Michael Cohen, star witness
By
Byron York
April 9, 2024 3:34 pm
.
MICHAEL COHEN, STAR WITNESS. If all goes as scheduled, former President Donald Trump’s trial will begin next Monday. It stems from the indictment by the elected Democratic district attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, and it is what the New York Times calls a “paperwork” case — that is, it concerns business records, in this instance records Trump’s company kept of a nondisclosure agreement he made with porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign.
It’s an astonishingly weak case. There have been many analyses making that point, so this is not the place to go into every aspect of the case’s many flaws. Here’s a short version: 1) The core crime alleged, falsifying business records, is a misdemeanor. 2) To turn the misdemeanor into a felony, Bragg had to claim that Trump falsified records in the act of committing another crime — but Bragg has not charged Trump with any other crime. 3) Bragg “stacked” the charges to come up with 34 felony counts against Trump based on what was essentially one payoff. 4) Bragg’s effort to boost the case from misdemeanor to felony depends on a highly debatable reading of campaign finance law. 5) Bragg’s star witness is, in the New York Times’s words, “a disbarred lawyer who served prison time after pleading guilty to violating campaign finance laws, evading taxes, making false statements to a bank, and lying to Congress.”
There’s too much to go into here. So this newsletter will just look at the last factor, the disbarred lawyer with the long rap sheet. He is Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer/fixer who has now, after pandemic-related early release from prison, gone full time into the anti-Trump business. Start with the various reasons Cohen has been disbarred:
more
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/2959839/michael-cohen-star-witness/
