Trump trial starts with smoking gun: Melber breaks down D.A.’s criminal receipts

Now in a trial, there’s generally two types of evidence. The star witnesses, like we started to hear from, that’s testimonial evidence and all the other stuff, what they call hard evidence, receipts, paper records, all of that is the goods, The DA in this opening statement that we followed all through this week here, told the jury they’re going to hear not only the goods through the receipts and the records I mentioned and the finances that prove the fraud, but also an actual recorded conversation. That’s out of court statements that can be confirmed about the payments from Cohen that went on Trump’s behalf, they say. And that dates back to September 2016. And this is interesting as we take it all in and we’ve had a couple days to make sense of it. The DA as team notes you will even hear Mr. Trump suggest in his own voice, paying in cash. And here’s what’s interesting about witnessing a trial. And if you’ve been around American Life even before we ever got a presidential level defendant trial, you may know that trials have always captivated us. We had OJ pass recently and everyone thought back. Everyone was old enough to where they were when that case was going on and when that verdict came in. And one of the reasons the trials are so captivating is that when you’re on the outside, you actually have a better seat than the jurors. What I mean by that is they’re limited to the evidence in court and they’re limited to the timeline in court and all of us following it. And I don’t just say this as a a nerdy legal reporter or lawyer, but all of us who are interested enough to follow this can then learn more and know more in real time than the jurors actually going to know. So I guarantee you there are people on that jury and we watch the screening process who may not remember what was in the news all those years back, may not have been following this as closely as you or us. So they may not have recently heard what I’m about to play, which is what they were previewed. They haven’t heard it yet. Opening statements is what you’re going to get. Then later, a good lawyer on either side, defense or prosecution will pay off those promises. But you don’t have to wait. If you were in the jury, you would. We can remember now what the DAS team is talking about. We have that recording. I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info. Regarding our friend David, I spoke to Alan about it. When it comes time for the financing, which will be what? If I answer, we’ll have to pay no, no, no, no, no, no pay with cash. No, no, no. Now it is interesting to say the least, that Michael Cohen was making furtive tapes of his own client. And you can expect on cross examination the Trump defense to try to attack him for that, but from an evidence perspective, from learning the truth. And again, trials are not supposed to be about getting someone or going after someone you don’t like for other reasons. They’re supposed to be about finding facts beyond a reasonable doubt for getting to the truth. That is some really, really strong evidence. That is why the DA mentioned it in their opening. Remember, they might have 100 exhibits. They don’t go through all hundred. That would bore a jury to tears, but they mentioned that one because it matters so much, because it shows the DA argues, criminal intent. You don’t pay large sums in cash, even in New York, even in real estate, when you get up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. That would be bizarre indeed. Donald Trump’s been around the block. He may know, and you may know when you take out a sum of over 1015 K, it already creates an alert. If you just take 15K cash out of the ATM, it creates a banking alert. That’s how suspicious it is. If you take 130 K out, yeah, the authorities are on to it. So that’s not always the best idea. Just if you don’t want to get caught. But it also is suspicious. And that’s not all the DA prosecution team telling the jury they will also have an extensive paper trail, bank records, emails, text messages, phone logs, business documents, and other records that the DA says they will show the jury to show that Trump reimbursed Cohen through those monthly checks. And again, we know what they’re talking about, Donald Trump’s big loopy signature on each of those checks and more. This star witness, I’ve mentioned, the tabloid publisher David Pecker, well, he’s the first witness, as you probably know from following this trial. They brought him right out. And he said, and this again, as part of the prosecution’s case, he’s their witness. And if the defense has witnesses that they think helped their side, as I’ve told you, we’ll be covering that. But right now, we’re on the prosecution side. And they put him out first to grab the attention to make this very clear that the DA’s argument is this is much bigger than some accounting error. This is much bigger than just business fraud, even though that’s not a good thing. It’s alone, a misdemeanor. He testified that this was a big deal, that it was a candidate level thing not done through intermediaries or cutouts or staff, that Donald Trump himself worked directly with Pecker on this plan that Trump believed would help him win the election. And he said on the stand, I told the tabloid leadership of The Enquirer, we’re going to try to help the Trump campaign. And this was hatched in a 2015 meeting where he would be Donald Trump’s secret eyes and ears. And then he would publish positive stories about Trump and negative stories about Trump’s opponents. And boy, did he deliver. Now remember, this is part of a larger narrative. In fairness to Trump as