‘That’s Not the Law’: Elie Honig Challenges Former Roger Ailes Attorney on Trump Trial Claim
CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig mixed it up with a criminal defense attorney who once represented ex-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes.
After court adjourned for the day in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial, CNN’s Anderson Cooper hosted a Last Supper-sized panel to discuss the testimony of former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker. Pecker testified that he used his publication to “catch and kill” negative stories about Trump ahead of the 2016 election. The former president is on trial in Manhattan on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to obscure hush money payments meant to conceal extramarital affairs he had before the election.
Arthur Aidala, whom the late Ailes hired to help combat sexual harassment accusations, weighed in. He stated that Trump’s attorneys simply need to show that Trump and Pecker sought to suppress word of the affairs to prevent Trump’s wife Melania Trump from finding out and not because he wanted to conceal them from the public before the election. His take elicited a strong response from Honig:
AIDALA: Here’s what [Trump’s lawyers] have to get out in cross-examination. “Isn’t it true, Mr. Pecker, that one point, Mr. Trump said – in addition to the campaign, ‘Melania doesn’t need to hear about this?'” That’s all they need is for that [unintelligible] like yes, “He was concerned about Melania. He was concerned about Barron,” because it’s got to be that the expenditure is 100% for him to become president of the United States.
HONIG: I’m sorry, that’s wrong. That’s just not the law… It does not have to be 100% campaign-related.
COOPER: You’re saying it could be both, “I wanted to protect the campaign, but also I was worried about my wife.”
HONIG: Yes. The campaign has to be a substantial factor, does not have to be 100%. Nobody would ever be able to prove that. My view of David Pecker today is, he was a rock-solid start for the prosecutors. You’re not going to win your case with the first witness. It’s a mistake to try to do that. I agree that if the case ended right now, we’d have no crime made out.
COOPER: So he’s sort of setting the table?
HONIG: Exactly….
AIDALA: I got to ask you this question. Here’s the problem with this whole case. We don’t exactly know what that secondary crime is, right? So, you and I are talking about election law. We’re not talking about whether he falsified– I think it’s an open-and-shut case that he put something in his books that wasn’t accurate. But if he put down, “I bought this suit to… to run for my presidential campaign, but he was going to wear it also to a wedding, he can’t write that off. It’s not a campaign expense… Campaign expenses are, “This is my campaign headquarters. I’m paying rent for it and I’m only running my campaign out of it.”
He can’t say, “I’m running my campaign out of it and I’m doing some real estate out of it.” That’s not a campaign expense….
HONIG: I think it’s worthwhile to step back and reflect on what exactly the charges are here. And I think Arthur’s doing an effective job showing where some of the questions are gonna be raised. But the core charges here, you have to start with falsifying business records. And so, this goes to what we were just talking about. They paid this money to Stormy Daniels to hush her for the election and the allegation is, they falsified the payments. They tried to make it look like an attorney’s legal fees, a retainer. And the argument is, there’s the falsification. You have to tie that to Donald Trump, which is not gonna be easy. And then the sort of back half of it is, you have to show that the motivation was political – not 100%, but that a substantial portion of the motivation was political.
Watch above via CNN.
