Trump Lawyer Says His Client Is Innocent Victim Of Extortion, Won't Let Him Testify About It To Grand Jury

Let's see him put that stuff in a court document.

trump finger point

(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

In light of reports that his client is about to be indicted, Donald Trump’s lawyer Joseph Tacopina took to the airwaves yesterday to denounce Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s ongoing criminal investigation of the 2016 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

“This case is outrageous. There should be a healthy dose of disgust from the bar, the legal community, prosecutors, defense lawyers alike,” he fumed to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America. “We are distorting laws to try and bag President Trump. I don’t know if it’s because he’s leading in all the polls. I don’t know what it is, but clearly this prosecutor and this prosecutor’s office has made an agenda of trying to get him.”

And perhaps he’s correct, although Bragg has taken significant flack for not charging Trump in conjunction with the fraudulent financial statements that form the basis of the civil complaint filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

But Tacopina went on to make a series of bizarre claims about the potential case against his client, which is reported to consist of a misdemeanor charge of falsifying a business record plus another charge to be named later, which would add up to a felony. Various observers have speculated that the “plus up” charge might involve conspiracy to violate election law, New York state campaign finance laws, or even the federal campaign violation Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen pled guilty to back in 2017.

New York has a five-year statute of limitations for most felonies, which would appear to mean Trump’s 2016 conduct is time-barred, but Tacopina didn’t want to talk about that. Instead he made the facially nonsensical claim that Daniels was seeking to extort Trump in 2016.

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“This was a plain extortion, and I don’t know since when we’ve decided to start prosecuting extortion victims?” the lawyer blustered. “He’s vehemently denied this affair, but he had to pay the money because there was going to be an allegation that was going to be publicly embarrassing to him regardless of the campaign.”

Here on Planet Earth, Daniels had been trying to sell her story for months by the time Michael Cohen got to her. She approached the National Enquirer, where publisher David Pecker and editor Dylan Howard were engaged in a plot to “catch and kill” stories about Trump which might be damaging to his campaign. Both testified about the scheme to then Special Counsel Robert Mueller, as did Cohen, who pled guilty to making an illegal, excessive campaign contribution. That’s clearly not extortion, but Tacopina wasn’t done.

TACOPINA: There was absolutely no false records made. To my knowledge, there was no false records made.”

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not sure?

TACOPINA: Well, I wasn’t there at the time, but my understanding of these facts is clearly there was no false record made.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you would acknowledge if a false record is made, that is a crime, a misdemeanor? Correct?”

TACOPINA: No, I wouldn’t acknowledge that! Any false record made, in a private banking record—

STEPHANOPOULOS: But if it were made, it is a crime. It’s a misdemeanor.

TACOPINA: It depends in what context. I could record something in my personal checkbook that says that I bought something for personal use or whatever. As long as there’s no tax ramifications or campaign ramifications, it’s not a crime. Whatever I do in a personal setting is different.

This, too, is a bizarre statement about easily disprovable facts. Trump didn’t use “personal” funds. He used money from the Trump Organization — that’s why we’re talking about falsifying a business record. And he disguised the reimbursement for the $130,000 Cohen fronted to buy Daniels’s silence about their sexual encounter as a legal retainer, which Rudy Giuliani admitted on air to Sean Hannity in 2018 after promising the Fox host “I’m giving you a fact now that you don’t know.”

GIULIANI: When I heard of Cohen’s retainer for $130,000, he was doing no work for the president. I said, “Well, that’s how he’s repaying it, with a little profit and a little margin for paying taxes for Michael.

HANNITY: But you know the president didn’t know about this?

GIULIANI: Ah, he didn’t know about the specifics of it, as far as I know. But he did know about the general arrangement, that Michael would take care of things like this. Like, I take care of this with my clients. I don’t burden them with every single thing that comes along. These are busy people.

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Giuliani gabbled on about how Trump had “funneled it through a law firm” and insisted that this was “a very regular thing for lawyers to do.” And five minutes later Greenberg Traurig showed him the door. But you don’t have to rely on Rudy — and really, you should not! — because Trump signed at least one of the $35,000 reimbursement checks used to make Cohen whole, which certainly makes it look like he was aware of the payments.

Tacopina spent a lot of time abusing Cohen and insisting that Trump never had the encounter with Daniels, but had to pay her off, irrespective of the campaign, to prevent disclosure of a story which was “false, but embarrassing to himself, his family, his young son.”

Meanwhile, Trump seems to have admitted the whole thing weeks ago — although he’s back to denying it now — and even he sussed out the “very publicly known & accepted deadline in the Statute of Limitations” which his current “COUNCIL” omits to mention.

But there was one thing Tacopina was clear on: There was no way in hell that he was going to let his client testify before the Manhattan DA’s grand jury. Poor Donald Trump, faithful husband and innocent victim of a dastardly extortion plot, will not be telling his tale of woe under oath. Not now, not ever.

And that one is totally believable.

Trump won’t testify before NY grand jury investigating hush money scheme, lawyer says [CNN]


Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.