George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Tuesday that former attorney Michael Cohen may have committed perjury when he testified Monday.
Cohen, a one-time fixer for former President Donald Trump who pled guilty to charges of lying to Congress in 2018 and who was accused of perjury by a federal judge, took the stand Monday to testify in the case centered around a $130,000 payout to porn star Stormy Daniels. Turley said that Cohen’s answer about why he secretly recorded a phone conversation with then-President-elect Trump was “striking.” (RELATED: Jonathan Turley Says Michael Cohen’s Testimony Helped Trump Because It Showed He Was Following His ‘Directions’)
“The one thing about yesterday that was striking, is I thought that Michael Cohen may have committed perjury again,” Turley told “America’s Newsroom” co-host Dana Perino. “In my view, one of his answers just made no sense at all. He said that he taped his client, former President Trump, in order to keep David Pecker, the former publisher of the ‘National Enquirer’ honest and make sure he paid. First of all, it made no sense at all why he would do that, Pecker had been in communication with Trump himself, but it didn’t make any sense at all.”
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“But Cohen seemed to try to find a reason for shattering every professional ethical standard in surreptitiously taping his client,” Turley continued. “And so it was really amazing to hear that answer, because I don’t think anyone, certainly I didn’t, believe it, that he was taping that to somehow benefit or affect David Pecker.”
Cohen, who received a 36-month sentence on tax evasion charges in December 2018 and was also disbarred, is a star witness for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, testifying before the grand jury before Bragg secured an indictment of Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on March 30, 2023.
Cohen was accused of submitting non-existent cases generated by Google Bard to a federal judge in December during an effort to have his probation ended early.
Turley also pointed out that the taped phone call played in court Monday showed Cohen was acting as an attorney for Trump. (RELATED: Jonathan Turley Lays Out How Prosecutors Could Be Using Michael Cohen To Avoid Swift Defeat)
“You know what it sounds like with a lot of these conversations? It sounds a lot like a client being told by a lawyer what they are going to do,” Turley said. “The lawyer is testifying against the client saying, ‘you should send him to jail for doing what I told him to do.’”
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