Trump’s Lawyers Accuse Alvin Bragg of Prosecutorial Misconduct, Citing ‘Unethical’ Jailing of Elderly Executive, Protection of Michael Cohen

President Trump’s defense attorney, Todd Blanche, has written a harsh letter to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, accusing him of “selective,” “oppressional,” and “unethical” prosecutorial misconduct. Mr. Trump posted the letter on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Tuesday.“In violation of the federal and state constitutions and your ethical obligations,” Mr. Blanche wrote, the district attorney has turned “a blind eye to the admitted and repeated perjury” of his “star witness, Michael Cohen,” while at the same time forcing a “guilty plea for 2 counts of perjury by Allen H. Weisselberg.” The letter comes one day after Mr. Trump’s former longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, pleaded guilty to perjury in Manhattan criminal court, as the Sun reported. Weisselberg, who worked for the Trump Organization for nearly 50 years, admitted to lying under oath when he testified during the recent civil fraud trial. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, had sued Mr. Trump and others for business fraud, and was awarded more than $454 million in damages in February. Weisselberg admitted to providing investigators with false information and lying on the witness stand regarding the size of Mr. Trump’s penthouse apartment at Trump Tower. Weisselberg, who is 76 years old, agreed to serve a five-month prison sentence for this perjury crime, likely on New York’s notorious Rikers Island. He is scheduled for sentencing on April 10. Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to lying in the Trump Organization civil fraud trial. Curtis Means-Pool/Getty ImagesMr. Blanche criticizes the district attorney for exposing “innocent citizens, like Mr. Weisselberg, to irreparable and life-altering harm,” and “threatening him with years in state prison should he not succumb” to the state’s “demands,” while refusing to investigate the “blatant violations of the New York Penal Law” committed by Mr. Trump’s nemesis and former lawyer, Cohen, who “admitted to multiple instances of perjury and then committed perjury” while on the witness stand during the recent civil fraud trial. Cohen is expected to be a key witness in the upcoming criminal trial brought by Mr. Bragg against the former president. Last spring, a grand jury indicted Mr. Trump with 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in an attempt to conceal alleged hush-money payments to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who claims she had an extramarital affair with Mr. Trump, which he denies. The trial is slated to begin on March 25.Cohen plays a key role in the case. According to the charges, he issued the hush-money payments to Ms. Daniels in 2016, and was consequently reimbursed by Mr. Trump through monthly payments the following year. These payments, the district attorney alleges, were disguised as legal service fees for “consulting.” The fraud allegations are misdemeanor charges, but Mr. Bragg raised them to felonies in a novel legal strategy: He connected them to another crime. Mr. Trump is further charged with trying to hide “damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election.” President Trump, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels. AP/fileThis intent to commit or conceal another crime, including breaking “state and federal election laws,” elevates the charges to felonies, punishable by up to four years in prison, under New York law. Analysts believe that an ordinary defendant found guilty of these charges would be unlikely to face prison time, especially as a first-time criminal offender. Yet with Mr. Trump, who has in recent months fared very poorly with Manhattan judges and juries in his three civil trials, anything is possible. On February 26, defense attorneys in the Stormy Daniels case filed a motion in limine, asking the presiding judge, in a pretrial request, to rule that certain evidence will be inadmissible at the criminal trial. One of the 16 requests listed is the testimony of Cohen, whom the defense calls a “liar,” who “recently committed perjury, on the stand, and under oath….” In his letter, Mr. Blanche reiterates the criminal nature of Cohen’s perjury and alerts the district attorney that the “truth cannot cut both ways.” If Weisselberg was forced to plead guilty to perjury, Mr. Blanche argued, so should Cohen, and his testimony should be considered inadmissible. Mr. Bragg’s “conscious choice to ignore obvious and admitted criminal conduct by Cohen and to instead deploy unethical, strong-armed