Using a slide labeled “manipulation of evidence,” Todd Blanche argues that Cohen somehow tweaked the digital evidence from his phones, including recordings. Blanche says jurors cannot trust those recordings, and more broadly, they cannot rely on Cohen himself.
Jonah Bromwich
Blanche lists the people who he says Cohen has lied to, which includes his wife, his children, his banker, the Federal Election Commission and “every single reporter he talked to for about a year.” Blanche follows with an attempted punchline: “He’s literally like the M.V.P. of liars.”
Maggie Haberman
Blanche is now arguing that Stormy Daniels was called to testify in order to inflame the jurors’ emotions and to embarrass Trump. Prosecutors object, but Justice Merchan allows it.
Jonah Bromwich
Blanche presents something of an alternate theory to contest what the prosecutors have offered. He argues that Dylan Howard, the editor of The Enquirer, and Gina Rodriguez, Daniels’s manager, seized an opportunity to make money from Daniels’s story.
Jesse McKinley
Blanche has twice noted that Stormy Daniels had denied having sex with Trump. While technically true, she subsequently provided her account of the sexual encounter to “60 Minutes,” in a book, in a documentary and here, where she testified under oath.
Maggie Haberman
Blanche’s most coherent argument of the morning is that if Stormy Daniels’s allegations were so scary to the Trump campaign, why didn’t it swing into action in April 2016, when a woman working with Daniels got in touch with The National Enquirer's parent company?
Jonah Bromwich
Todd Blanche lays the groundwork for his most important attack on Michael Cohen, saying he is the only witness who testified that Trump knew everything about the hush-money payment that was made to Stormy Daniels →
Jonah Bromwich
“There is no way that you can find that President Trump knew about this payment at the time it was made without believing the words of Michael Cohen — period,” Blanche says.
