Trump Lawyer Just Hoped Prosecutors Would Do His Work For Him In Hush Money Trial
Trump Lawyer Just Hoped Prosecutors Would Do His Work For Him In Hush Money Trial
A novel legal strategy of assuming the other side will call your witnesses for you.
Todd Blanche, the lawyer for convicted felon Donald Trump (words we will never tire of typing), agreed to an interview with Kaitlan Collins of CNN on Thursday night, mere hours after losing the biggest case of his career. It is a tough task to try and spin such a defeat, particularly on national television, particularly when you are still washing off the tire tracks left over by the giant truck the prosecution just drove over you because your client is a giant lifelong criminal so crooked that he needed to be tied to a very stout garden stake like the world’s dumbest peony just to sit upright at the defense table.
It is even tougher when you are Blanche, a man with all the charisma of watery coffee at a church picnic. Seriously, this interview is like spending 20 minutes trapped in a closet with an audiobook on the history of shoelace aglets narrated by Engelbert Humperdinck.
Nevertheless, Blanche for some reason persisted with this, the longest 20-minute interview we have ever seen in our lives. But at least it was chock full of moments like this one, when Collins asked Blanche why he never called to the stand certain Trumpworld figures like Keith Schiller who could have perhaps rebutted some of the prosecution’s charges (starting around the 11:00 mark):
“Because we live in America and we don’t have the burden of proof … The question that we asked the jury and they ultimately obviously got past is why? Why the prosecution didn’t call those witnesses. You as a defense, you don’t go into a case saying I’m going to fill the holes for the prosecution … Keith Schiller and some of the other witnesses that were not ultimately called, in our view, should have been called by the prosecution. And we asked the jury to take a hard look at that.”
Quite the novel defense strategy, counting on the prosecution to call witnesses that allegedly would weaken its case, then not calling them yourself while hoping the jury would just sort of figure out why not on its own because it’s so self-evident. Todd, bubbe, if you wanted jurors who never read anything but Andrew McCarthy’s columns in National Review, you need to figure that out during voir dire.
Renato Mariotti put it well in a piece at The New York Times explaining how Trump’s defense team blew a case that he thought had quite a few weaknesses in the defense’s favor. First he suggested that a simpler story often wins out, but you have to actually tell the story in the first place:
Instead of telling a simple story, Mr. Trump’s defense was a haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks. That may work for a Trump rally or a segment on Fox News, but it doesn’t work in a courtroom. Perhaps Mr. Trump’s team was also pursuing a political or press strategy, but it certainly wasn’t a good legal strategy. The powerful defense available to Mr. Trump’s attorneys was lost amid all the clutter.
There were other fine moments during this fustercluck, such as this one from Blanche that came within the first two minutes, in response to a question from Collins about all the evidence that pointed to his client being hugely guilty:
“The 34 counts were documents that really had very little connection to President Trump but for the checks, the few checks that he signed.”
Yeah, but Trump knew damn well why he was signing those checks and who they were for, as other evidence and witnesses showed, which is why Blanche might have been helped by rebuttal witnesses, assuming they had believable excuses that actually rebutted the prosecution’s argument. Again, he didn’t graduate law school last week.
COLLINS: Why did Donald Trump not ultimately take the stand here?
BLANCHE: Well, that’s a very personal question to him and to me, honestly.
Man, Collins is not asking you whether Cantaloupe Capone is suffering from advanced syphilis. She’s not asking if he wants to terminate a pregnancy, which his Supreme Court nominees and most of his party have made clear they think is a decision for all of society except the pregnant person anyway.
No, a personal question would be, “Mr. Blanche, since Trump’s wife never showed at the trial, did you have to change his Depends during court recesses?” Which would make sense, he doesn’t seem to have spent those recesses coming up with a smart defense strategy.
Collins also asked the question we have all been wondering: Is Todd Blanche actually getting paid for his work?
“Of course President Trump pays his bills, and I am getting paid.”
“Of course, Kaitlan, despite decades of documented incidents where Trump tried to welch on a bill, he has had a late-in-life conversion to believing people should be paid for their work.”
Just a couple of weeks ago, we heard a story from an uncle about a lawyer friend of his whose firm did some work for Trump some years ago. Trump and the firm signed a contract agreeing to a fee of $750,000. Trump of course tried to dine and dash on the last $250,000 payment with the justification that the firm would make way, way more than that amount when potential clients heard they had worked for Donald Trump.
The firm, not being full of idiots, had to sue Trump to get its full payment. And this has happened to countless, countless other Trump lawyers — the man has needed a lot of lawyers — over the decades! (And contractors. And employees. And and and.)
Collins tactfully left unsaid the obvious follow-up, which is whether the pay is enough to offset the fact that no matter what else Blanche has done or will do in his legal career, “failed to get an acquittal for the only POTUS to ever be convicted of felony charges” will be the first line in his obituary.
Lie down with dogs, et cetera and so forth.
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Spend enough time not paying people, end up being unable to hire competent people to do the job.
There is no way at all Blanche is getting paid.