Former President Donald Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche has used his closing argument to play down the nature of his client's alleged crimes and insist the case is merely about "documents," The New York Times reported.
The angle Blanche seems to be gunning for is that Trump was so busy being a president that he couldn’t have possibly known about much else happening under his nose. The defense lawyer is trying to paint a picture of Trump spending long days in the Oval Office, seeking to distance the former president from the documents in question, including checks he signed to reimburse Michael Cohen. Blanche has also emphasized to the jury that Trump used to be an American president, seeming to convey not just that he was busy, but that jurors should think twice before convicting someone of such stature
Rather than rely solely on spoken words, Blanche leaned on a PowerPoint presentation, with one key slide titled "No Election 'Influence,'" CNN reported. He insisted that the bottom line of the case is quite unrelated to the alleged tryst with Stormy Daniels or the hush money payments, but whether Trump. “while he was living in the White House and was the leader of the free world,” had a hand in the financial documents processed by the Trump Organization.
Part of Blanche's strategy is to also drive home the fact that Cohen is untrustworthy and a liar. "He's literally like the MVP of liars," Blanche said, NBC reported.
Ultimately, Blanche argued that this was a case of Cohen doing his own thing, of his own accord, continuing to insist – despite documents suggesting otherwise – that the former president's ex-fixer was being paid for his legal services, not his efforts to silence women on Trump's behalf.
“Blanche is making a classic horses, not zebras argument, saying that the simplest explanation of behavior is usually the right one, as he argues that Cohen was simply being paid for legal work, not repayment for a cover-up scheme,” The New York Times reported.
