Donald Trump wasted a “winnable case” in which he could have had a hung jury or gotten away with just a misdemeanor, legal experts have argued.
The former president was found guilty by a jury of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the so-called ‘secret money’ trial in New York.
Trump covered up $130,000 in payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to hide extramarital affairs and now faces the unlikely prospect of jail time.
But veteran attorneys argue that District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case had weaknesses, despite 200 pieces of evidence and weeks of witness testimony.
Donald Trump after being found guilty on all 34 counts in his hush money trial in Manhattan Criminal Court
Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, detailed in an analysis for the New York Times how Trump’s defense was undone by two critical errors.
The first was to use a defense that amounted to “a disorderly cacophony of denials and personal attacks” rather than a tightly woven narrative.
Trump has used this strategy of denying everything and attacking everyone for years on television, social media and his boisterous and vulgar campaign rallies.
But Mariotti said it was not suitable for a courtroom and torpedoed his chances of winning, or at least of bringing the case to a draw that could be called a victory.
Mariotti explained that the prosecution’s case hinged on the testimony of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and ‘fixer,’ which was the only evidence that Trump knew of the plot to falsify the records.
Trump was in the White House when the false records were created and could have argued that Cohen and the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, hatched the plan on their own while he was busy being president.
Cohen’s credibility is ruined, he is known to hate Trump and has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and to charges of bank fraud, tax evasion and campaign finance violations.
“You don’t have to be a lawyer to see how this could be a powerful legal defense,” Mariotti wrote.
Trump covered up $130,000 in payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to hide extramarital affairs and now faces the unlikely prospect of jail time.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass (right) succeeded despite a case with exploitable weaknesses
Trump’s lawyers tried to do this, but the trial lasted weeks with a dizzying array of witnesses and evidence for the jury to follow.
Todd Blanche, who presented the defense’s closing argument, even referred to it, but his speech to the jury lasted three hours.
“The problem is that the defense raised so many other points and fought so many other things, that it failed to focus the jury on the weaknesses of the prosecution’s case and instead tried to fight everything and everyone, even when it won little. by making That’s It,” Mariotti wrote.
“The defense needs its own story, and in my experience, at trial the side that tells the simplest story usually wins.”
Team Trump’s second fatal mistake, Mariotti explained, was sticking to Trump’s usual policy of “denying everything.”
Mariotti wrote that if he were leading the defense, he would have gotten Trump to admit his affair with Daniels and remove her from the board.
Instead, the prosecution further complicated the trial by trying to prove that the affair occurred, and jurors were sympathetic to Daniels’ testimony.
Trump’s defense failed again on the “keep it simple” maxim when questioning Cohen on the stand for days about every little point.
In response, prosecutors presented dozens of documents that supported Cohen’s testimony and made it seem more credible and the case stronger.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (center) speaks with prosecutor Joshua Steinglass (left), next to him, at a triumphant press conference following the verdict.
All the defense had to do was attack the parts of his testimony that were not supported by the numerous texts, documents and audio recordings and present him as an unreliable witness.
—It may be that a not guilty verdict was always a remote possibility. But if the defense had been more effective, one of the jury’s two attorneys could have voted for acquittal, all that is needed for a hung jury,” Mariotti wrote.
Trump’s lawyers also took an ‘all or nothing’ approach that called for a complete victory with no chance of escaping with a misdemeanor.
If they had let the judge tell the jury that they could find him guilty of a lesser charge, they might have committed to that instead of felonies.
‘Mr Trump’s team was a reflection of his client, always attacking and never backing down. That playbook has worked for Trump time and time again. In this trial and in a Manhattan courtroom, the attitude and strategy backfired,” Mariotti wrote.
Trump will be sentenced on July 11.
