Democrats thought Alvin Bragg’s indictment against Donald Trump over “hush money” allegations was their best chance to put the Republican nominee on trial before Election Day.
The Manhattan Democrat District Attorney rushed to indict the former President for that specific purpose, but putting the cart before the horse might just be his undoing.
And now Alvin Bragg’s witch hunt against Donald Trump is crumbling after a judge issued this ruling regarding his “star witness.”
Almost exactly one year ago, Manhattan Democrat District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted former President Donald Trump on 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records to cover-up an alleged “hush money” payment his former attorney Michael Cohen made to porn star Stormy Daniels in order to keep her alleged affair with Trump quiet during the 2016 election.
Cohen, of course, pleaded guilty to his own felony charges in 2018 for tax fraud, lying to banks and Congress, and campaign finance violations and spent three years in prison before being released and placed on probation – which he is still under today.
Nevertheless, Bragg has made Cohen the “star witness” in his witch hunt against Trump as the former attorney previously testified that his actions regarding the alleged payment to Daniels were “for the principal purpose of influencing” the 2016 election.
But the Manhattan Democrat DA’s hope that Trump’s former attorney would help him score a conviction may have just hit a brick wall, and it’s all because Cohen seemingly can’t help but lie.
Everything started to crumble when Trump Attorney Alina Habba asked Cohen about one topic – his 2018 guilty plea to tax evasion.
Cohen recently requested that he be granted early release from his aforementioned probation, but the federal judge overseeing his case denied the request on the basis that he committed perjury when he testified under oath against Trump in the civil fraud trial in New York that Democrat Attorney General Letitia James brought against Trump for supposedly committing fraud by inflating the values of his properties in order to receive bank loans.
According to Politico, Judge Jesse M. Furman pointed to the testimony Cohen gave in the case back in October, in which he claimed that despite previously pleading guilty to tax evasion, he somehow wasn’t actually guilty of the crime.
As a matter of fact, when he was specifically asked by Habba whether he lied to the federal judge overseeing his case when he pleaded guilty, Cohen simply replied, “Yes.”
“Did you lie to Judge Pauley when you said that you were guilty of the counts that you said under oath that you were guilty of? Did you lie to Judge Pauley?” Habba prodded.
“Yes,” Cohen admitted in response.
Judge Furman was not pleased to hear that and it left him no choice.
“Cohen repeatedly and unambiguously testified at the state court trial that he was not guilty of tax evasion and that he had lied under oath,” Furman wrote in his ruling denying Cohen’s early release request.
According to Judge Furman, Cohen’s testimony “gives rise to two possibilities: one, Cohen committed perjury when he pleaded guilty before Judge Pauley or, two, Cohen committed perjury in his October 2023 testimony.”
Trump, of course, has been sounding the alarm on the fact that Cohen “committed MASSIVE PERJURY” when he testified against him “at a level seldom seen on the stand before.”
Cohen had asserted under oath that Trump had directly instructed him to boost the value of his company’s assets to “whatever number Trump told us to,” but when pressed on the matter under cross-examination, Cohen conceded that the former President never told him to inflate the assets’ valuations.
Despite the clear lies and backtracking, Trump obviously ultimately lost that case, but Cohen’s testimony is coming back to haunt him in more ways than merely keeping him on probation for another year.
Now, thanks to Judge Furman ruling that Cohen likely previously committed perjury, many have speculated about the impact it could have on Bragg’s case with the former Trump attorney supposedly one of his star witnesses.
Earlier in March, Trump’s attorneys accused Bragg and his office of turning a “blind eye” to Cohen’s alleged perjury.
Trump attorney Todd Blanche wrote in a letter to Bragg that his “conscious choice to ignore obvious and admitted criminal conduct by Cohen and to instead deploy unethical, strong-armed tactics against an innocent man in his late 70s underscores the irresponsibility of your conduct in office.”
The former President’s legal team has already unsuccessfully attempted to bar Cohen from testifying in Bragg’s witch hunt against Trump on the grounds that “Michael Cohen is a liar.”
“He recently committed perjury, on the stand and under oath, at a civil trial involving President Trump,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in a court filing, per Politico. “If his public statements are any indication, he plans to do so again at this criminal trial.”
Judge Juan M. Merchan ruled against that motion on the basis that he was “unaware of any perjured testimony,” and somehow saw no reason to keep a witness from testifying in a case “because his past actions suggest that he will commit perjury.”
However, with Judge Furman’s ruling that Cohen likely committed perjury, not to mention the fact that Bragg’s case has been delayed until at least the middle of April, Judge Merchan could be compelled to change that position.
Only time will tell how this all unfolds, but needless to say, Democrats are certainly starting to fear that their plan to hand the election to Joe Biden might not be as foolproof as they thought.
Political Animal News will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.