The Surprising Strategy Trump Could Use to Win His Manhattan Trial
The former president’s defense has taken some major hits, but Trump could still pull off an upset victory in court.
Former President Donald Trump and his lawyers still have two robust defense strategies — one obvious, one surprising — that they can use in the courtroom to try to rebut prosecutors’ charges. | Peter Foley/AFP via Getty Images
04/11/2024 05:00 AM EDT
Ankush Khardori is a senior writer for POLITICO Magazine and a former federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice, where he specialized in financial fraud and white-collar crime. He has also worked in the private sector on complex commercial litigation and white-collar corporate defense. His column, Rules of Law, offers an unvarnished look at national legal affairs and the political dimensions of the law at a moment when the two are inextricably linked.
For all of Donald Trump’s bluster, he faces an uphill battle to avoid conviction in his Manhattan criminal trial beginning Monday.
The fact is most criminal defendants who go to trial end up being convicted. Trump himself is also incredibly unpopular in Manhattan, and his courtroom antics in recent months have probably not endeared him to many prospective jurors in the borough. Worse still for the former president, Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over Trump’s criminal trial, significantly narrowed Trump’s potential lines of defense in a series of pretrial rulings on legal and evidentiary issues.
But Trump and his lawyers still have two robust defense strategies — one obvious, one surprising — that they can use in the courtroom to try to rebut prosecutors’ charges that Trump falsified his company’s business records in connection with a hush-money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election.
First, watch for the defense to take a wrecking ball to Michael Cohen, the former Trump lawyer/fixer and a key witness, in the hopes of taking the whole case down with him. Then there’s another, less explored route that Trump’s team could try: asking the judge to give the jury the option of convicting him on lesser, misdemeanor offenses instead of the felony counts that have actually been brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his team of prosecutors.
A person familiar with Trump’s legal strategy told me that some of Trump’s lawyers have quietly — albeit tentatively — considered that option in the run-up to the trial, which has not been previously reported. Trump’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
“Now, obviously he doesn’t want” to be convicted at all, the person familiar with Trump’s legal strategy said, “but a misdemeanor conviction in state court in Manhattan is going to have absolutely no effect on this guy’s ability to run for office or on his liberty.”
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Trump’s quest to regain the White House appears to exist in large part to allow him to avoid prison time as a result of the pending criminal cases against him. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that his other trials — particularly for trying to overturn the 2020 election — pose the gravest political threats to this effort. But polling conducted by Ipsos and POLITICO Magazine suggests that a conviction in Manhattan could indeed hurt him electorally, particularly with independents.
If Trump’s lawyers can pull