tactics against an innocent man in his late 70s underscores the irresponsibility of your conduct in office,” Mr. Blanche fumed, going on to detail the perjury committed by Cohen, citing court transcripts. In this courtroom sketch, Michael Cohen testifies on the witness stand as Judge Arthur Engoron looks on from the bench, October 24, 2023, at New York. AP/Elizabeth WilliamsWhen Cohen took the witness stand during the civil fraud trial, the former lawyer told the court that Mr. Trump had directed him and his team to inflate the value of his assets on financial documents, relying on numbers Mr. Trump arbitrarily chose. But the next day, under cross-examination, Cohen admitted that Mr. Trump had not actually provided his team with definite valuations. Instead, he said, Mr. Trump acted like “a mob boss,” who “tells you what he wants without specifically telling you.”Furthermore, Cohen admitted, while on the witness stand, that he “testified that he was not guilty of the federal tax evasion charges to which he pleaded guilty and that he lied to U.S. District Court Judge William H. Pauley III during his sworn plea allocution in 2018,” Mr. Blanche wrote. After defense attorneys addressed Cohen’s perjury during the civil fraud trial, the presiding judge, a state supreme court justice, Arthur Engoron, told the court that the testimony was not essential, as there was enough other evidence “to fill this courtroom.” Yet in his decision, he referred to Cohen’s statements as credible.“Justice Engoron’s findings as to Cohen’s purported ‘credibility’ were made despite perjury by Cohen that is more central to these proceedings than the sham trial Justice Engoron himself facilitated,” Mr. Blanche argued. A sketch depicts President Trump conferring with defense lawyer Todd Blanche at the Federal Courthouse at Washington, August 3, 2023. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is at left. Dana Verkouteren via AP“The reality is the opposite: Justice Engoron is obviously wrong. But whatever the merit of Justice Engoron’s flawed views, if you choose to present testimony from Cohen in People v. Trump,” the defense attorney insists, “that decision will have serious legal and ethical consequences for the integrity of the proceedings.…” The letter further states that “the selective prosecution of Mr. Weisselberg is an affront to justice.” Mr. Blanche recalled a previous guilty plea Weisselberg agreed to in 2022, after the district attorney charged both the former chief financial officer and the Trump Organization with tax evasion in two separate cases. The judge who presided over those cases, a Manhattan supreme court justice, Juan Merchan, is now also handling the upcoming hush-money case. Mr. Blanche reminded the district attorney that “the prosecution team insisted on a state prison term, meaning at least one to three years’ imprisonment, unless Mr. Weisselberg cooperated with and provided helpful evidence to DANY.” “On June 17, 2022, Mr. Weisselberg’s attorneys met with Judge,” Mr. Blanche’s letter continues, “during the meeting, Judge Merchan indicated that unless Mr. Weisselberg cooperated against President Trump and others, he would only offer Mr. Weisselberg a state prison sentence of at least one to three years imprisonment.” Todd Blanche, attorney for President Trump, arrives at Trump Tower on February 15, 2024 at New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesBut Weisselberg refused to testify against his former boss, Mr. Trump. Instead he pleaded guilty to tax evasion on nearly $2 million in compensation from the Trump Organization. He was sentenced to five months in prison, but only served 99 days on Rikers Island, widely known for its unbearable living conditions. Because Weisselberg is still on probation, the recent perjury charge put him in a serious predicament. If he didn’t agree to plead guilty, he could have faced a more serious sentence for violating his probation. The judge would have indicted him, the defense wrote, and sought to have him “jailed for a probation violation, forcing a senior, innocent man to suffer and sit in jail awaiting a hearing on an alleged violation of probation, which has a low burden of proof.” In short, the letter portrays the district attorney as someone who charges some but not others, depending on what serves his cases. The Sun reached out to the district attorney’s office for comment, but did not receive an answer. No response to the letter has yet been filed.

Trump’s Lawyers Accuse Alvin Bragg of Prosecutorial Misconduct, Citing ‘Unethical’ Jailing of Elderly Executive, Protection of Michael Cohen

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