MANHATTAN (CN) — The end of Donald Trump’s divisive New York hush-money trial has been more fizzle than flash as Tuesday marked the last day of trial before the former president’s criminal case is handed over to the jury.
Through a whopping seven hours of summations, prosecutors ran the jury through what they called the “damning” evidence they've presented over the past five weeks. The defense, meanwhile, tried to discredit some of the district attorney’s biggest witnesses.
Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche was the first to address the jury on Tuesday morning. Speaking behind a lectern that, for the occasion, was angled to directly face the jury box rather than the judge, Blanche tried to dismantle prosecutors’ claims that Trump falsified business records to conceal a hush-money scheme related to his 2016 presidential run.
“President Trump is innocent,” Blanche said. “He did not commit any crimes and the district attorney has not met their burden of proof.”
Blanche spent much of his two-and-a-half-hour argument critiquing the testimony of Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer-turned-foe who told the court that Trump instructed him to illegally cover up bad press in 2016 to help him get to the White House.
“You should want and expect more than the testimony from Michael Cohen,” Blanche said.
Calling Cohen a liar, Blanche told the jury it would be impossible to convict Trump of any crime beyond a reasonable doubt based on Cohen’s words alone.
Cohen claims he paid adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 at Trump’s direction in 2016 to keep her from telling her story about having sex with Trump ten years earlier. He testified that Trump eventually repaid him for the arrangement via monthly checks illegally disguised as legal fees.
Blanche lambasted those claims on Tuesday. He argued that Trump merely was “paying his personal attorney in 2017 $35,000 a month pursuant to an agreement that he made,” not repaying him for the hush money.
The defense lawyer painted Cohen as greedy and said it would be “absurd” to believe that Cohen wasn’t expecting the monthly payments for his work. Cohen held that he was working for free, without a retainer agreement.
Blanche also leaned into Trump’s reputation for being stingy. He argued that, if Cohen’s $35,000 monthly checks truly were repayments as Cohen had claimed, then Trump was overpaying — something he never does as a self-proclaimed penny-pincher.
Throughout Blanche’s argument, his strategy remained consistent: convince the jury that Cohen is the glue holding the case together for prosecutors, and that he simply cannot be trusted based on his past fibs. He raised his voice at times, appearing angry at prosecutors for the substance of Cohen’s testimony.
“They are perfectly happy to have a witness come in here and commit perjury, to lie to you,” Blanche boomed, prompting a sustained objection from the district attorney’s table.
Blanche used sports analogies to spice things up, calling Cohen “the MVP of liars” and the “GLOAT,” or “greatest liar of all time.”
At one point, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan chided Blanche for going too far. Blanche urged the jury not to send Trump to prison based on Cohen’s testimony — a statement which enraged Merchan.
“You know that making a comment like that is highly inappropriate,” the judge said. “It’s simply not allowed, period.”
Merchan said it was “outrageous” for a lawyer of Blanche’s caliber to comment to a jury about his defendant’s potential sentencing, since the jurors won’t determine whether Trump goes to jail — only if he committed crimes.
Later, Merchan advised the jury that Blanche’s comment was improper. He told them to disregard it.
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