Some Lasting Lessons from a Dramatic Week at Trump’s Civil Trial
On Thursday morning, a day after being fined ten thousand dollars for violating a gag order at his New York civil trial, Donald Trump was back home in Florida doing precisely what got him sanctioned in the first place: ranting away on social media. He stated that the judge who fined him, Arthur F. Engoron, “HAS GONE CRAZY IN HIS HATRED OF ‘TRUMP.’ ” And he gloated about his lawyers tripping up his nemesis Michael Cohen on the witness stand, commenting, “It was like watching the end of the best Petty Mason episode, where the defendant breaks down and cries, ‘Yes, I did it, I did it, I did it.’ ”
The actual defendants in the case are Trump, two of his sons, and a pair of former senior executives in the Trump Organization. In a pretrial judgment late last month, Engoron decided the key issue in the case, ruling that the defendants committed fraud by inflating the value of Trump’s properties on financial-disclosure forms that they submitted to banks and other institutions. The trial, now nearing the end of its fourth week, is proceeding on additional counts and possible penalties, for which Letitia James, the New York attorney general, is seeking a fine of up to two hundred and fifty million dollars and a lifetime ban on Trump serving as an officer or director of any business in New York. Wednesday’s proceedings, which featured a punishing cross-examination of Cohen by Trump’s lawyers, made for the most dramatic day of the trial so far. With the former President also facing much more consequential criminal trials,, it also conveyed three larger lessons for the months ahead.
The most important one is that Trump is utterly incorrigible. As his other cases proceed, he will most certainly continue to treat the courts, and the entire legal process, with disdain and contempt until—and unless—someone imposes a sanction on him that is a lot stiffer than fines of five thousand or ten thousand dollars.
Last week, Engoron issued Trump a five-thousand-dollar fine for failing to remove a social-media post that showed a picture of one of Engoron’s law clerks with Chuck Schumer and claimed that she was the “girlfriend” of the Senate Minority Leader. The post violated a previous order from Engoron not to post or speak publicly about the clerk, who sits alongside him on the bench, or other court staff. (Engoron himself remains fair game—just not the people who work for him.) Apparently oblivious to the prior fine as he stood outside the courtroom on Wednesday, Trump stopped at the crowded media pen and described Engoron as “a very partisan judge, with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside of him, perhaps even much more partisan than he is”—presumably referring to the law clerk again.
Engoron addressed Trump’s statement as soon as he got to the bench. Noting the “overheated environment” in which the proceeding was taking place, he said, “I don’t want anyone killed.” He also asked Trump’s lawyers why he shouldn’t impose “severe sanctions for this blatant, dangerous disavowal of a court order.” Trump’s lead attorney, Chris Kise, insisted, with a straight face, that Trump had been referring to Michael Cohen, a testifying witness that day, rather than the law clerk. Engoron pointed out that Cohen, unlike the clerk, wasn’t sitting directly alongside him, but he said that he’d take the matter under advisement.
After a lunch break, Engoron raised the issue again and called Trump himself to the witness stand. After the former President was sworn in, the judge asked him whom he had been referring to in his statement. “You and Cohen,” Trump replied. Engoron wasn’t buying it. After a bit more back-and-forth about the previous social-media post, he dismissed Trump, who walked quietly back to the defense table. Engoran then said, “The witness is not credible,” and imposed a ten-thousand-dollar fine, to be paid within thirty days. At least for now, that was that. Trump may not be nearly as rich as he claims, but he can surely afford ten grand (or his campaign donors can).
The second lesson of the day is specifically for prosecutors: don’t put very much faith in Michael Cohen. On Tuesday, Cohen told the court about how Trump would “direct” him and Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, to rework valuations on a Trump net-worth statement until they reached an arbitrary level that Trump had decided on—say, six billion dollars. After Cohen and Weisselberg had carried out this task, they would return to Trump, “demonstrating that we achieved—or close to—the number he was seeking,” Cohen testified.
On Wednesday, under aggressive questioning from two Trump lawyers, Alina Habba and Cliff Robert, Cohen appeared to wilt. Habba, after taking the former fixer through some of the glowing things he told the media about Trump before 2018—“He’s going to be an amazing President,” “The family is fantastic”—got him to say that he had significant animosity toward Trump, that he had “made a career” out of criticizing him, and that he had lied under oath in congressional testimony in February, 2019, when he said that Trump didn’t order him to inflate the value of his assets. After Roberts took over from Habba, Cohen confirmed that he lied on another occasion: to a federal judge, in his December, 2018, sentencing hearing. Then he disavowed his statement to Habba that he had lied in his congressional testimony. “So Mr. Trump never asked you to inflate the numbers on his financial l statement,” Robert said. “Correct,” Cohen replied, as Trump and Habba threw up their arms.
Under redirection from Colleen Faherty, a lawyer for the New York attorney general’s office, Cohen sought to resolve his clashing statements. Trump “did not specifically state, ‘Michael, go inflate the numbers,’ ” Cohen said. “Donald Trump speaks like a Mob boss, and what he does is he tells you what he wants without specifically telling you. So when he said to me, ‘I’m worth more than five million. I’m actually worth maybe six, maybe seven, could be eight,’ we understood what he wanted.” This was a perfectly reasonable explanation, and it jibes with everything we know about Trump, who also avoids sending incriminating e-mails and written notes. But it’s never good for a prosecution when one of its witnesses appears to flip-flop or says that he lied to another judge. After Wednesday’s session, James evidently felt a bit of cleanup was necessary. Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, she said that it was “important to know that Michael Cohen is not the main witness.”
The final lesson from the Trump-Cohen showdown is one that has been clear from the start of this proceeding, and from Trump’s pretrial comments in his other cases. As he confronts his accusers, Trump’s legal tactics are secondary to his political strategy of discrediting the court and the prosecution in the eyes of his supporters. Only he knows his ultimate goals. But they seem to include raising doubts in advance about any guilty verdicts and planting the idea that such verdicts would be so outrageous that they would lead to unrest and violence. Almost certainly, he’s also trying to prepare the ground for a self-pardon in the event of a conviction on the federal charges against him if he gets reëlected.
As he pursues these ends, Trump’s court appearances are primarily media events, where he delivers his message to Trump-supporting platforms that amplify it and whip up the MAGA faithful. This couldn’t have been clearer when, after blithely defying Engoron’s gag order, he rose from his seat and walked out of the courtroom after Engoron rejected a request from his lawyers to dismiss the case because of Cohen’s testimony. With Trump absent, Engoron explained that there was “no way, no how” he was going to issue such a ruling because of an “arguably equivocal statement” from a single witness that he didn’t consider key. “There’s enough evidence to fill this courtroom,” Engoron said.
Of course, the judge’s statement didn’t get nearly as much publicity as Trump “storming out of court,” which is how many media outlets described Trump’s abrupt exit from the courtroom. Directly outside, he stopped to tell the media pen, falsely, that Cohen had “admitted that we won the trial.” It was a carefully staged bit of theatre, but the ex-President storming out of his own trial is a better story. ♦
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