Did prosecutors just break out their smoking gun against Donald Trump?
For months we’ve had to listen to talking heads try to tell us that Alvin Bragg’s criminal case against Donald Trump was a shaky one because it would come down solely to the testimony of supposedly unreliable and uncontrollable witness Michael Cohen. But given the slate of witnesses who testified to the grand jury before the indictment came down, it was obvious all along that this wasn’t going to be the case.
Sure enough, leadoff witness David Pecker alone went a long way to proving Trump’s guilt. And by the time Hope Hicks took the stand and confirmed that Trump was in on the Stormy Daniels payoff, it was all but over. Numerous talking heads even admitted as much on air.
But by the time we were coming up on Michael Cohen’s testimony, the talking heads seemed to conveniently forget what they’d said earlier, and were suddenly back to claiming that the case rested solely on Cohen’s word.
In reality, of course, it turned out that pretty much all of Cohen’s testimony had already been corroborated by other witnesses, with the exception of Cohen’s phone call with Trump. Yet prosecutors have even corroborated that call, by showing a photo of Trump sitting there with then-Daniels attorney Keith Schiller in the timeframe of the Cohen phone call.
This is not the kind of criminal case that needs a single smoking gun. But in the sense that this photograph corroborates the one key aspect of Michael Cohen’s testimony that wasn’t already corroborated by other witnesses, the photo might as well be the smoking gun of this trial.
