Turley Believes Cohen Committed Perjury on Stand… Again

This has been a really interesting week in the Donald Trump hush-money case.

Different outlets are reporting his testimony in a completely different fashion.

I like the interpretation by Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley, who caught something that I reported on just the other day.

It Does Not Make Sense

When Cohen was testifying, he described why he had been secretly recording Donald Trump.

According to Cohen, he did so to keep David Pecker, the publisher who bought the Karen McDougal story, loyal to Trump.

When I initially reported the story, I stated that I believe he did this to hold future leverage over Trump, not Pecker, and that seems to be the direction that Turley is taking.

He stated, “The one thing about yesterday that was striking, is I thought that Michael Cohen may have committed perjury again.

“In my view, one of his answers just made no sense at all. He said that he taped his client, former President Trump, in order to keep David Pecker, the former publisher of the ‘National Enquirer’ honest and make sure he paid. First of all, it made no sense at all why he would do that, Pecker had been in communication with Trump himself, but it didn’t make any sense at all.

“But Cohen seemed to try to find a reason for shattering every professional ethical standard in surreptitiously taping his client. And so it was really amazing to hear that answer, because I don’t think anyone, certainly I didn’t, believe it, that he was taping that to somehow benefit or affect David Pecker.”

Turley continued on, actually putting the onus of the actions in this case on Cohen, not Trump, suggesting that Cohen was making the suggestions to Trump on how all this should be handed. He explained:

“You know what it sounds like with a lot of these conversations? It sounds a lot like a client being told by a lawyer what they are going to do.

“The lawyer is testifying against the client saying, ‘you should send him to jail for doing what I told him to do.’”

At this point, we only have Cohen’s word on this, so it would be difficult to prove his intent, but Turley explained this far better than I did and as even I noted before, Cohen’s explanation just did not make sense.

The fact that he has lied before on the stand should, at the very least, give Trump’s attorneys something to work with in terms of convincing the jury on that front.