CNN anchor John Berman pressed former Trump fixer Michael Cohen over his value as a witness against ex-President Donald Trump — pointing out “you did plead guilty to lying to Congress.”
The trial in the fraud case brought by Attorney General Letitia James (D) and presided over by Judge Arthur Engoron concluded with closing arguments on Thursday — and lots of unexpected fireworks. Those included a chaotic press conference at which Trump attacked Cohen, among others.
On Friday’s edition of CNN News Central, Berman pointed out some potential issues with Cohen’s credibility, and asked “How do you think a jury sees you as a witness?”:
JOHN BERMAN: So, Michael, you did plead guilty to lying to Congress. You did admit just about a month ago that you sent citations, legal citations that did not exist because you found them on AI to your your attorney. And you knew that this was going to come up in this trial and, you know, it’s going to come up if and when you were a witness in other trials, including Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump. You were a lawyer for a long time. How do you think a jury sees you as a witness?MICHAEL COHEN: Okay, that’s a great question. Thanks for asking. And, John, let me be very clear.The lie, and I’ll say it a million times, I’m going to
say it on the stand. The lie that I told Congress was the number of times that I stated I spoke to Donald Trump about the failed Trump Tower Moscow real estate project. Donald, his team. And don’t forget, it wasn’t just me. It was Ivanka. It was Jared. It was Alan Garten, Abbe Lowell, Ty Cobb, you know, uh, Jay Sekulow. We all worked on this letter, which of course I did present and I put into evidence before Congress. They wanted me to say the number three, that I spoke to Trump about it three times, because that’s what Donald wanted. It was de minimis. And it’s and it was on his, um, it’s what he wanted. The real answer was ten.And if anybody would turn around and say that my credibility is impugned because of the three versus ten. Well, there’s nothing I can do to change their mind.Now, as far as the AI is concerned, I want to be clear about this. Yes, I went on Google Bard because I don’t have Westlaw. LexisNexis. Now that, you know, I’m going to, um, go for my, uh, license, my bar application, I’m going to ask for it to be reinserted. Reinstated. So I used what I thought was a very powerful AI tool Bard, um, which is part of Google, and it produced a hundred different citations,which I forwarded to my lawyer.Now, I want to be clear about something. My other lawyer, Daniel Perry, found the mistake. We notified the judge. All right. Uh, before the judge, um, acknowledged or even knew that they were inaccurate.Southern District of New York prosecutor Nicholas Ruse didn’t acknowledge or didn’t notice that there was a mistake. We did. And we sent proper citations with new cases that exactly are on point to what we wanted, which is the fact that these, uh, terminations, these early terminations of supervised release are very common. That’s all that it was.So once again, I don’t think either of these will have any effect upon my credibility. Uh, whether I testify before the Manhattan D.A., uh, or not.
Watch above via CNN News Central.