George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley on Friday characterized Michael Cohen, who is former President Donald Trump’s previous attorney, as a “bottom feeder” witness against him in his upcoming hush money trial.
The charges against Trump stem from an alleged $130,000 payment that Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to making false statements, tax evasion and other charges, sent to porn star Stormy Daniels to stay silent about an alleged affair with the former president. Trump’s trial will begin on Monday with jury selection and the former president is under a gag order that recently got expanded.
Turley said Cohen is not a trustworthy witness and that the jury may have a negative response to his testimony.
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“These are fairly standard and predictable moves. The first one being that you have to destroy Michael Cohen’s credibility, but there’s not much there to destroy,” Turley said when host Brian Kilmeade asked about the former president’s potential defense strategy based on a Thursday Politico column. “I mean, this is the ultimate bottom feeder witness, where the question is whether the jury is going to recoil by the prosecutors putting him on the stand.”
The column outlines Trump’s strongest strategies for defense in the trial, one of which is “to take a wrecking ball to Michael Cohen.”
A federal judge in March declared Cohen probably “committed perjury” in previous testimony, according to CNN.
“He was just denounced by a judge for being a serial purger,” Turley added. “So it doesn’t really help to say ‘well, that’s so last week. I’m testifying in another case.’ He has this long litany of false statements, conflicts. You know, he pleaded guilty under oath and then later said that he wasn’t telling the truth to the astonishment of many of us, he was never prosecuted for that perjury by the Justice Department and now he is appearing as a witness for a prosecution team. So, this is just a very strange universe that we have entered into this case.”
Cohen in March said he provided his then-lawyer with fake legal cases, that he used in court documents, from Google’s artificial intelligence model, leading to further condemnation of alleged dishonesty by the judge.
