The jury at the court in New York will hear from convicted liars, perjurers and the publisher of a tabloid magazine
April 22, 2024 2:29 pm(Updated 2:44 pm)
NEW YORK CITY – After the week-long process to choose a jury in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, the hard work now begins for the panel of seven men and five women.
But in this case it will be especially challenging because the cast of murky characters will leave them wondering who to believe.
The jury at the court in New York will hear from convicted liars, perjurers and the publisher of a tabloid magazine that made a cottage industry of headlines about celebrities having just weeks to live – they almost always endured beyond the deadline.
That poses unique issues of credibility that will complicate the deliberation process on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Prosecutors claim it amounted to an attempt to deceive the American public.
Trump, a former US president and the presumptive Republican nominee for November’s election, has pleaded not guilty.
The star witness for the prosecution – and perhaps the most complicated witness of all – will be Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer. By all accounts, he will be the only witness who will directly link Trump to the scheme he is charged with.
Cohen is expected to say that the former president approved repayments to him for the hush money, repayments that prosecutors say were illegal. That’s a lot of weight to put on the shoulders of a man who was sentenced in 2018 to three years in jail for lying to Congress, lying to banks and breaching campaign finance laws, among other crimes.
Worse, last month the judge who sentenced Cohen refused to release him early from court supervision following his release because he may have perjured himself in his submissions when he was sentenced.
A lying liar who is lying yet again, Trump’s lawyers will no doubt claim.
Another problematic witness will be David Pecker, the former chief executive of American Media Inc, the parent company of the National Enquirer. He is set to testify about meetings with Trump where they allegedly agreed to buy up the rights to Daniels’ story but not publish it.
Pecker will also be asked about flattering stories the Enquirer wrote about Trump and negative stories about his 2016 campaign rivals.
Yet how are you to believe a word said by a man who published baseless conspiracy theories insinuating that the father of Senator Ted Cruz, who ran against Trump in 2016 for the Republican nomination, helped the man who shot dead John F Kennedy?
Other witnesses with a chequered past include Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategic adviser, who was jailed for four months for contempt for refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena. Then there’s Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal lawyer, who is now bankrupt and facing election interference charges in Georgia.
And of course there’s Trump himself. On Friday, prosecutors asked the judge to be allowed to cross-examine him on other cases outside of the conduct he is charged with in this matter.
That includes the $83.3m judgement by a jury earlier this year which found him liable for sexually abusing a journalist in the mid 1990s.
It also includes the judgment in a fraud trial that led to a $364m fine against his real estate business by a judge in another New York court who said he didn’t believe Trump’s testimony.
And it includes the fact that the Trump Organisation was found guilty in a previous trial of similar crimes to those he is currently accused of.
In that context, the accusers may well turn out to be some of the most believable witnesses.
Ms Daniels has been consistent in her account of her dealings with Trump, as has Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate who says they had an affair for several months in 2006 while Trump’s wife Melania was pregnant with their son Barron, now 18.
Yet the most reliable – and damning – evidence of all is likely to come not from a human being but in the form of documentation.
The jury will see the cheques that Trump wrote to Cohen repaying him for “legal services” that didn’t actually exist. The cheques, some of which were signed in the White House while Trump was president, bear his unique signature and there is no disagreement they were from him.
This case may well hang on the fact that the documents don’t lie – even if everybody else does.