George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley, a conservative legal expert, said that the key witness in the Manhattan court case against former President Donald Trump may have committed perjury on the stand on Monday.
Former attorney Michael Cohen may lied under oath during a “striking” testimony regarding a secret recording of Trump and others.
“The one thing about yesterday that was striking, is I thought that Michael Cohen may have committed perjury again,” Turley told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” star Dana Perino.
“In my view, one of his answers just made no sense at all,” Turley continued. “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.”
The testimony made “no sense” to Turley — which is suspects is because Cohen was lying under oath.
“First of all, it made no sense at all why he would do that,” Turley pointed out. “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,” he said.
“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 said.
Cohen returned to the witness stand on Tuesday, providing further testimony about Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush money scheme that prosecutors allege was an illegal effort to purchase and conceal stories that threatened his 2016 campaign.
Cohen, who turned against his former boss after being convicted and jailed for lying to Congress in 2018, faced questioning from prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, who sought to portray him as a former Trump loyalist turned criminal.
Trump was joined at the courthouse by a group of GOP lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and other potential vice presidential candidates for his 2024 campaign.
Their presence was a calculated display of Republican Party support not only for Trump but also for voters following the trial coverage and the jurors tasked with determining his fate.
Johnson held a news conference outside the courthouse where he criticized the numerous prosecutions of Trump as Democrat-inspired “lawfare.”
Trump, speaking before the court hearing, praised his political allies, stating, “I do have a lot of surrogates, and they’re speaking very beautifully. And they come … from all over Washington. And they’re highly respected, and they think this is the greatest scam they’ve ever seen.”
In a related development, a New York appeals court upheld a gag order on Tuesday, prohibiting Trump from discussing witnesses, a prosecutor, and the judge’s daughter. The court found that Judge Juan M. Merchan had “properly determined” that Trump’s public statements “posed a significant threat to the integrity of the testimony of witnesses and potential witnesses in this case.”
During his testimony, Cohen admitted to lying to Congress during an investigation into rumored ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign, and said that he did so to protect Trump.
Besides his secret recordings, Cohen also described the April 2018 raid by law enforcement on his apartment, law firm, a hotel room where he stayed, and a bank where he stored valuables.
The recordings and Cohen’s testimony are critical to the prosecutions case — but Turley said he was unconvinced.
“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,” Turley said. “The lawyer is testifying against the client saying, ‘you should send him to jail for doing what I told him to do.’”