Townhall Media
Warning to the New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his people running the prosecution of former President Donald Trump: When you've lost Anderson Cooper, you're in trouble. Cooper commented Thursday on Trump's team cross-examining "star witness" Michael Cohen, and he wasn't happy with the outcome.
Some of Cooper's more interesting observations included:
...on cross-examination, the lawyers want to kind of put the witness in a... build a box around the witness and then slam it shut. That's what Todd Blanche did to Michael Cohen. The story that Todd Blanche went through, the sequence of events, uh, of this phone conversation, that Michael Cohen had testified to previously, you know, that he had had this consequential phone conversation with Donald Trump, it was a 90-second phone conversation, I believe it was October 24th, was (sic) the date that it was testified to, around 8 PM or so at night, but Todd Blanche, on his cross-examination today, went and kind of looked at the transcripts and text messages that Michael Cohen had received and sent before that time frame, and there had been this series, I guess, of crank calls that Michael Cohen had received that turned out to be from some 14-year-old, there was an exchange of messages between the 14-year-old and Cohen, and then Michael Cohen texts Keith Schiller at like 7:50-something or 7:48 PM, saying "hey, I've got some dope has been harassing me, I got the person's phone number, who can I talk to?"
Cohen then testified, according to Cooper, that Keith Schiller had directed Cohen to call him — this was supposedly the call in which the discussion about going ahead with payments to Stormy Daniels took place, which seems an odd juxtaposition.
More from Cooper:
It was an extraordinary cross-examination by Todd Blanche, and, you know, Michael Cohen's, throughout the day, when Michael Cohen was cornered when he found himself in a corner, he suddenly has a pattern of not understanding the question that's being asked, continuing, I mean, one might say he's trying to buy time, trying to figure out how he wants to answer, but he definitely starts to, you know, have Todd Blanche repeat questions, "I don't understand what you mean," and "I'm confused by the question," but this time, Michael Cohen was cornered, in what appeared to be a lie, I think to many in the room, and had to adjust his memory of what he had just testified to on Tuesday.
It is belaboring the obvious to note that Anderson Cooper is scarcely a Trump ally, nor would he be likely to report on Cohen's testimony and Blanche's cross-examination developing in Trump's favor unless it was so lopsided a performance as to make any other observations downright foolish.
While the New York "hush money" trial of Donald Trump still has a way to go, it's beginning to look like the prosecution's star witness was anything but. This case appears to have been built around Cohen's testimony — Cohen, who pleaded guilty to lying to a financial institution, among other charges — and who is being taken apart by Trump's legal team.
Given a New York judge and a New York jury, that may not be enough. But all it would take is one juror with a conscience, one juror who is actually committed to the legal principle of "beyond a reasonable doubt," and the result is a hung jury — and there's little chance, even if DA Bragg decides to try the case again, that it could happen before November's election.
Stay tuned, and if you aren't reading Susie Moore's regular updates on this case, you should be.
