Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg took aim at Donald Trump‘s latest court filing seeking to bar former attorney Michael Cohen from testifying at his hush money trial, calling for a judge to deny the former president’s “unprecedented” argument.
Bragg’s office was responding to a recent motion by Trump’s lawyers decrying Cohen as a witness who has previously perjured himself and should be barred from testifying at the New York trial, expected to begin March 25, “in order to protect the integrity of this court and the process of justice.”
In a 44-page filing, senior counsel to the district attorney Matthew Colangelo wrote that Trump’s motion to exclude testimony “reads more like a press release than a legal filing” and that Trump “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.”
Trump is facing allegations that he falsified records at the Trump Organization to cover up money he paid to Cohen, his former attorney and fixer, in 2017. Bragg’s office claims that Cohen was paid for facilitating the hush money payments to two women, former model Karen McDougal and porn star Stormy Daniels, to keep them quiet during the 2016 campaign about alleged affairs with Trump.
“The people should be precluded from suborning Michael Cohen’s perjury,” Trump attorney Todd Blanche wrote in a court filing last week. “He recently committed perjury, on the stand and under oath, at a civil trial involving President Trump. If his public statements are any indication, he plans to do so again at this criminal trial.”
Cohen in 2018 pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation stemming from the payoffs in a separate federal case. Cohen admitted during Trump’s recent civil fraud trial, where Trump was ordered to pay more than $450 million after being found to have inflated the value of his assets to ensure favorable loans and insurance premiums, that he had lied to a federal judge at one of his appearances in that case.
Bragg’s office countered that Trump’s counsel will have their day to confront Cohen during cross-examination about his crimes, arguing that is “more than sufficient to protect defendant’s rights and test the veracity of the people’s evidence,” according to its latest court filing. Colangelo also said that Cohen will testify that he previously made false statements under oath.
“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,” Colangelo wrote.
Trump’s lawyers are separately seeking to fight Bragg’s request for a gag order against the former president, which would bar Trump from making disparaging public remarks about potential witnesses, court staff, and families of prosecutors in the case.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has yet to make a decision in response to Trump’s bid to block Cohen’z testimony or the gag order, though Trump has previously been unsuccessful in countering gag orders against him in his separate civil cases in the Empire State.
Trump was previously ordered to pay $15,000 in fines after Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who presided over the civil fraud case, found that he repeatedly breached a gag order barring him from disparaging the judge’s law clerk.
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Jury selection for the hush money case is slated to begin later this month, and Trump will be required to attend the weekslong trial as he seeks to campaign for a second term in the Oval Office. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Read the full filing from Bragg’s office:
2024-03-05 People’s Opposition [Filed] by Kaelan Deese on Scribd
