Donald Trump’s defense team couldn’t have asked for a better outcome as it sought to discredit Michael Cohen on cross-examination of the former fixer.
The defense got the Trump Organization’s one-time fixer to reverse his entire position at the former president’s civil fraud trial.
In his second day of testimony, Cohen was asked pointed questions by combative Trump lawyer Alina Habba about numerous inconsistencies in his statements to the media, in court and in Congressional testimony about Trump’s net worth.
The aim was to undermine his testimony from the day before, during which Cohen said he and Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg were instructed by Trump to “reverse engineer” his net worth to whatever “arbitrary number” the boss wanted.
Trump’s lawyer noted that Cohen used these revised financial statements to brag about Trump’s net worth in a 2013 story by The Real Deal.
Cohen testified to Congress in 2019 that he and Weisselberg were never asked to inflate Trump’s net worth or assets. Questioned by Habba in the first half of proceedings on Wednesday, Cohen said he was lying in 2019 but telling the truth in court Tuesday.
But when asked the same question later in the day by another Trump attorney, Clifford Robert, Cohen repeated his congressional testimony from 2019 that he had not been asked to inflate Trump’s financial position.
Forbes reporter Dan Alexander observed that Trump’s team could not “hold back its smiles.”
Robert then asked Judge Arthur Engoron to dismiss the case, but the jurist refused. Trump, in attendance for the second straight day, then walked out of the courtroom along with his son Eric, according to NBC.
Cohen tried to clarify, stating that Trump did not directly ask for Cohen to inflate numbers, but that the instruction was implied.
Trump’s team played a CNN clip from 2016 in which Cohen pegged Trump’s net worth at $10 billion. It also presented a CNN article from 2015 that quoted Cohen as saying he’s never seen a situation where “Mr. Trump has said something that is not accurate.”
Cohen, who was the Trump Organization’s counsel and arranged hush money for a former Trump mistress, later had a falling out with Trump and went to prison after pleading guilty to charges of tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, bank fraud and making false statements to Congress.
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