by the Highly Conflicted Judge, Juan Merchan, and the Crooked Joe Biden Administration, who are leading the Trial for ELECTION INTERFERENCE purpose, keep talking about the “bookkeeping error” or “crime,” they are referring to the fact that a bookkeeper, with zero influence from or discussion with me, correctly called the payment of a Legal Expense to a lawyer - a Legal Expense. In other words, I am being prosecuted because a bookkeeper, who I had no contact with, marked down, from a dropdown menu in the ledger, a Legal Expense to a lawyer as “Legal Expense.” What the hell is wrong with that? And, what else would you call it?….
Are these twuths hints at what the defense closing will be?
I think they are blatant attempts to mess with the Jury - there’s even one stating what ‘he’ would do if he were in the Jury box…
I’m a bookkeeper. If my boss told me to send payments of $34K every month to Joe Blow, the only question I’d ask is what account should I charge this to. If I was provided with an invoice from an attorney, I’d probably not even ask that question, just get the boss to initial the invoice and confirm that this must be a legal expense.
Neither of those scenarios are an error.
This is perhaps the dumbest approach Trump has taken yet. If the recorded legal expense actually was a legal expense, then show us the legal services rendered. The bookkeeper has nothing to do with it.
It’s like he had the brilliant idea to blame the bookkeeper, but then realized that he couldn’t shift the blame unless he admitted that it wasn’t actually a legal expense. So he… tried anyway? Bizarre.
He’s essentially admitting almost all the major components of the crime. This money was paid, and it was paid under the guise of a “legal expense”, and the records show that.
All that remains, then, is to show that there was no legitimate legal expense, that this was a payoff (and I think that’s been established beyond a reasonable doubt), and to show that Trump knew all about it.
That last part is the only element of the crime not clearly established beyond a reasonable doubt, as it all comes down to how credible the jury finds Cohen vs. Trump. He’s lucky that the jury has been instructed not to read about the trial on their own, because this flop-sweat performance would probably put them over the top on that last question.
So his Truthings can’t be used in court? I’m guessing not.
A dog whistle in hopes that someone on the jury is A)exposed to his posts, even though I’m sure they’re told to avoid anything related to the case and B)MAGA enough to respond to it. (Though it they’re MAGA enough to respond to it, they’re probably MAGA enough to ignore the courts direction to avoid it in the first place).
Exactly the same for me. Normal bills just get expensed as you’d expect them to, anything I’m unsure about, I ask the boss and he tells me how it should be entered.
Also, while this is going to be different from business to business, even if I think it should be categorized as some specific type of expense and even if I ask our CPA and they agree, in the end, it’s the boss’ money and he can do what he wants with it.
And, with that, it’s the boss’ signature on that tax return. I may have entered the numbers into the books and the CPA prepared the return, but the boss, like Trump, signed it.
And, even more importantly, probably the MOST important is that disclaimer he used to talk about. The best most perfect disclaimer ever. If that’s the same disclaimer that my CPAs put on reports/returns they create for me, it says 'this report is correct based on the numbers given to us, we didn’t check to make sure the numbers given to us were correct" In other words, garbage in, garbage out.
That disclaimer is probably earning it’s keep right now, helping to shield some (likely) innocent bookkeepers from this mess.
TLDR, That disclaimer he used to brag about is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Telling the world that if the tax returns are wrong, it’s Trump’s fault.
In this CNN story from 2018, Trump discloses payment to Cohen in financial form, they link to a financial form that has the following footnote:
WashingtonCNN —
President Donald Trump acknowledged for the first time that he repaid his lawyer Michael Cohen more than $100,000 for expenses Cohen incurred during the 2016 presidential election, according to a financial disclosure form .
The document did not explicitly state what the payments were for. But Trump’s lawyers have previously said that Trump reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 hush money payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels.
[snip]
“In 2016, expenses were incurred by one of Donald J. Trump’s attorneys, Michael Cohen,” read a footnote on the form, which was released by the Office of Government Ethics. “Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement of those expenses and Mr. Trump fully reimbursed Mr. Cohen in 2017. The category of value would be $100,001-$250,000 and the interest rate would be zero.”
I haven’t looked at the linked document, but if the footnote in quotes is correct, a payment in the right range was made to Cohen and called a reimbursement, right?
I haven’t followed all the details, is Trump saying the the money paid to Cohen wasn’t a reimbursement? How do you reimburse a lawyer for legal services? I get that there may be out-of-pocket expenses that a lawyer may bill, but services or fees?