Defense did a lot better today. I think it's reasonable to conclude that Cohen lied about that one phone call. Probably not enough to prove. But enough to consider his word untrustworthy. So it would be fair for the jury to not consider his word credible.
But the problem is everything else. Cohen provided the taped phone call of Trump paying to kill the McDougal story. The defense couldn't counter that. It's clear that Trump knowingly paid her off at least. So why wouldn't he have paid off Stormy, too? Trump also insisted on signing any check over $10k. And his signature is on the repayments to Cohen after he paid off Stormy. And the Trump Organization Controller testified that Trump was quite the penny pincher on signed checks, voiding checks that he felt he didn't have to pay. So it's unlikely that Trump would have unknowingly signed the Story repayment checks to Cohen, especially since the total amount was around $500k. It's pretty unfathomable to think that Trump wasn't paying attention to $500k going out.
Then there was the structure of how he repaid Cohen. That was completely out of character on how he repaid Cohen for his usual legal services. Those payments were highly unusual in that capacity. And then there's the fact that Cohen took out a second mortgage to initially pay off Stormy. It is exceptionally hard to believe that he would do this without assurances from Trump.that he would be repaid.
And finally we have both the testimony of Pecker and Hicks who both stated that Trump badly wanted the Stormy story killed. Hicks said he considered it a category 5 hurricane. And Pecker testified point blank that he, Cohen, and Trump all worked together to kill the Stormy story.
So at the end of the day we have Cohen likely having lied about that one phone call, which changes none of the other facts. That Cohen committed crimes, which were done on behalf of Trump and that Cohen now hates Trump, which is understandable because he went to prison for him. That's really all the defense has established.
Absent witnesses who can shred the rest of the facts, I don't see the defense having nearly enough to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors that Trump was somehow in the dark about all of this.
