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Michael Cohen (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File), Donald Trump (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
Prosecutors opposing Donald Trump’s pretrial motions called it “intentionally inflammatory and totally meritless” to claim, as defense attorneys did, that allowing Michael Cohen to testify at the upcoming Manhattan hush-money criminal trial against the former president would be to “suborn perjury” in search of a conviction.
The Tuesday filing from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (D) responded to several of the Trump team’s positions ahead of trial — and the first response was on Cohen’s capacity as a witness in the case.
Cohen, the former Trump fixer who went to federal prison for his role in trying to cover up the Stormy Daniels affair and admittedly lied to Congress about a Moscow Trump Tower negotiations timeline out of loyalty to his ex-boss, has since refashioned himself as a truth-teller about Trump.
But before the about-face, Cohen, as Trump’s then-fixer just weeks before the 2016 election, used Essential Consultants, LLC, to pay porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet about a sexual dalliance she had with the candidate all the way back in 2006, just a year after he married Melania Trump.
According to the Manhattan DA, the Trump team’s “unprecedented argument” against Cohen’s participation in the case as a witness was closer to a “press release” than it was a “legal filing.”
Calling it an “obviously unsupportable request,” the DA said that Trump has asked the court to bar “witnesses from testifying at trial on the ground that defendant anticipates that he will disbelieve the witness’s expected testimony.”
Prosecutors pointed out that Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, Trump’s civil fraud trial judge, already “expressly found” Cohen “told the truth” and gave “credible” testimony in the fraud case that led to a $364 million penalty against Trump and his family business..
The Engoron finding on Cohen’s credibility, Bragg asserted, only shows Trump’s claims that Cohen perjured himself in the civil fraud case were nothing but bluster. Worse yet, the DA continued, you wouldn’t know about the Engoron finding from reading the defense’s arguments before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan.
“Justice Engoron’s finding that Cohen was credible and ‘told the truth’ on the stand […] rebuts defendant’s repeated assertion that Cohen instead committed perjury at that trial,” the filing said. “And it is misleading for defendant to argue otherwise without even advising this Court that Justice Engoron found Cohen’s testimony credible and truthful.”
Therefore, Bragg said, it was “totally meritless” of the defense to claim that Cohen’s testimony would mean the state could be suborning perjury.
“The suggestion that the People may suborn perjury by calling Cohen to testify,” Bragg wrote, “is intentionally inflammatory and totally meritless. The People expect Cohen’s testimony at trial to be both true and corroborated, including by extensive documentary evidence, the testimony of other witnesses, and defendant’s own statements.”
Cohen will say on the stand that he was previously convicted for lying, and he can testify because “a witness’s prior false statements are not a basis for precluding that witness from testifying in a new proceeding,” prosecutors said, writing that defense did “not cite a single case” supporting that contention. In any event, challenging Cohen’s credibility is what cross-examination is for, the filing noted.
“Because Cohen’s credibility is ultimately ‘to be resolved by the jury,” the state urged, “the Court should deny defendant’s motion.”
Read the document here. (h/t Adam Klasfeld)
