Trump lawyer's 'meaningless' grilling of witness had 'little bearing on the facts': expert

Former President Donald Trump's defense lawyer Todd Blanche is engaging in "meaningless" histrionics with his latest cross-examination of Michael Cohen, argued Pace University law professor and former New York prosecutor Bennett Gershman in conversation with Salon's Marina Villeneuve.

Cohen, Trump's former attorney and fixer, has been the star witness of the Manhattan criminal hush money trial, and has been subject to several days of intense cross-examination.

“The defense is engaged in a theatrical play that has little bearing on the facts,” said Gershman. “The heavy-throttled attack by the defense on Cohen’s credibility, his motives for testifying against Trump, and his despising Trump, is really meaningless, as the prosecutors will argue in summation to the jury. Everything Cohen says about adulating, and then despising Trump, is bolstered and corroborated by massive other evidence.”

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Moreover, Gershman, added, Cohen was really just an "extra" whose centrality to the trial is a bit overstated: jurors already have “the ‘catch and kill’ scheme to bury the Stormy Daniels story by buying her off; the payment to Daniels; the voluminous records showing the way the payment was falsely disguised as a legitimate business expense; the fact that the payments were legally required to be documented as political campaign expenses” — all through independent evidence unrelated to Cohen.

After days of trying to undermine Cohen on cross examination on Thursday, Blanche finally struck some kind of blow when he established that a phone call to Trump's bodyguard Keith Schiller in 2016 may have been about a different topic than the hush payments, as Cohen had previously recalled.

The prosecution is expected to rest following the end of Cohen's testimony. The defense plans to call an election law expert, and may also call Cohen's former attorney Robert Costello following his testimony against Cohen in a House committee hearing earlier in the week.