On Thursday, following Michael Cohen’s second day of cross-examination in the Donald Trump hush money trial, I packed into an elevator exiting the courthouse with a group that included CNN personalities George Conway and Kaitlan Collins.
Earlier in the trial, when Trump was coming back into the courtroom after a lunch break, my colleague Susan Matthews had seen Trump goon Boris Epshteyn hand Collins a pair of printed-out Truth Social posts by “the boss.” The printed-out posts showed photos of the now arch-anti-Trumper, Conway, celebrating Trump’s victory on Nov. 8, 2016—back then, Conway was married to Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, and was, on election night 2016, in his words, “rather inebriated” at Trump’s victory party. “Give these to George the next time you see him,” Epshteyn had said, forcing the documents into Collins’ hands. The point, I suppose, was that Epshteyn’s boss, Donald Trump, wanted to shove it in Conway’s face that he had once been such a proud supporter before turning into a high-profile critic.
I asked Conway if he had been delivered that message, and he pointed to Collins and said, “Ask her.” Conway then joked that he never actually received the printouts because of poor delivery service and Collins countered that the Truth Social printouts were probably still in her bag. The group then joked about what sort of portable printer was being used to turn Donald Trump’s social media posts into hard copies that are then used to carry on petty squabbles with members of the media. (Was the printer Trump-branded?) It was all quite amusing.
The conversation then turned to another photo from that night, one that Conway said he really wanted to see again, which was a shot taken the moment that Stephen Miller handed Trump the victory speech in 2016 that nobody—seemingly not even the candidate—expected he would have the opportunity to deliver. This photo supposedly shows the shock on even Trump’s own face. Someone else in the elevator (it’s unclear whether they were a member of the New York Times’ staff) said that the paper of record did not even have a cover with Trump winning prepared that night—that is, the New York Times apparently did not have a plan because nobody thought Trump would actually win. This was certainly my experience at Slate on election night 2016, as we jettisoned all of our prewritten takes and planned homepage art about the historic victory of our first woman president, scrambling to figure out and let our readers know what the hell had just happened instead.
I was thinking about this part of the elevator conversation as I reflected on Trump attorney Todd Blanche’s cross-examination of Cohen, which continues on Monday after two grueling days last week. For me, Thursday was the first point in the trial that Trump’s defense had effectively created any amount of possible reasonable doubt as to Trump’s guilt. The media’s reaction to that cross-examination—both in reporting and in conversations I had with other members of the press corps—was largely “meh.” My worry, infused with the chilling memory of November 2016: Were we just underestimating Trump, yet again?
The Trump team had foundered during previous confrontations with critical witnesses, seeming to aim their questioning for the pleasure of their boss and not to actually convince jurors. On Thursday, though, you could see why Trump had hired former Southern District of New York prosecutor Blanche to try his first case as a defense attorney. Blanche hammered a clearly beaten down Cohen over his many, many angry rants, as well as his many, many shifting stories and outright lies surrounding his own criminal culpability.
This didn’t fundamentally challenge the story Cohen had been telling about Trump: That the president was informed every step of the way on Cohen’s preelection hush money payoff to Stormy Daniels and approved of, if not orchestrated, the whole thing. But it did put Cohen’s credibility in question.
The key moment that actually dented Cohen’s Daniels story came when Blanche confronted Cohen about one of a handful of phone calls the former Trump fixer said he had with Trump in the days before the 2016 election when Cohen was finalizing the hush money payoff. On that 96-second-long Oct. 24 call—made to former Trump body man Keith Schiller, who regularly patched Trump through to callers—Cohen testified that he and Trump reached “an understanding” that they were “moving forward to fund the deal.” The timing of the phone call is key, because two days later, on Oct. 26, Cohen deposited the funds in the shell company he had created that would ultimately be used to pay off Daniels.
Blanche, however, produced a text chain Cohen had with a 14-year-old prank caller who had been anonymously harassing Cohen. Cohen told the crank caller that he planned to report the harassment to the Secret Service. He then texted Schiller to request a call “regarding harassing calls to my cell and office.” About 15 minutes later is when he had the 96-second phone call with Schiller that he claims was when Trump signed off on the Daniels deal. He had previously neglected to mention anything about the prank caller.
