Getting To The Week Where It Could Finally Happen

I haven't written much more about the Manhattan criminal trial facing donald trump since late April, as much of it had been the day-to-day witness testimony and presentation of evidence... alongside trump's efforts to skirt around the judge's contempt warnings about trump's social media attacks.

If you want some details, Josh Kovensky over at Talking Points Memo (TPM) provided decent coverage.

Thing is, last week both sides wrapped up their cases before the jury, so Judge Merchan set this coming Tuesday May 28th - he did not want to ruin Memorial Day weekend for the jurors - for closing arguments and to give instructions to the jury for deliberation. This - as they say - is it.

Whether trump wins acquittal or DA Bragg wins at least one "guilty" conviction remains with how Merchan instructs the jury, what limits he imposes, and what decisions - if any - that jury returns.

I don't want to get my hopes up (again). There could be straight acquittal across all 34 charges, or at least one juror holding out to where it ends up a mistrial. The jury could vote guilty on just a handful of counts and not others if they have reasonable doubts, or convict on every one.

This is, in my opinion, the closest we as a nation have ever gotten to holding trump accountable for all the unethical and brazen acts he's committed over the decades he's been in the spotlight. While trump has been held liable in civil court for his sexual assault and for his tax/financial frauds, this is criminal court now; and the potential to hold him in jail - where his gaslighting and denials will not save him - can happen.

Some of this depends on how quickly the jury goes through each indictment before them: There are 34 felony charges, and they could well deliberate on each one at a time. They could also finish this as quickly as the civil jury decided on Carroll's sexual assault charges, which took one afternoon.

A lot of this will boil down to which side presented the stronger case, and by most accounts trump's defense was shoddy and questionable at best. The highlights were the testimonies by the prosecutors' star witnesses Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, where trump's lawyers did their best to discredit both. Court observers don't think that happened, especially against Cohen (via Kovensky at TPM):

Michael Cohen, the arch-nemesis of Donald Trump, would finally face withering cross-examination on the stand. He would come face to face with attorneys for the former and potentially future President.

The entire case would hinge on this. Cohen alone, the thinking went, could confirm a central element of the business records falsification case: that Trump approved the fraudulent reimbursement scheme for Cohen making the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. And Cohen did confirm it.

But on Tuesday, in the first hours of cross-examination, something else happened. What was anticipated to be fireworks instead turned to a fizzle in a stuffy Manhattan courtroom on a warm May afternoon.

Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche spent much of his initial day of cross-examination meandering in questioning with Cohen. He landed a few blows on Cohen, assailing his credibility in various ways...

Blanche then followed up with the obvious and effective hit: how could Cohen claim to remember phone calls with Trump from 2016 in detail when he said he did not recall interactions with prosecutors on the case in which he was testifying from 2023?

That line of questioning had additional impact: it portrayed Cohen as uncontrollable by prosecutors. It came after Cohen and the DA spent more than a day on direct examination establishing that all of his lies and bullying during his time with Trump occurred at Trump’s direction, his behest, to please him. Instead, if further pursued, Cohen ignoring requests from the DA’s office to stop speaking to the press could develop into an argument that he was going rogue from Trump when he paid the hush money to Stormy Daniels in 2016.

But on Tuesday, Blanche did not pursue that.

Instead, he wound up mired in often confusing details about the various Trump investigations in which Cohen had testified. At one point, Blanche asked Cohen about his first interview with prosecutors in the Mueller investigation — an instance in which he has admitted to have lied...

That arguably wasn't a good avenue to go down, because Cohen can counter that he lied back then on trump's behest (even on his orders).

The relative softballs came as a surprise in part because of Cohen’s performance under cross-examination during New York Attorney General Letitia James (D)’s civil trial of the former president. Then, he erupted with his own objections, telling defense attorneys in that case that some questions had been “asked and answered.”

That set a low bar for Cohen’s testimony in this case. But he managed to parry some of Blanche’s questions in part by embracing the negative implications that the Trump attorney seemed to be trying to elicit by trickery or force...

It didn't help trump's defense that they presented too few of their own witnesses to rebut the DA's case. Their big witness turned in a performance more detrimental than Cohen's hostile testimony (going this time to Charles R. Davis over at Salon):

One reason Donald Trump’s lawyers probably are telling him not to testify in his own defense is because they — and everyone else in a certain Manhattan courtroom on Monday — have now seen what happens when a defiant witness takes the stand and has a tantrum in front of the jury.

Robert Costello, an attorney who briefly advised Michael Cohen after the FBI raided his home in 2018, is the first person the defense team has called to provide substantive testimony. Firmly on Team MAGA, Costello was asked to counter the former president’s ex-fixer, who had told the court that Trump called him after the raid and told him to “stay tough.”

According to Costello, Cohen was distraught after the raid — but adamant, at the time, that he had no dirt on his boss that he could share with law enforcement in hopes of softer treatment. “He said, ‘I swear to God, Bob, I don’t have anything on Donald Trump,’” Costello said, purportedly quoting his former client.

But that was far from the highlight. What drew the most attention from Costello’s brief time on the stand was the way he acted toward Judge Juan Merchan, who had sustained multiple prosecutions objections to the apparent annoyance of the defense witness. “Jeez,” Costello muttered in response to one such ruling, whose sarcasm extended to his body language – and prompted the judge to clear out the jury to remind the witness how to behave in a courtroom.

“I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom,” Merchan said. “You don’t give me a side eye and you don’t roll your eyes,” he continued. “If you don’t like my ruling, you don’t say, ‘jeez.’”

Costello responded with what CNN described as a “long glare,” further setting off the judge.

“Are you staring me down?” a visibly upset Merchan asked Costello. The scene ended with the judge threatening to strike Costello’s testimony altogether if he didn’t learn how to control himself. “Your conduct is contemptuous right now,” he said. “If you stare me down one more time, I will remove you from the stand.”

As Davis noted, if you want an idea how trump would have behaved on the stand - and he didn't, because even his lawyers were terrified how trump wouldn't keep track of which gaslighting lie to stick with - Costello was the proxy. For a lawyer himself, Costello forgot one of the biggest rules taught in school: NEVER antagonize a judge. While the jury was dismissed for the part where Merchan read Costello the riot act, court attendees noted several jurors seemed stunned by Costello's behavior, arguably didn't impress them, and they had to know what was going on while they were out:

As attorney and Brookings Institution senior fellow Norm Eisen commented, Costello’s performance was what might call an “own goal”: he added nothing that jurors would not have already gathered from Cohen himself — the former president’s ex-fixer told jurors he repeatedly lied to protect his boss — while needlessly antagonizing the judge. Even if the jury had left the room for the talking down, jurors could likely figure out the reason they had to get up and go: “ill manners of a kind we have not seen from any witness yet across the 19 days of trial, even on the most contentious cross-examinations...”

From where I'm sitting, trump didn't put up a convincing defense. Every prosecuting witness didn't flinch on the stand, and corroborated both the paper trail and what it was all for.

This should be the week justice finally comes for donald trump.

We'll see how it goes from there for the rule of law and the fate of the nation.