Donald Trump certainly made history Thursday when he became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes. However, experts say his attorney, Todd Blanche, might have been able to avoid a conviction if he'd led a better defense.
Dave Aronberg, state attorney for Palm Beach County, Florida, said that he "wasn’t too surprised” by the way things turned out. But, appearing on MSNBC’s “Way Too Early," he argued that Blanche is at least party to blame.
"The prosecution successfully established a firewall around Michael Cohen, and that was important because it neutralized Trump's best defense, which is to call Michael Cohen a liar and to say you've got to just reject the case built around Michael Cohen," he said.
Blanche committed "crucial errors," Aronberg continued, when he failed to rebut the prosecution and “adequately wound Cohen on the stand.” He also faulted the defense team for continuing to insist that Trump barely knew Stormy Daniels. That undermined Blanche's credibility, Aronberg said, “because no one believed that the sexual encounter didn’t happen.”
Second, Blanche claimed that the monthly $35,000 payment to Cohen was a legal service and not a reimbursement for the hush money he paid Daniels. That blocked "Trump's best defense," he said, "which is that the legal services actually covered the reimbursement to a lawyer-slash-fixer and Trump didn't intend to deceive. But Trump's defense made it easier for prosecutors to prove that Trump acted deceptively and turned an obvious $130,000 reimbursement into a bogus $420,000 legal expense."
A former Trump lawyer, Tim Parlatore, also felt Trump was poorly defended in a case that was “incredibly defensible,” as he told a a panel on CNN Thursday evening.
A major reason for the defense’s failure is the amount of time it spent discussing Playboy model Karen McDougal, the "catch-and-kill" scheme with the National Enquirer and “other things that had nothing to do with the actual charge of falsified business records," Parlatore told anchor Wolf Blitzer. “I think that they really fell into the trap of fighting all these things they didn't need to," he said.
Blanche, however, argues he did nothing wrong. Asked by Fox News' Jesse Watters if he would do anything differently, now that there's a verdict, he laughed. "I wouldn't change anything that we did," he said.
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