The prosecution’s case had flaws that couldn’t be wallpapered over even with weeks of testimony, over 200 exhibits and a polished and persuasive presentation by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, and his team. If Mr. Trump’s lawyers had played their cards right, they most likely would have ended up with a hung jury or a misdemeanor conviction.
The defense lost a winnable case by adopting an ill-advised strategy that was right out of Mr. Trump’s playbook. For years, he denied everything and attacked anyone who dared to take him on. It worked — until this case.
“Jurors often want to side with prosecutors, who have the advantage of writing the indictment, marshaling the witnesses and telling the story. The defense needs its own story, the side that tells the simpler story at trial usually wins.
Instead of telling a simple story, Mr. Trump’s defense was a haphazard cacophony of denials and personal attacks. That may work for a Trump rally or a segment on Fox News, but it doesn’t work in a courtroom. Perhaps Mr. Trump’s team was also pursuing a political or press strategy, but it certainly wasn’t a good legal strategy. The powerful defense available to Mr. Trump’s attorneys was lost amid all the clutter.
The trial dragged on for weeks largely because of Mr. Trump’s “deny everything” approach. A savvy defense counsel would have stipulated that Mr. Trump had an intimate affair with Ms. Daniels. Instead, the defense forced the prosecution to prove that the affair occurred and proceeded to aggressively attack Ms. Daniels, whom some of the jury likely found sympathetic in her testimony. That attack gained no ground legally for the defense — little turned on whether Mr. Trump had a sexual encounter with her — but distracted from his actual defense.
Similarly, the cross-examination of Mr. Cohen dragged on for days because the defense sought to confront him with every lie it could identify, seemingly every misdeed he ever committed and every potential line of attack it could come up with.
Because the defense denied everything and attacked Mr. Cohen on every point, prosecutors were able to focus on the many points where Mr. Cohen’s testimony was corroborated by documents, phone records, text messages and a recording. If the defense had narrowly focused on the key points on which that testimony was not corroborated, it could have undermined the prosecution’s advantage.”
From: Mariotti, R. (2024, May 30). Opinion | How Trump’s Team Blew It. The New York Times.