The Table Is Set for Michael Cohen to Testify Against Trump

 

Jonathan Alter Contributing Opinion Writer

Updated

May 10, 2024, 6:09 p.m. ETMay 10, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/07/opinion/thepoint#prosecution-ready-cohen-trump

 

The Table Is Set for Michael Cohen to Testify Against Trump

 

For months, we’ve heard that the prosecution’s entire case in Donald Trump’s New York felony trial boils down to one man: Michael Cohen.

 

It turns out that it doesn’t — as long as Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, behaves himself on the witness stand beginning early next week.

 

For three weeks, I’ve sat in the courtroom and watched prosecutors carefully set the table for the feast of Cohen’s testimony against his longtime boss. Knowing that Cohen is a disreputable witness, they’ll basically argue that you don’t have to like the chef to swallow the food he serves.

 

The arc of the prosecution’s narrative has taken the jury from the “catch and kill” scheme (a coherent prelude to the crime) to the validation of highly incriminating records to the debunking of arguments for the defense. It all adds up to an effective precorroboration of Cohen’s likely testimony.

 

Stormy Daniels had no connection to the falsification of business records, the fundamental charge against Donald Trump. But by establishing that she did, indeed, have sex with Trump, her testimony provided important proof of motive. It’s increasingly clear to the jury that Trump coughed up the hush money to save his 2016 campaign after it was sent reeling by the “Access Hollywood” tape. He knew that a credible story of sex with a porn star would sink him. So he broke the law.

 

The defense has responded mostly by grasping at straws. It tried to make the hush money look like an extortion scheme, with the former president in his favorite position as victim — a difficult maneuver, considering that Trump has spent years in the same tawdry milieu.

 

On Monday and Friday, the defense attorney Emil Bove used technojargon and innuendo to suggest, without a shred of proof, that a key piece of evidence — a Sept. 9, 2016, call in which Trump and Cohen discussed hush money for the Playboy model Karen McDougal — was somehow tampered with by Cohen, the F.B.I. or some other sinister force and that it might not have been Cohen on the call. The idea was to use a nanosecond gap in the call and a change in phone ownership to capture the imagination of even a single conspiracy-minded juror. It takes only one to create a hung jury.

 

But Bove’s cross-examination crashed when a young prosecution witness explained that when people (in this case, Cohen) buy new phones, they usually keep their old numbers.

 

Is that all they’ve got? No, the defense is betting on the offensiveness of Cohen, who has been ignoring repeated pleas from prosecutors to keep his mouth shut in the days before he takes the stand. (Justice Juan Merchan strongly suggested he do so.)

 

If Cohen can straighten up and fly right, riding on a trove of evidence and surviving cross-examination, a conviction is well within sight.