‘Morning Joe’ Panel Spends Nearly 8 Mins Trying to Downplay the Fact that Michael Cohen Was Caught Lying During Cross Examination

BRZEZINSKI: “Also with us, we have former litigator and MSNBC legal correspondent, Lisa Rubin. How are you holding up covering this trial?”
RUBIN: “It’s a lot.”
BRZEZINSKI: “All day, every day. And MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos. Because we also have to talk about the criminal hush money trial with the former President Donald Trump which we’ll get to now. It potentially could wrap up next week, we will find out from the experts here. The prosecution star witness Michael Cohen is set to return to the stand on Monday after Trump’s legal team tried to hammer away at his credibility yesterday. Court is in recess today so the former president can attend his son Baron’s high school graduation this morning. Lead defense attorney Todd Blanche says Cohen’s questioning will likely wrap up on Monday. The prosecution has said it does not plan to call any additional witnesses, and the defense says it may not call any, either. That means closing arguments could begin as early as Tuesday, clearing the way for jury deliberations by the end of next week. Willie, so we’re looking now just at what happened yesterday.”
GEIST: “Another day of cross-examination of Michael Cohen yesterday. He testified he spoke directly to former President Trump on the phone about the payments to Stormy Daniels. Cohen asserted he contacted Trump through Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, on October 24th, 2016, about the hush money payments. It’s about two weeks before Election Day. Defense attorney Todd Blanche pressed Cohen about phone records showing he texted Schiller that day in which Cohen asked how to handle a teenager who was prank calling him. Cohen responded saying he did not remember that message. Blanche said, ‘Do you recall texting Keith Schiller at 7:48 P.M.?, ‘Who can I speak to regarding harassing calls to myself and office? The dope forgot to block his call on one of them.’ You don’t recall that?’ Cohen responded, ‘It sounds right, yes.’ Blanche then noted a return text to Cohen where Schiller simply says, ‘Call me.’ Blanche then pointed out Cohen called Schiller immediately after for a conversation that lasted only about a minute and a half. Blanche accused Cohen of lying, suggesting he did not speak to Trump during that call about Stormy Daniels as he had testified. Cohen, however, insisted both topics were covered, despite the short length of the call. The defense also attempted to paint Cohen as having a vendetta against Trump. Here is a portion of his podcast that was played in court.”

[Clip starts]
COHEN: “I truly [bleep] hope this man ends up in prison. It won’t bring back the year that I lost, or the damage done to my family, but revenge is a dish best served cold. And you better believe I want this man to go down and rot inside for what he did to me and my family.”
[Clip ends]

GEIST: “Okay, Lisa, so you were down at the courthouse again yesterday. We’ll talk about that podcast moment in just a second, but let’s go back to — because it was a little confusing, maybe, as you listened through it. What was Todd Blanche, what was the Trump defense team getting at with that text and phone call between Michael Cohen and the bodyguard, Keith Schiller?”
RUBIN: “Let’s talk about there was a narrow implication and then a much broader one, Willie, that they were trying to draw. The first thing they were trying to say is that Cohen’s testimony about the phone call on October 24th between him and Keith Schiller, which he testified was really a call to Trump about the Stormy Daniels settlement, wasn’t true. They presented him with text messages and phone call records that hadn’t been part of his direct examination, and the insinuation was, ‘You manufactured this. When you said you talked to Keith Schiller in order to talk to Donald Trump about finalizing the Stormy Daniels settlement, that didn’t really happen, did it? You had a minute and 30-second long phone call with him and juxtaposed with these texts about the 14-year-old who was prank calling you at the time. It it’s pretty clear that you called Keith Schiller to complain about that, to get Secret Service and security involved in these harassing phone calls. It had nothing to do with Stormy Daniels.’ That may or may not be true. It is also true that two days later, on the 26th, there is indisputably calls between Michael Cohen and Donald Trump, and I expect on redirect that we will hear a lot from the prosecution about that, that Michael Cohen certainly notified Donald Trump and spoke with him for some longer period of time as he was finalizing it. But the broader implication that Todd Blanche was trying to draw is, if you can’t trust Michael Cohen about this phone call, can you really trust any of his testimony about the conversations that he had with Donald Trump at the time? After all, this was nearly eight years ago. And isn’t it really the case that Michael Cohen’s recollection is not organic, but is rather the construction of multiple prep sessions upon prep sessions with prosecutors from the Manhattan D.A.’s office who have constructed a memory in Michael Cohen that didn’t organically exist about a conversation that never happened, and others as well.”
SCARBOROUGH: “You know, Danny, I have expressed, at times, skepticism about this case even being brought. I will say, though, yesterday, when commentators were talking about how this was like some Perry Mason — I’m just like, no, it’s not. A juror is not going to go, ‘Oh, my god, eight years ago, a minute and a half conversation...’ — I mean, it seems to me the much bigger problem is the podcast where he says, ‘I want this guy to go down.’ I mean, the prosecution is going to be able to clean this up on redirect, aren’t they?”
CEVALLOS: “I agree, but I think you are in the minority. The vibe I’ve been getting is that a lot of folks feel like this was that kind of Perry Mason moment. And to that I say, when it comes to cooperating witness types like Cohen — and Cohen, if we take a step back, isn’t even close to the worst kind of cooperating witness you normally have on the stand. These are hardened criminals normally. This is not Cohen. So the prosecution knows that he’s going to get dinged on things, especially because a lot of these allegations happened eight years ago. Juries will forgive memory lapses from that long ago.”
SCARBOROUGH: “Of course.”
CEVALLOS: “So, I wasn’t in the courtroom, but from what I could see I think this is something that one of two things will happen: either the prosecution will choose to clean it up on redirect, or, Joe, they may not even think it’s that big a deal. They may go for the better moment, which is to stand up and say, ‘We’re good, we have no further questions for this witness.’ I just didn’t think it was that damaging because the prosecution is going to concede, essentially, and they have throughout the case, Cohen is flaky, Cohen is a guy that isn’t the most reliable person, but he’s believable on these issues. You know, I’ve been guilty of this before myself in cases where you find a factual inconsistency and you really hammer it and you think it’s going to be that Perry Mason moment, but if you hammer it too much, it looks a little petty to the jury. So it’s hard to say what the jurors are thinking. It just didn’t strike me as something that was fatal to the prosecution. Everybody knew that Cohen was going to get hit with his inconsistencies on cross-examination, I don’t think it came as a surprise to the prosecution, and I really don’t think even the defense thinks that that they’ve completely dumped on the state’s case.”
LEMIRE: “So, Chuck, if you were there, how would you have handled this moment with Cohen? What would be the plan? And once Cohen is done, we may be out of witnesses unless Donald Trump is called to the stand.”
ROSENBERG: “So, first, preliminarily, I agree with Joe and Danny. Perry Mason moments happen on ‘Perry Mason,’ they don’t tend to happen in courtrooms. It would be extraordinarily rare. Second, I also agree with Danny that either the government cleans it up or ignores it. I mean, cross-examination of Mr. Cohen lasted, what, 17-and-a-half years, and at the end of that, this is what we’re left with, that there was a discrepancy about a phone call eight years ago? Great. He’s probably wrong, but was he intentionally wrong? If he was intentionally wrong, that’s a problem.”