a defendant, we should note that the media and various types of media publish all kinds of things. And sometimes it’s very clear whether they have positive or negative views on certain people. And in media, some people will tell you that’s based on the facts and other people will say it’s based on ideology or some other alliance. So this part that I’m showing you is a pattern that the prosecution says made a crime. It itself is not necessarily a crime. We see those positive stories of Trump, which is Rachel and others have pointed out in our coverage this week. We’re on the news stands at every major grocery store in America, hitting people who might not read the inside or follow the news as closely. And this went on through the 2016 election cycle. In fact, it went on and on, Pecker describing how the tabloid would then go after Trump’s opponents in ways that even other Trump friendly media might find going too far after the debates, based on the success that some of the other candidates had, Pecker said he would receive a call from Michael Cohen himself. Who would direct which candidate and which direction we should go? Now, that’s important because it makes it sound like something more than what I mentioned earlier, that media cover things and might cover things positively or negatively. It sounds more like orders being phoned in, like they became an arm of the Trump campaign. And that included following something that Donald Trump is well known for, lying and embellishing and spinning his way through everything again on the stand, Pecker says. We would embellish it. All of this coming from Cohen and the tabloid went after Ted Cruz, as we have covered through the week, Trump’s biggest rival at the time, Cruz famously finished second only to Trump in that primary. There was the cover story that some might view as defamatory, falsely saying Cruz’s father was somehow linked to the JFK assassination. I’m showing this to you as criminal evidence. I’m not showing this to you as true in fairness to Senator Cruz. Now, Pecker testified in court that what you see on your screen was not only false, but they knew it was false from the start. In other words, sometimes you have something come out. It has to be corrected. This should have been corrected in advance. It should have never run because they knew it was quote manufactured according to the star witness himself. And Trump used all this against Cruz at the time and Cruz punched back. All I did is point out the fact that on the cover of the National Enquirer there was a picture of him and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast. Now, Ted never denied that it was his father. Instead he said Donald Trump. I had nothing to do with it. Donald’s source for this is the National Enquirer. The National Enquirer is tabloid trash, but it’s run by his good friend David Pecker, the CEO who’s endorsed Donald Trump. And so the National Enquirer has become his hit piece that he uses to smear anybody and everybody. Ted Cruz was correct. Let me repeat, Ted Cruz was correct. And people watching that at the time might have covered it like horse race politics or well, these are just two politicians fighting. Or OK, they dragged The Enquirer into it. But what was not well exposed at the time, what it only took a federal case, the separate investigation and SDNY and then this case and now Pecker’s immunity and him coming to the stand. What we now learned many years later is that Ted Cruz was right about that very point and that it was more than just unfair and inaccurate, that it was a kind of political deal And you can’t rerun the primary and you can’t rerun the general. But you could imagine for all the talk about whether this is somehow unfair to Trump from the left or the Democrats, and look, people have every right to criticize the justice system. I mentioned OJ. That happened in that case too. If you’re not under a gag order, if you’re not the defendant, other people could weigh in. That’s fine. That’s America. But what’s interesting here is even for within the Republican Party, what if at the time more Republicans simply had the facts that those kind of attacks which might have been dragging down Cruz, he obviously felt they were big enough that he had to respond, were actually coming from this secret deal that as Ted Cruz said, it was David Pecker, not just having fun with tabloid stories but actually trying to do something to distort that election. Pretty interesting. We’re also going to hear more testimony from Pecker tomorrow. It is, All in all, has been a big and tough time for defendant Trump in this case, and the DA got off to a very strong start here. Let’s remember that many experts who’ve been around New York courtrooms where they’re doing this four days a week said it could take weeks to pick the jury and Donald Trump could do all these things meantime to make it more chaotic. Well, just as he failed to delay the start of this thing, he also failed to drag out the jury process more than four days work days Failed to move this case. He said oh, he could never get a fair trial there. Failed in many ways to stop what has now begun. As of Monday, everything up to this was set up. But starting Monday, going through the last two days and what we’ll resume again tomorrow is a methodical, evidence backed, detailed case with a lot of star witnesses who know Trump or worked for him or worked privately for him for years. This is not resistance theater and this is not supposed to be politics, although it may be dealing with a lot of campaign political history. This is a 2 by 4 against a very silent, very cowed defendant who was just learning what life is like on that side of the table.