Michael Cohen’s Lies Help Donald Trump
The Democrats’ lawfare strategy against President Donald Trump is utterly failing. Radical-leftist prosecutors have charged Trump with 91 felonies in four separate indictments. Yet none of them seem to be sticking.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment alleging that Trump conspired to obstruct an official proceeding on Jan. 6, 2021, has stalled at the Supreme Court pending a ruling on whether the president possessed legal immunity. Smith’s other prosecution of Mr. Trump over classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago was postponed after it became known that the Federal Bureau of Investigation tampered with the evidence. In Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’s racketeering case unraveled after it became known that Willis was not only heavily biased against President Trump but was also engaged in improper activities, including committing adultery with her coconspirator Nathan Wade. Then there is New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution, creatively alleging that payments to a pornographic actress should have been classified as “campaign contributions.” Those payments were made through Michael Cohen, a former “fixer” for Mr. Trump who has now turned against him.
Cohen took the witness stand to try to finally “get Trump,” but what happened instead must have leftists fuming.
Here is the Alvin Bragg hush money prosecution in a nutshell. Donald Trump met pornographic film actress Stephanie Clifford in 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament in Nevada. She alleged that they had an “intimate relationship” that year and the following year. About a decade later, as Trump explored a potential presidential bid, Clifford threatened to sell her story about the alleged sexual relationship to the media. Cohen, an attorney, paid her $130,000 to stop repeating these claims. These payments were marked as “legal expenses.” Trump famously became a candidate for president and won. Bragg charged Trump with “falsifying business records in the first degree, in violation of Penal Law §175.10.” This infraction is normally a misdemeanor, but Bragg creatively construed it as a felony by claiming Trump did it in order to cover up another crime. The indictment does not actually specify that initial crime, but still charged Trump with 34 felonies because the “falsified” documents included 11 checks, 11 invoices from Cohen and 12 vouchers generated by the Trump Organization.
Trump denies the alleged sexual encounter with Clifford and that he ever directed Cohen to make “hush money” payments. So Bragg’s indictment hinges on the prosecutor’s ability to prove Cohen made payments to Clifford under Trump’s direction, instead of making payments on his own volition. That brings us to this week.
Cohen was supposed to provide an “unassailable” line of evidence proving Trump committed a campaign finance violation. Yet after Cohen finished testifying yesterday, his fourth day of testimony, Trump’s prosecutors were forced to rest their case. Cohen’s credibility hinged on a random phone call he says he made to Trump, but his testimony revealed that the call was actually to Trump’s bodyguard and had nothing to do with “hush money.”
As Trump’s legal team cross-examined Cohen, it became evident that Cohen called Trump’s former bodyguard Keith Schiller on Oct. 24, 2016, to talk about a 14-year-old prankster who was harassing him. Cohen may have spoken to Schiller about the hush money payments, but there is no evidence this information was passed on to Donald Trump himself. Therefore, Trump cannot be convicted of labeling “hush money” payments as “legal expenses” in his business records as there is no proof Trump knew what his $130,000 was forwarded to Clifford for.
Bragg’s case against Trump has fallen apart so spectacularly that even the regime media is embarrassed. cnn anchor Anderson Cooper said he would “absolutely” have doubts about Cohen’s testimony if he were a member of the jury, while msnbc legal correspondent Lisa Rubin said Cohen’s testimony “makes the district attorney’s office look sloppy in addition to making Michael Cohen seem like a self-assured either fabricator, liar or forgetful person.”
That is a good summation of the trial! A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict Trump for falsifying business records on March 30, 2023. So Trump has been under intense investigation for over a year based on a 96-second phone call his former lawyer made to his bodyguard eight years ago. None of this proves that Trump committed adultery with Stephanie Clifford or that he falsified business records to cover up a hush money payment. And the fact that it has taken the prosecution so long to find out there is no evidence of a crime indicates this was a show trial all along.
cnn ran the headline “Michael Cohen Gives Donald Trump His Best Day in Hush Money Trial So Far.” And cnn is probably the most anti-Trump news site in America. When cnn starts reporting that there is not enough evidence to convict Trump of a crime, you know there is not enough evidence to convict Trump of a crime.
Cohen may be convicted of lying under oath, yet it’s unlikely Trump will be convicted of even a single misdemeanor, much less 34 felonies. Alvin Bragg could have saved himself a lot of embarrassment by vetting Cohen a little more thoroughly before bringing this case to trial, but the left doesn’t seem too concerned about fact-based evidence. Cohen’s lies gave them a full year of negative press coverage about Trump. And now that the hush money case has turned out to be much ado about nothing, it is time for the media to move on to the next fake Trump scandal.
Leftist lawfare is designed to sabotage Trump’s presidential campaign via a barrage of negative news coverage. Yet this strategy is backfiring spectacularly. Opinion polls indicate that only one third of American adults say Trump did something illegal in the hush money case, and this figure will probably go down after Cohen’s testimony. The media can only cry wolf so many times before the villagers realize there is no wolf and the media is unreliable. Such a realization will undoubtedly help Trump’s popularity as he seeks to return to the White House next year.
As my father, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry, explains in his book America Under Attack, a prophecy in Amos 7 states that God will pass by America one last time so people have a chance to solve the terrible curses afflicting their nation. How? Not by voting Democrats out of office, but by repenting of their personal sins. “And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A plumbline. Then said the Lord, Behold, I will set a plumbline in the midst of my people Israel: I will not again pass by them any more” (Amos 7:8).
“We have been watching this prophecy since June 1990, in the second issue of the Trumpet we ever produced,” my father wrote in “Why I Still Believe Donald Trump Is Coming Back.” He continued:
It speaks of a time when God is preparing to measure the destruction of end-time Israel—the United States and Britain—and He says, “I will not again pass by them any more” (verse 8). This is just before severe correction comes on these nations if they don’t repent. They are receiving their final warning. … So the entire context of God saying I will not again pass by them anymore is the time of “Jeroboam”—an end-time antitype of King Jeroboam ii of Israel ….
This prophecy is why we have consistently insisted that President Trump will return to power, even immediately after the 2020 election was stolen and a pretender to the presidency was officially inaugurated. We have continued stating this even when it was unclear whether he would have enough support for a comeback—or whether he wanted to. We do not know how this will unfold. But keep watching the statements Mr. Trump releases, the rallies he holds around the nation, and the attacks leftists continue to mount against him. He is not finished.