Ed Morrissey recounts Michael Cohen's off-again, off-again relationship with the truth.
It's not just that he constantly lies, then is forced to admit he lies, and then lies some more.
It's also, as Ed Morrissey says, that this unemployable vermin's future income relies on him telling more lies to get Trump convicted.
What will Michael Cohen do if he's unable to help put Trump in jail? No one's going to throw money at him in Instagram chats for failing the left.
[T]he WSJ focused more on the effort from Trump's legal team in going after Cohen's credibility from another direction:
Blanche portrayed Cohen as having built a career as a major Trump antagonist. He noted the former lawyer had made more than $3 million from writing books about Trump, and had his own podcast. ...Blanche displayed some merchandise he said Cohen was selling: a T-shirt with Trump in an orange jumpsuit behind bars and a coffee mug that said, "Send him to the big house not the White House."
It's not just that Cohen appears bent on revenge, but has constructed a business model for it.
Given the implosion in Stormy Daniel's obviously-perjured testimony, and now Michael Cohen's, Jonathan Turley says the judge must not even allow this piece-of-shit go to jury -- he should just enter his own verdict of "Not Guilty" on his own.
That's called a "directed verdict," in which a judge states that, as a fact, the prosecution has simply failed to make its case and no reasonable jury would find otherwise.
Cohen repeatedly said that he could not remember even recent calls after recounting calls from eight years ago with crystal clarity. He said that he could not remember if he leaked information in the case to CNN. However, these paled in comparison to other glaring moments.
Take, for example, his testimony on his unethical decision to secretly record a Sept. 6, 2016 telephone call with Trump.
It was a breathtaking betrayal that most lawyers would not contemplate, let alone carry out.
When asked by the prosecutors about that act, Cohen bizarrely claimed that he did so to guarantee that David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, would "remain loyal to Mr. Trump."
No one seriously believes that this is true. It does not even make sense. Pecker was speaking to Trump about the payments and even met with him at the White House.
Turley also drills down more into Cohen's business model not just as a financial motive, and not just as revenge against his former boss/client, but also as another lie under oath.
The prosecution's case then came down to the testimony of Michael Cohen. Cohen not only admitted to recording Trump without his knowledge or consent, but he said the recordings showed that Trump was actually just following his advice.
"The most important thing about the audiotape is that there was an audiotape. For most lawyers, watching... listening to this tape is, is really an appalling moment. The very idea that an attorney would tape a client without their knowledge or consent just shatters every aspect of professional conduct, but the tape really doesn't offer much," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow on Monday.
"Like much else in Cohen's testimony, he gives these details of how he goes to his client and says, 'I fixed the problem. I arranged for payments.' I'm, you know, this is not, this story is going to go away, at least before the election and Trump is saying things like 'good, good,'"
Turley added, "Well, that sounds a lot like a client following the directions of his lawyer. But now the lawyer is telling the jury, I think you should send my client to prison for doing what I suggested for him to do."
"There is nothing illegal here. What Cohen was describing is not a crime," Turley said. "The prosecutors are making great fanfare over proving non-criminal acts and non-contested allegations. Yeah, there was an NDA. Yeah, money was paid. That happens all the time, and so we're still left with this bizarre situation of a trial over something that none of us have yet been told what the crime is."
Victoria Taft reports that Cohen spoke about meeting with Robert Mueller's 17 Angry Democrats.
Very suspiciously, Mueller agreed to drop decades' worth of jail time for Cohen -- if he out-of-nowhere pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges.
Why?
Well, the 17 Angry Democrats were trying to set up a predicate for eventually charging Trump. Cohen's admission to phantom crimes would be that predicate.
Cohen is testifying that he met with special counsel Robert Mueller's office several times before reporting to prison. Cohen first met with the special counsel's office in 2018 before pleading guilty, and he says he was not truthful "because I was still holding onto the loyalty to President Trump."
After pleading guilty, Cohen said he testified truthfully in subsequent meetings with Mueller's team.
You will recall that Cohen received less time from federal prosecutors for cheating on his income taxes and lying to a bank and then, despite not having anything to do with his fraud case, agreeing to plead guilty to two counts of campaign election violations. As Andy McCarthy noted recently, Cohen pleaded guilty to the campaign violations without those violations ever being litigated. McCarthy noted that these charges were never tested in court.
He marveled at why someone would plead guilty to these charges when both the feds and the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) declined to bring them because these weren't campaign expenditures and were not illegal. In 2018, McCarthy made the point that Cohen pleaded guilty to charges that weren't crimes. Why did Cohen do that?
Cohen could have been imprisoned for a long time for all the charges against him. This graph from a DOJ document shows how much time he could have spent behind bars.
In December 2018, the feds, who happily put all manner of Trump supporters in prison for long stretches, gave Cohen a three-year term. He noted on the stand Tuesday that he's still on probation.
In his testimony, the prosecution was allowed to note that Cohen went to prison for his crimes, including campaign finance violations that weren't violations of the law. This obviously will telegraph to the jury that these 34 charges in New York must be illegal campaign expenditures. That's the story the prosecution has been allowed to tell the jury even though they've charged only the bookkeeping charges.
If you think that stinks of corruption, get this:
Cohen was coached on his testimony by unhinged partisan congressman and Biden surrogate Dan Goldman.
And Dan Goldman... well, you'll see.
Here's how CNN is trying to get people interested in this trial: staged readings of the trial transcript: