The defence team of former President Trump lays out their strategy for the opening arguments of the “highly irregular” hush money trial, which is set to start on Monday. They maintain that the facts are in their favour.
During his Sunday appearance on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Trump’s attorney Will Scharf stated that making doubts about the reliability of the prosecution’s main witnesses is a part of their battle plan.
Regarding Michael Cohen, several courts have previously determined that he was guilty of perjury, as we have said in court pleadings. The prosecution’s witnesses are essentially unreliable, and the evidence here clearly supports President Trump since he did nothing illegal. This, I believe, will be a major topic in this case,” he said.
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Trump “did nothing wrong,” according to Scharf, and the defence team’s goal is to “focus on the facts.”
“Business records are at issue in this lawsuit. Retainer fees paid to one of President Trump’s solicitors were correctly recorded in those corporate papers. Not only that, but President Trump did not really enter those documents. He said that “all of this was going on in Trump Tower in New York, and he was busy running the country from the White House.”
“We believe the facts are absolutely on our side, that they’re absolutely exonerative of the president and, as long as the jury focuses on the facts, as long as the jury can see through all the media coverage and all the sensationalism and focus on the actual facts at issue … we believe we have a winning case.”
Scharf further maintained that since the matter is diverting the presidential candidate from the campaign trail, it should not be heard in New York during the busiest time of the year.
We have asked the judge to recuse herself. For a change of venue, we’ve relocated,” he continued.
This coincides with the odd jury composition that has raised interest among legal experts—something Scharf himself has noticed.
“There are a lot of aspects of this case that are highly, highly irregular, and we saw that play out with jury selection last week,” he continued.
“You saw a huge number of jurors being excused because … they admitted that they couldn’t be fair and impartial and unbiased, as we expect of jurors,” he went on to say.
Among the anomalies are the two solicitors who will be part of the twelve-person jury.
The action is deemed “unusual” by both legal teams to approve and especially “very risky” for the defence, according to former Manhattan district prosecutor Elliot Felig, who also made an early Sunday appearance on the show.
Felig surmised that after Trump’s team sets up a technical defence that, even if the jurors accept all the information offered by the prosecution as accurate, it still fails to constitute a crime, the defence thinks the two attorneys would swing the remaining jurors.
Although there are a lot of peculiar aspects to this case, the defence will contend at the conclusion that even if all of the facts the prosecution presented are proven to be true, that still doesn’t prove a crime. That explains why the jury defence team has two solicitors’, he stated.
Typically, neither attorney wants to be on the jury. Both parties in this matter agreed to have two solicitors serve on the jury.”
According to Scharf, one of the least strange features of the case is that lawyers are present.
