'Bungled': Legal expert breaks down the 'significant strategic and tactical errors' that doomed Trump

31 May 2024

When jury deliberations in Donald Trump's criminal hush money/falsified business records trial got underway in a Lower Manhattan courthouse on Wednesday, May 29, some legal experts expected deliberations to continue into June. But the following day, late in the afternoon, the jurors handed down their verdict and found Trump guilty on all 34 of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg Jr.'s criminal counts.

Trump is now the first former president in United States history to be convicted on criminal charges. Justice Juan Merchan has set July 11 — only four days before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee — for sentencing.

Politico's Ankush Khardori, in an article published on May 31, emphasizes that Trump and his legal team, including attorney Todd Blanche, "bungled" a case they could have won.

"A conviction was not inevitable," Khardori argues. "The legal issues were intricate and in some key respects novel, and some of them will credibly be at issue on appeal. The state's evidence was voluminous but far from airtight, and there were weaknesses and gaps in the prosecution's evidence as the case unfolded."

The legal journalist continues, "In fact, this was probably a winnable case — not in the form of an acquittal perhaps, but in the form of a hung jury that could have resulted by persuading one or more jurors that a case built around Michael Cohen — the former Trump lawyer/fixer turned convicted felon turned media personality — was simply not strong or reliable enough to warrant this watershed moment in American history. Trump also probably could have gotten off with convictions on misdemeanor counts of falsifying his company's business records instead of felonies, but he never asked the judge to instruct the jurors on that point, perhaps fearing that the request might make him look weak — the worst offense of them all, in his mind."

Khardori goes on to write that Trump and his attorneys "bungled this trial" by making " a series of significant strategic and tactical errors before Cohen even took the stand."

According to Khardori, "They foolishly claimed that the porn star Stormy Daniels had fabricated her story in the run-up to the 2016 election, then pilloried her ineffectively during cross-examination. They elevated peripheral witnesses, like Daniels' lawyer, through drawn-out cross-examinations when they should have downplayed their actual relevance to the charges."

Khardori describes "legal Trumpism" as a strategy of "deny everything, attack indiscriminately" — which, according to the Politico journalist, did not serve Trump or defense attorney Todd Blanche well.

"Blanche repeated many of the mistakes that he and his co-counsel made throughout the trial," Khardori notes. "He again denied Daniels' story, ridiculously. He spent an inordinate amount of time arguing that Cohen was not reimbursed for the payment to Daniels but had actually been put on a monthly retainer that just so happened to correlate to the Daniels payout, plus the tens of thousands of dollars that Cohen stole from his client."

Read Ankush Khardori's full Politico analysis at this link.

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