Will Trump be a convicted felon?

Former president Donald Trump’s defense team chose to rest in the so-called “hush-money” trial in Manhattan on Tuesday, moving the case forward to closing arguments next week and then jury deliberations. 

Trump did not end up testifying in his own defense, which he had suggested earlier in the trial he might do. Instead, the defense called only one significant witness: Robert Costello, an attorney and former advisor to Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani. Costello testified that Cohen told him previously that he had nothing incriminating to offer prosecutors about Trump and that he told him “numerous times” Trump did not know anything about payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Costello’s testimony was intended to further discredit Cohen, the prosecution’s key witness. Cohen is the only witness that would have a first-hand account that Trump knew Cohen was paying Daniels to sign a non-disclosure agreement and that he lied about the purpose of the payments in business records to cover up the alleged affair. However, Cohen’s testimony was riddled with credibility problems brought about by the defense team’s cross-examination, led by Todd Blanche. Cohen admitted that he stole tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organization by inflating legal expenses. He was also caught hiding the true purpose of a phone call made to Trump’s bodyguard just a couple of days before Daniels was paid. Cohen testified that the call was made to her approval for the payments from Trump, but the defense demonstrated through contemporaneous text messages that Cohen asked to speak to the bodyguard about a fourteen-year-old prank caller.

Even some of Trump’s harshest critics gave kudos to Blanche for his effective cross-examination. CNN host Anderson Cooper, who was at the trial, called his performance “incredible,” explaining, “On a cross-examination lawyers want to build a box around the witness and then slam it shut. That’s what Todd Blanche did to Michael Cohen.” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a star cooperating witness get his knees chopped out quite as clearly and dramatically as what just happened with Michael Cohen.” Others described it as an “aha” moment for the jury.

Will Trump be a convicted felon? Or did his defense team introduce sufficient reasonable doubt for the jury in their attempts to discredit Michel Cohen? We’ll find out soon enough in likely the last trial to take place against the former president before Election Day. 

-Amber Duke

On our radar

RNC ON LOCKDOWN The Republican National Committee was evacuated Wednesday after two vials of blood addressed to former president Donald Trump arrived at the GOP headquarters in Washington, DC. The Capitol Police are investigating the incident. 

BIDENOMICS ON BLAST A new Harris-Guardian poll found that 56 percent of Americans believe that the US economy is in a recession. “When people can’t afford the things they used to, they’ll feel like the economy is in a recession no matter how well the stock market is doing,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz said in reaction. 

BACK IN THE SADDLE Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis won her Democratic primary on Tuesday as she faces efforts from Trump’s defense team to remove her from the former president’s election interference case. 

Congressional committee gets Covid accountability 

It’s taken years and a Republican-created congressional committee, but EcoHealth Alliance and its pugnacious director, Dr. Peter Daszak, will both be debarred by the Department of Health and Human Services following years of investigations and bipartisan condemnation. EcoHealth, through federal HHS funding, was giving grants for gain-of-function research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is believed by many to be the source of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The move comes after the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic brought Daszak in for a public hearing last month, where he faced withering criticisms from members of both parties who tore into his shoddy accounting processes and constantly shifting definitions of gain-of-function research. 

Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis, a subcommittee member, criticized Daszak as someone who was “blinded by greed and ambition” who “funneled millions of taxpayer dollars into what was clearly dangerous, if not catastrophic, gain-of-function research, playing a risky game with global health.”

In response to the decision, famed scientist Richard Ebright, one of the earliest proponents of the now-widely accepted lab leak theory of Covid’s origins, wrote that “unindicted felon Daszak provably defrauded the US government, provably breached contractual terms of US government grants, and, through reckless gain-of-function research in Wuhan, probably caused the Covid-19 pandemic, killing 20 million and costing $25 trillion. Prosecute.”

This afternoon, the subcommittee finally brought in Dr. David Morens, a top ally to Anthony Fauci, who is notorious for his almost laughable avoidance of Freedom of Information Act requests. Morens conducted extensive government business from his Gmail account. In one email, he wrote about how “i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d…plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.” 

In another email, he wrote that there “is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.” 

When Morens wasn’t bragging about dodging FOIA requirements in his emails, he sounded like he was auditioning for a full-time role in Mad Men. A massive tranche of his emails released by the committee include ones where he wrote that beverages are “best delivered by a blonde nymphomaniac” and that if he finds a girlfriend, he “will spring for a jacuzzi, upgrade my wine cooler, get a mattress that will take more of a pounding and stop working so hard.” 

While what comes next for Morens following his grilling is unclear, Ebright had a proposal: “full cooperation in investigating and prosecuting Fauci should be Morens’s only path to avoiding long imprisonment.”

His buddy Fauci will be testifying publicly before the committee next month. Fireworks are expected — they may or may not be shipped in from a Chinese market. 

–Matthew Foldi

Deadly force authorized in Mar-a-Lago raid

Unsealed filings from the classified documents case against former president Donald Trump released this week reveal that the Department of Justice authorized the use of deadly force in the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. Trump responded to the news by calling Biden a “threat to democracy.”

The FBI claimed the authorization was “standard protocol” in a statement:

The FBI followed standard protocol in this search as we do for all search warrants, which includes a standard policy statement limiting the use of deadly force. No one ordered additional steps be taken and there was no departure from the norm in this matter.

Independent reporter Breanna Morello agreed with the FBI’s assessment that the deadly force authorization was standard, noting, “Since 2000, every FBI Operations plan has had the ‘Deadly Force Policy’ section pre-filled in. All federal agents are authorized to use Deadly Force in accordance with this policy. I’m told this is nothing unique and is pretty standard.”

Others, however, suggested that the FBI should have altered the policy given they were taking the unprecedented action of raiding the home of a president (Trump did not end up being home at the time of the raid) who had secret service protection. 

“It was not a standard op. The MAL raid was an unprecedented action with significant potential for confusion and blue-on-blue issues and conflict. It also involved competing equities between federal agencies (FBI & USSS) with equal statutory claims to interrupt the other’s activities,” Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and current conservative radio host, said. “Anyone telling you otherwise is either dumb, or playing dumb. I’ve done more deconfliction with Russians in a foreign op I did for the USSS than the FBI did in their search warrant at MAL.”

–Cockburn