After five weeks of combing through phone records, contracts, invoices, checks, tweets and text messages about Donald Trump and his gang of women-silenced goons, Manhattan prosecutors finally made this Tuesday. that the jurors were waiting for: they told a story.
It was a story of deception and intrigue, as Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass spent hours describing exactly how his team believes the former US president hid his sexual encounters before the 2016 election by falsifying documents to cover up what they claim was election interference.
By now the jury knew the dramatic characters: ex-Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels, who worked with publicist Gina Rodriguez, who navigated shady stories with celebrity lawyer Keith Davidson, who made disappearing agreements with the likes of National investigator Editor Dylan Howard, who was responding to his Trump-loving boss David Pecker, who maintained a back channel with Trump’s consigliere, Michael Cohen, who called Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, to reach the man at the top.
Steinglass ran through the descriptions as text messages and phone calls flashed across the courtroom’s four screens: “Pecker to Howard, Howard to Pecker, Pecker to Cohen, Howard to Pecker.” »
Communications were no longer disparate discussions. An interdependent network fully emerged.
“Cohen to Pecker. Cohen to Trump. And Cohen tells him, among other things, that Stormy Daniels is back,” Steinglass told jurors.
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With the logs now in chronological order, jurors were able to see how many minutes passed between pings, as deals were negotiated in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.
“Ten minutes later, Cohen calls Trump to update him…Cohen testified that he left a voicemail. The next morning, Melania Trump texts Cohen to call Trump on his cell,” Steinglass said.
But like any Greek tragedy, the author put his hero to the test. In this case, he was the key witness for the Manhattan District Attorney, the Trump fixer-turned-fundraiser-turned-defector. Relying on Cohen — a former disbarred attorney convicted of perjury in part for his role in the case — prosecutors understood the challenge of getting jurors to believe the person angriest with Trump to describe his role boss in history.
Prosecutors faced it head on.
“Michael Cohen is understandably angry because to date he is the only one paying the price for his role in the conspiracy,” Steinglass said, acknowledging how the wealthy medal-winning real estate and taxi baron managed to transforming his infamy into lucrative media. personality concert.
“I’m not asking you to feel bad for Michael Cohen. He made his bed. But he can hardly be blamed for making money on the only thing he has left: his knowledge of the inner workings of the Trump phenomenon,” Steinglass said.
But, as with any debate over Trump’s eternally controversial policies, prosecutors were simultaneously engaged in an entirely different battle: that against false equivalencies.
Of course, Cohen “misled the press, Congress and the FEC,” Steinglass conceded, addressing the direction of the Trump team’s legal strategy. But even the slightest hint of context shows that most of Cohen’s lies were in service of Trump.
“It’s pretty rich, because the lies he told Congress in 2017 had to do with the Mueller investigation and the Russia investigation, and what Michael Cohen lied about was about the relationships the accused had in Russia,” Steinglass noted. out.
Meanwhile, prosecutors sidestepped the most sinister side of the whole affair: the blatant campaign to hit a Republican presidential candidate for cold hard cash at the most vulnerable moment of his campaign.
“Think what you want about Mr. Davidson and the story business…maybe you think it’s a sordid practice…in the end, it doesn’t really have any point importance, because you cannot commit election fraud or falsify your business records because you believe you have been a victim. In other words, extortion is not a defense against falsifying business records.” , Steinglass said.
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