Trump versus Cohen: Who’s the Bigger Crook?

One of the real problems in putting together a trial where the defendant is a real crook, is that most of the testimony that you hope will bring back a guilty verdict from the jury will be delivered in the courtroom by other crooks.

After all, as my eagle-eyed sister the criminal lawyer explains to me all the time, most crooks spend their time with other crooks and conduct their crooked business with other crooks. So, the chances that someone will get up and testify about a crime that someone else committed who himself has nothing to hide about his own behavior are fairly zilch.

This creates something of a challenge for prosecutors trying to nail someone for committing a crime, because the first thing that the defendant’s lawyer will do when the cross-examination begins, is to cast doubt on what a prosecution witness claims to have occurred by getting that witness to admit that he has a history of not necessarily telling the truth.

This sequence happened today in the hush-money trial of Donald Trump, and it happened, so to speak, in spades.

Here was Michael Cohen addressing the jury in his continuing testimony about the hush money scam, and he ends up admitting that while he was advising Trump how to hide the payments to Stormy Daniels, he was also stealing from the Trump Organization itself.