Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is pushing back against former President Donald Trump’s efforts to exclude the testimony of Michael Cohen in an upcoming criminal trial.
In a filing on March 5, the New York County District Attorney’s Office chided President Trump’s legal team for their attempt to prevent Mr. Cohen, a former attorney to the former president and a key witness, from testifying.
“In an argument that reads more like a press release than a legal filing, defendant makes the obviously unsupportable request that the court preclude one of the people’s witnesses from testifying at trial on the ground that defendant anticipates that he will disbelieve the witness’s expected testimony,” the filing by Mr. Bragg’s office reads.
The trial, slated for March 25, marks the first instance of a sitting or former U.S. president facing criminal prosecution.
President Trump, indicted last April on 34 counts of falsifying business records, has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Prosecutors allege interference with the 2016 election; however, the charges focus on “falsifying business records” and don’t directly relate to the election. The indictment claims that then-candidate Trump had Mr. Cohen, his lawyer at the time, pay to cover up an alleged affair and was reimbursed through The Trump Organization.
President Trump’s attorneys sought to block Mr. Cohen’s testimony last week, attacking his credibility and accusing him of perjury in a recent civil case involving the former president.
Their filing argued that Mr. Cohen’s testimony would be inadmissible evidence, and they accused prosecutors of trying to bolster their “zombie” case in a bid to “interfere with President Trump’s leading campaign in the 2024 presidential election.”
Prosecutors should be stopped from encouraging Mr. Cohen to tell more lies, President Trump’s attorneys argued.
“Michael Cohen is a liar. He recently committed perjury, on the stand and under oath, at a civil trial involving President Trump,” the filing by President Trump’s attorneys reads. “If his public statements are any indication, he plans to do so again at this criminal trial. The Court should preclude Cohen’s testimony in order to protect the integrity of this Court and the process of justice.”
Prosecutors dismissed those claims on March 5 as “intentionally inflammatory and totally meritless.”
“The people expect Cohen’s testimony at trial to be both true and corroborated, including by extensive documentary evidence, the testimony of other witnesses, and defendant’s own statements,” the prosecutor’s filing reads.
Mr. Cohen previously admitted, during President Trump’s New York civil fraud trial, to having lied under oath to Congress. Mr. Cohen told the court that he lied when he told Congress that neither then-candidate Trump nor a former Trump Organization chief financial officer told him to inflate numbers on personal financial statements.
Ultimately, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who was presiding over the civil case, determined that Mr. Cohen was a “credible” witness despite noting that his testimony was “significantly compromised.”
“His testimony was significantly compromised by his having pleaded guilty to perjury and by some seeming contradictions in what he said at trial. However, carefully parsed, he testified that although Donald Trump did not expressly direct him to reverse engineer financial statements, he ordered him to do so indirectly, in his ‘mob voice,'” Justice Engoron wrote in his ruling last month, which ordered President Trump to pay $355 million in penalties.
“Although the animosity between the witness and the defendant is palpable, providing Cohen with an incentive to lie, the Court found his testimony credible, based on the relaxed manner in which he testified, the general plausibility of his statements, and, most importantly, the way his testimony was corroborated by other trial evidence,” the justice continued.
Justice Engoron added that he doesn’t believe that “pleading guilty to perjury means that you can never tell the truth.”
Prosecutors made the same argument in their March 5 filing.
“Among other things, Cohen will testify that he pleaded guilty to making false statements in the past in connection with unrelated matters. But a witness’s prior false statements are not a basis for precluding that witness from testifying in a new proceeding, and defendant does not cite a single case that so holds,” the prosecutor’s filing reads.
The defense also attempted to prevent testimony from Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress whom President Trump allegedly paid off in the case, citing her intention to offer “false, salacious, and unduly prejudicial testimony.”
“Similar to Cohen, she seeks to tell contrived stories with salacious details of events she claimed occurred nearly 20 years ago, which have no place at a trial involving the types of charges at issue,” the filing by President Trump’s lawyers reads.
Criticizing the request, prosecutors called it a “sweeping” request, arguing that it relied on improper speculation.
“As with defendant’s baseless attempt to preclude testimony from Michael Cohen, this argument relies on improper speculation that—even under this court’s supervision—Daniels will provide nothing more than irrelevant or prejudicial trial testimony,” the prosecutor’s filing reads.
President Trump has denied the alleged affair and charged that Mr. Bragg’s indictment is politically motivated.
Justice Juan Merchan, presiding over the trial, has yet to rule on President Trump’s requests.
