'Really stupid': Ex-Trump lawyers explain how 'narcissism' and lies 'hamstrung' his defense

07 June 2024

When a Manhattan jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 criminal counts in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr.'s hush money/falsified business records case after only two days of deliberation, legal experts on CNN and MSNBC were quick to offer analysis.

Some argued that Trump, through his antics, badly damaged his own defense and made things difficult for his attorney Todd Blanche. Others said that Blanche was too accommodating with Trump during the trial.

NOTUS reporter Ben T.N. Mause gathers some legal perspectives on Trump's defense and the trial's outcome in an article published on June 7.

Former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore told NOTUS that Trump's defense team "had zero strategy whatsoever."

Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer who is now a scathing critic of the former president, believes that Trump did everything he could to make Blanche's defense an uphill climb.

Cobb told NOTUS, "A good lawyer, when his client insists on doing something really stupid, throws his body in front of the freight train and prevents it. That's harder to do with Trump than many…. I don't believe there's anybody in America who believes he didn't have sex with Stormy Daniels."

Cobb continued, "If he had admitted it, that would have kept out much of the evidence, but he didn't. I mean, he really hamstrung his lawyers there. And I think that's probably the biggest error in the trial. But again, I say that really wasn't his lawyers' error; that was his error."

During the trial, Blanche aggressively attacked Michael Cohen — Trump's former personal attorney and fixer and one of Bragg's star witnesses — on cross-examination, hoping jurors would decide he lacked credibility. But in the end, that approach didn't save Trump.

Barry Kamins, a former New York City judge, told NOTUS, "They were gambling, I suppose, on the fact that if the jury didn't believe Cohen, that the whole case might fall apart. And don't forget, you know, you only have to convince one juror in order to get a hung jury."

But in the end, it was Trump who jurors found the least credible.

Cobb told NOTUS, "When Trump tells a lie, he gets wedded to it. His narcissism embroiders it into his narrative, and he pets it every time his brain goes by it. He can't move past it without repeating those lies. That makes him more of a liar than anybody else in the courtroom in the jury's eyes."

Read the full NOTUS article at this link.

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