Experts talk about how prosecutors are overcoming the challenge of their star witness’s history of lying: ‘They’re just throwing everything at the wall.’
NEW YORK CITY—Government lawyers in the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump have taken a carefully calculated approach, seeking to balance lengthy testimony from an admitted perjurer with voluminous phone, email, text, and audio records that they are betting a jury in a deep blue city will find objectively reliable, according to legal experts.
Throughout the trial, prosecutors have punctuated their questioning of witnesses with frequent requests to move an item into evidence and show it to the jury, and the judge has rarely said no.
Their painstaking use of records to construct a documentary history of an alleged coverup of a nondisclosure agreement payment—what the prosecution alleges amounts to election fraud—tacitly acknowledges that former Trump lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen is not a witness that most lawyers would normally want make the focus of their case, the experts say.
With his record of lying and financial fraud, Mr. Cohen presents as a problematic witness for the prosecution.
The prosecuting attorneys have gathered evidence from far and wide, according to Jeffrey Hooke, a professor at Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University. They have rolled out an array of evidence that they hope will substantiate the core allegations: that President Trump knowingly miscategorized payments pursuant to a nondisclosure agreement as fees for legal services that Mr. Cohen rendered and that doing so with the November 2016 election looming amounts to electoral fraud.
The reliance on documents is more than an example of lawyers doing their homework, according to Harvey Kushner, chair of the criminal justice department at Long Island University.
It is part of a studied effort to allay any reservations that the jury might have about convicting President Trump on the basis of a convicted liar’s testimony and to parlay political sentiment and affiliation in a deep blue bastion into a victory for New York’s progressive establishment.
Mr. Kushner compared the current proceedings in lower Manhattan to trials in which lawyers put notorious mobsters and others with dubious credibility on the stand.
