Calls on the left are growing for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to produce concrete evidence in his hush money trial against former President Donald Trump.
A panel of MSNBC analysts on Monday dissected the multi-week effort by the Democratic prosecutor to nail Trump on 34 felony charges alleging he falsified business records to benefit his presidential campaign. Jurors on Monday heard testimony from former Trump attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, the second star witness to allege that Trump had knowledge of a $130,000 payment made by Cohen to kill rumors of an affair. Former Minnesota Senator Claire McCaskill said “circumstantial evidence” is all that Bragg has produced so far, exposing him to criticism that no “direct evidence” exists.
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“I’m a little concerned about the fact that there’s so much emphasis on the payment being made and how the payment came about being made, and I think everyone has to always keep front of mind that the prosecutors have to prove the way they recorded these payments and hid them in the business records is really the key to a conviction in this case,” McCaskill said, according to the Daily Caller. “And that while Trump signed all those checks, it’s a lot of circumstantial evidence. And sometimes, as Dan will tell you, a mountain full of circumstantial evidence is much better than one unreliable witness. So I do think the circumstantial evidence is significant here, but the direct evidence that Trump was fully aware that these payments were being hidden in a way that was fraudulent is a little light at this point. And I think the jury is going to wonder, where is Allen Weisselberg?”
Cohen, who was convicted of lying to Congress and may have admitted he broke the law by secretly recording Trump, was propped up by former Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney who testified last week that Weisselberg, the former Trump Organization leader, directed him to repay Cohen for negotiating a financial settlement with adult film star Stormy Daniels. Handwritten notes by Weisselberg outlining the plan were shown to the jury, evidence that prosecutors hope will be enough to show that Trump knew every aspect of what was hatched on his behalf.
“It does remain to be seen” whether prosecutors can show that Trump knew the extent of Cohen’s actions, added Congressman Dan Goldman (D-NY). “The detail defense is a tough one to make… The DA knows they are going to have to corroborate [Cohen] because they know he is an admitted perjurer.”
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“I don’t think the Manhattan DA is in a better position than the Southern District of New York, for example,” Goldman added. “They have had to kind of maneuver with state law that’s not directly on point as federal law is, and there are a lot of questions as to why the Southern District did not end up keeping this case and passed it over to the Manhattan DA’s office. I think some of it relates to the fact that they gave immunity to Allen Weisselberg and, therefore, it is very complicated to charge a case where if you have a witness like that who has immunity.”
“But it’s also hard to prove,” he continued. “You do need to prove that he knowingly did this to conceal it from the public so they would not have the information. And it is effectively an in-kind contribution to his campaign. And while it may seem like a technical campaign finance violation, the thrust of it is exactly what the campaign finance laws are designed to avoid, which is, that the American public, there are rules, there are laws, there are regulations for how campaigns can use money, can report money, the disclosure obligations are everything. Because in politics, it is transparency that matters most. So that the American public can understand what they are voting for.”