Noted attorney Alan Dershowitz on Tuesday accused prosecutors from the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of telling two lies to jurors during closing arguments in the trial of former President Donald Trump.
Closing arguments in Trump’s trial based on the indictment of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records secured by Bragg in March 2023 took place Tuesday. Dershowitz said on Tuesday’s episode of “The Dershow” on Rumble that prosecutors misled the jury about Michael Cohen’s claims regarding Trump’s motives for making the $130,000 payout to porn star Stormy Daniels as part of a confidentiality agreement being corroborated.
“The other claim is that he was intending to defraud the voters of New York, who obviously thought Donald Trump would never do anything wrong sexually and they would have been shocked to learn that maybe he paid hush money to a porn star,” Dershowitz said. “They would have yawned, ‘This is New York, ho hum, so he paid money to a playmate. So he paid money to a prostitute, big deal.’ He was sparing his wife some embarrassment, but you know everybody knows who Donald Trump is and nobody’s voting for him on the grounds that he’s celibate.”
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“But the government’s case just crumbles of its own weight and the prosecution is misleading the jury when they say that everything Cohen says is corroborated,” Dershowitz continued. “Yeah, everything Cohen says is corroborated except the two major points, except what turns it into a crime. What’s not corroborated is his testimony that he told Trump he was gonna list these things as legal expenses instead of as compensation and Trump knew all about it. Those are the two things that are not corroborated, so the prosecution is misleading the jury when it makes that closing argument.”
Dershowitz later accused the prosecution of falsely claiming that the payout to Daniels had an effect on the 2016 election, since it took place shortly after a tape of a conversation between Trump and “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush was made public.
“The other lie that the prosecutors told the jurors is he wouldn’t, Trump would not have been elected in 2016 if the Stormy Daniels issue had come out,” Dershowitz said. “Really? The jury, the voters had already heard the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape where he said I can touch, you know, any anybody’s genitals.”
“If that didn’t affect somebody, would having consensual sex with a porn star have an effect on the election?” Dershowitz continued. “I mean, how could the prosecution be allowed to argue to the jury this would have… this would have changed the election? This would have caused Hillary Clinton to be elected president instead of Donald Trump? I mean, that’s such a stretch and surely, if that’s what has to be found by a jury, no reasonable jury could ever, could ever, find that.”
