Congress will not be doing business today, because almost every elected Republican has showed up to sit behind Trump. This includes Gaetz and Boebert, because only the best people.
There are so many of them that they have spilled over into the public seating and some of them have been pushed off to the overspill room.
Oh, and at his regularly scheduled press rant outside the courtroom today, Trump violated his gag order going after prosecutor Colangelo. Only DA Bragg was exempted from the gag order, everyone else in the DA’s office is off limits for Trump. Probably not enough here to get his ass thrown in jail.
The Congressional delegation to kiss trump’s ass had to have its own ass reminded by the judge about the no cell phones policy.
The cross-examination of Cohen begins with…a sidebar. Apparently, this is the longest and most heated sidebar yet seen at this trial, but it’s not sure what all the fuss is about.
Trump has been conspicuously careful not to violate the gag order from the moment he was threatened with jail. Now that the evidentiary part of the trial is coming to an end, he is testing the fences like a fat, orange raptor.
The prosecution can still bring a motion about this to the judge, and recommend a fine. I think Trump would have to go after a witness or the jury before the judge would put him in jail. No need to risk gifting grounds for an appeal over a minor infraction.
The sidebar is over; no word as to what it was about.
However, the judge told the jury that they should be ready to work next Wednesday. Maybe this means that he expects them to be deliberating by next Wednesday and he doesn’t want to have that interrupted.
Blanche isn’t off to a good start today. Given a day to reset, he has on multiple occasions asked for the wrong exhibit to be put up on the screens, only to have to have it taken down and him to look up the correct one.
Blanche is Sideshow Bobbing his way through this morning’s testimony. He’s trying to manufacture a conspiracy between Cohen and one of the DA’s investigators - Jeremy Rosenberg. Blanche keeps using inflammatory language, the prosecution objects, the judge sustains, rinse repeat.
Blanche is playing tapes from Cohen’s podcast in which Cohen expresses, essentially, that he fucking hates Trump now. With the trail of shit and tears that Cohen has left behind him in his career as a scumbag attorney, this is all they’ve got?
After pricking on for about a day about Cohen saying mean things about Trump, Blanche finally gets around to asking Cohen about him being a known liar.
Of course, Cohen is pushing back, pointing out that the lies he told were because that’s what Trump wanted.
Full Disclosure: not all of Cohen’s under-oath lies were in service of Trump; some were for his own benefit. It remains to be seen if Blanche: (a) brings this out; (2) is able to differentiate it from the chaos of his cross-examination so far; and (iii) if the jury will care given the corroboration of the other witnesses and documentary evidence.
Blanche is doing a really good job of letting Cohen explain that he’s unhappy that, of all the co-conspirators in this crime, he is the only one who went to jail.
Blanche eventually gets to Cohen lying under oath for his own benefit, but I’m not sure it’s doing any damage to Cohen. Blanche posited - correctly - that Cohen pleaded guilty to tax crimes but since has consistently whinged that he should never have been charged with those particular crimes.
Cohen has been doing a seemingly good job of parsing, weaving and countering.
Here’s what Cohen got to say about why he accepted the plea deal but still maintains he should never have been charged:
It works to the angle that he was “overcharged” because of political motivation. The problem with this is that the political motivation at that time would have come from Trump.
He was prosecuted to the eyeballs by SDNY. The same SDNY that then decided that it could not possibly prosecute Trump in the same affair because they couldn’t trust Cohen as a witness.
The same SDNY who sat on a pile of documents in this case, only to release them at a time best-suited to create grounds for delay.
SCOTUS decisions are happening. They have decided not to blow up the CFPB at the behest of pay day lenders, which is good. My concern is that this court has a habit of offering small “wins” to the people, before dropping a motherfucking soup bone on our heads with the next ruling.
