So, stop me if you've heard this one, Trump's former lawyer Micfhael Cohen walks into a courtroom and testifies as to the fraudulent nature of the Trump Org finances ………
Haven't heard that one? The punch line is that Trump loses it outside the court, and goes after the judge's clerk again, and gets fined $10,000.00.
This is in addition to the $5,000.00 fine the judge levied on Friday for the same thing.
Silence filled the courtroom in the fraud trial of Donald Trump on Tuesday in anticipation of the arrival of the case’s first star witness. Trump, at his usual place at the front of the courtroom surrounded by his lawyers, didn’t turn to look back at his former employee, Michael Cohen, entered to take the stand.
………
According to Cohen, Trump directed him and other executives to cook the books and “reverse-engineer” the values of different assets in order to help the former president inflate his net worth. Asked what numbers he came up with, Cohen said: “Whatever number Mr Trump told us to.”
It was a refrain Cohen repeated throughout his testimony. He, along with the former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, were in charge of helping Trump mark up his net worth. They did it in handwritten notes, in red pen.
“He would look at the total assets and he would say I’m actually not worth $4.5bn, I’m really worth more than $6bn,” Cohen said.
………
But Cohen was calm in the courtroom, even as Trump glowered at him from a few feet away. He was asked to list the crimes he had been convicted of, different counts of tax evasion, misrepresentation and campaign finance violations. When asked to elaborate on a charge of lying to Congress, Cohen said: “I did that at the direction of, in concern with and for the benefit of Mr Trump.”
To quote Mel Brooks (I'm doing that a lot lately) directorial debut The Producers, "We find the defendants incredibly guilty."
And as to the contempt citation:
Donald Trump was briefly forced to testify at his civil fraud trial in New York and fined a further $10,000 after the judge found that he had breached a gag order.
The former president, who had already been fined $5,000 over a disparaging social media post about a key court staffer, was reprimanded for comments he had made outside court but denied he had violated the order, wherein he had been ordered to cease posting about court staff.
Judge Arthur Engoron said Trump “is not credible” as a witness after he claimed on the stand that his criticisms on Tuesday were not aimed at the judge’s law clerk, Allison Greenfield, who has been assisting Engoron throughout the trial.
Greenfield has usually been sitting next to the judge in the courtroom. On Tuesday, Trump was quoted by the Associated Press as saying: “This judge is a very partisan judge, with a person who is very partisan sitting alongside him – perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”
Trump insisted on the stand that the “very partisan” person he had referred to was Michael Cohen, his former fixer-turned-foe, who has been testifying against him in court this week. When Engoron asked if he was sure, the former president replied: “Yes, I’m sure.”
He continued to attack Greenfield, however. “I think she’s very biased against us,” Trump said. “I think that we’ve made that very clear.”
Engoron had previously threatened Trump with jail if he breached the gag order. Fining him $10,000 on Wednesday, he said: “Don’t do it again, or it will be worse.”
3 strikes, and he's out. Next time send him to Rikers.
0 comments :
Post a Comment