When you're down and troubled and radical leftism needs a helping hand, you can always be sure that MSNBC will be there.
Let's back up for a second. Michael Cohen — the disgraced former-attorney for Donald Trump — is carrying the weight of the Left's hopes and dreams to throw the former president in jail … at least until the election is over.
There's just one obvious problem: Cohen is a laughably unreliable witness given his demonstrated history of lying just … all the time.
So much so that The Atlantic published "Michael Cohen's Credibility Paradox," asking "Are jurors prepared to believe the testimony of an admitted liar?"
But don't worry! Enter MSNBC opinion writer, Hayes Brown:
Let's be clear: Michael Cohen is a great witness against Donald Trump in the latter's ongoing Manhattan trial — and a terrible person to rely on for the prosecution's case. As Trump's onetime lawyer and 'fixer,' Cohen was in the middle of the alleged scheme undergirding the case against the former president. At the same time, he's also a known liar, having gone to federal prison in 2019 for, among other things, lying to Congress.
As Cohen himself said repeatedly under the people's questioning, the lies were told in the interest of protecting his client, the man currently on trial.
Trump's defense lawyer Todd Blanche tried to seize on this discrepancy during cross-examination Tuesday, albeit in a wildly scattershot fashion. 'Questioning of Cohen has jumped around between lies, casting Cohen as jilted, as motivated to provide dirt to Trump to get out of prison early, and his podcast attacks,' NBC News' Laura Jarrett reported from the courtroom over an hour into the cross-examination. 'It's all an effort to say he can't be trusted, but it's a sprawling effort.'
Blanche's scattered efforts aside, this line of attack might work out well for the defense in most cases. After all, if Cohen is the prosecution's best witness, poking holes in his credibility is an obvious strategy. But there's just one problem: As Cohen himself said repeatedly under the people's questioning, the lies were told in the interest of protecting his client, the man currently on trial.
Then, after taking us through a timeline of Cohen's recent history with Trump (with a solid scoop of MSNBC-ing on top), Brown adds the following:
It was important, then, to establish with the jury that when Cohen lied, he didn't do so pathologically or to save his own skin, as Trump's defense lawyers have implied. It was with a specific goal in mind: protecting Trump. If anything, highlighting his willingness to lie ironically makes him more credible as a witness to the alleged scheme, as it makes clear the lengths he went to to protect his then-client.
So much irony!
The problem here is clear: once someone is shown to be a liar in a court of law, their credibility hangs by a thread. The motivation behind those lies doesn't really matter: the issue is that Cohen has lied, and could therefore be lying again.
Here's the main difference for the folks at MSNBC clamoring for Trump to be thrown in stocks in the public square: Cohen's old lies were bad lies, because they were pro-Trump. Now, Cohen's new (alleged) lies are anti-Trump, and so we should just assume he's telling the truth now?
Let alone the fact that these lies might help Cohen with his own legal woes?
If Trump floats, Cohen's a liar. If Trump drowns, Cohen's telling the truth!
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