To me, it was an incredibly effective and theatrical bit of questioning. If Cohen was lying about this phone call, the defense will note in closing arguments, what other phone calls with Trump that were supposedly about the hush money payments might he be lying about? It’s the first point they had that I thought could actually potentially sway the jury.
Blanche, of course, made a meal of the fact that neither prosecutors nor Cohen mentioned the 14-year-old prank caller or the text exchange with Schiller leading up to the call.
“You did not talk to President Trump on that night, did you?” Blanche demanded. In addition to talking to Schiller about the prank caller, “I believe that I also spoke to Mr. Trump and told him that everything” was being resolved with the Daniels payment, Cohen insisted. “We are not asking for your belief! This jury doesn’t want to hear what you think happened!” Blanche exclaimed. This was objected to and sustained, but Blanche’s point was very much made.
Again, for me, this was the first and only moment that a member of the defense team had really dented the credibility of any of the witnesses pertaining to the details of the hush money deal itself. Some very smart news reporters I had spoken with afterward, however, hadn’t thought all that much of the moment. One told me he didn’t even realize what had happened until afterward. Another downplayed how it might play with jurors, given all the other evidence. As legal analyst, Slate contributor, and former Obama ambassador and Trump investigator Norm Eisen put it to me, “It was not a Perry Mason moment.”
Eisen continued: “A Perry Mason moment—and I’ve had precious few of them in over 30 years of going to court—is when you are able to blow up the case. It was a good moment. It was a powerful moment. It was a strong punch claimed on the chin, but it did not knock out the witness or the case. It staggered him, certainly.”
Eisen insisted that “Cohen gave some answers that were wobbly, but he fundamentally stuck to his guns, and there’s a plausibility” to his story that he spoke with both Trump and Schiller that night. As damaged a witness as Cohen might be, there’s also “so much corroboration,” Eisen noted.
He has a point. The Oct. 24 Schiller call was just one in a series of phone calls Cohen testified about showing that he was in direct contact with Trump as he was closing the hush money deal. On the morning of Oct. 26—the day Cohen transferred the money to his account to pay off Daniels—Cohen had two phone calls directly with Trump himself. He had another 5-minute phone call with Trump the morning of Oct. 28 when the wire to Keith Davidson was going through. Cohen testified—without any dents in that story so far—that he updated Trump and had his approval the entire way during those calls. Cohen’s story is also almost entirely corroborated by the highly convincing opening witness, former National Enquirer honcho David Pecker, who had no ax to grind against Trump and who was barely dinged during cross-examination.
This takes me back to my elevator conversation, though: Are we all just miscalculating Donald Trump’s strength one more time in a way that would only redound to his benefit?
Waiting to get into court that morning, one national reporter had said to me that they were astonished by the degree to which members of the press corps continued to underestimate Trump. (I confessed to being very guilty of this myself.) After Cohen’s testimony, another national reporter—one of the longest-tenured veteran journalists at the trial—and I were discussing how other members of the media did not seem nearly as impressed with Blanche’s “aha” moment. The veteran reporter offered an explanation: “confirmation bias.” That is, we all keep thinking Trump will fail, because we just don’t like the guy.
This came up again when I was speaking with another journalist a few blocks south of the courthouse at the end of the day. This reporter spotted Blanche and members of his firm walking in our direction on the other side of the street. They looked to me to be all smiles, almost giddy. Perhaps they were high from Blanche’s performance, or perhaps it was because of the rare bit of public gratitude Trump had just shown his lawyers in courthouse remarks.
Either way, the other reporter and I flagged down Blanche—whom I had never spoken with before—and told him we had just been chatting about him and his performance. He came running to our side of the street to hear what the feedback about his performance among the press corps had been. I told him a bit of what I had heard—that it was a good uppercut, but no knockout punch. He was dismissive of it, guessing correctly that I had spoken with Eisen. Then I mentioned to him what the veteran reporter had said to me about the risk that “confirmation bias” was yet again causing the press corps to miscalculate Trump’s odds of survival. He smiled and ran off before I could ask him a question of my own—remarking simply, “I agree.”
With jury deliberations set to begin this week, or at the latest, next, we’ll soon know whether he’s right.
