This week, jury selection started for Donald Trump in the hush-money case brought by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg.
Bragg has hit Trump with 34 felony counts for falsifying his business records.
This entire case hangs on Michael Cohen, which could be a complete and utter disaster for Bragg if the witness winds up being impeached.
Serial Perjurer
We are all familiar with the term “impeachment” as it relates to the office of the president.
What you may not know, however, is that witnesses in cases can also be impeached.
This is simply when another witness comes forward with a statement under oath that can be proven and contradicts the statement by another witness.
Bragg’s case was crafted behind the idea that Trump directed Cohen to categorize the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels as legal expenses rather than paying what amounted to blackmail to keep Stormy Daniels quiet regarding their alleged affair.
This case would normally be a misdemeanor that would result in a fine, penalties, back taxes, and a slap on the wrist before Trump would have been sent on his way.
However, because Bragg took so long to bring the case against Trump, in what many believe was solely politically motivated when it became clear that Trump was going to run again, the statute of limitations ran out on the misdemeanor charges.
So, Bragg turned this into a 34-count felony indictment by stacking ledger entries to form the charges.
The case is weak at best and was avoided by the Department of Justice, as it had learned its lesson on this front after prosecuting John Edwards in 2012 in a virtually identical case.
Edwards, a former Democrat presidential candidate, had been charged with six counts related to third-party payments being given for hush money as a campaign finance violation. The jury found Edwards not guilty on one count and deadlocked on the other five.
Since the DOJ did not touch the case, Bragg decided to make this his career case, but his fate will rest in the hands of Michael Cohen, as he is the third party who allegedly routed the payments to Stormy Daniels.
Constitutional and legal expert Jonathan Turley penned an op-ed in the New York Post on this very subject, stating, in part, “Cohen has a long record as a legal thug who has repeatedly lied when it served his interests. He has a knack for selling his curious skill set to powerful figures like Trump and now Bragg.
“For those of us who have been critics of Cohen from when he was still working for Trump, it is mystifying that anyone would call him to the stand to attest to anything short of the time of day . . . and even then most of us would check our watches.”
Legally, the case is about as weak as it gets, but Trump has an angry judge and a jury pool that likely hates his guts, so don’t expect miracles in terms of the jury seeing through Cohen’s lies, which means that Trump’s likely route to defeating these charges will have to come through the appeals process.
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Author: G. McConway
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