Andrew Weissmann Calls Hope Hicks’ ‘Devastating’ Testimony a ‘Body Blow’ to Trump: Crying Was ‘Icing on the Cake’
MSNBC commentator and former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said the testimony of Hope Hicks dealt a “body blow” to former President Donald Trump in court on Friday.
Trump is on trial and charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to obscure hush money payments to conceal extramarital affairs. The prosecution says Trump facilitated the payments because he did not want word of them to come out ahead of the 2016 election.
One of those payments was made in October 2016, when then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000.
On Friday, the jury heard testimony from Hicks, who worked for the Trump Organization at the time of the payments. Trump had told her that Cohen made “out of the kindness of his own heart.”
Prosecutors asked Hicks – who at one point cried while testifying – about that claim. She seemed more than skeptical of it.
“I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person or selfless person,” she told the court, adding that he’s “[t]he kind of person who seeks credit.”
During cross-examination, Hicks appeared to back up the prosecution’s argument that Trump arranged the hush money payment to prevent it from being an election issue.
“Mr. Trump’s opinion was that it was better to be dealing with it now and it would’ve been bad to have that story come out before the election,” she said, appearing to undercut the claim Trump was trying to hide the affair from his wife Melania Trump and not affect the election’s outcome.
Lawrence O’Donnell asked Weissmann to weigh in on Friday’s edition of The Last Word on MSNBC.
“I’m sure you’ve seen so many witnesses getting emotional for so many reasons in courtrooms,” he said. “And sometimes it’s this weird cross-current of pressure in that room and it surprises the person that it happens to as much as anyone else.”
I didn’t really care why she was crying. And I think it’s too overplayed. I really cared about the substance of her testimony and I also thought about how her crying was kind of icing on the cake for the D.A.’s office. I’m not in any way suggesting that they sought it, but her testimony was a body blow to the defense here because she put the guilty knowledge of the hush money payments into Donald Trump’s mouth and she recounted that testimony to the jurors….
In terms of evidence, I was thinking about what she said was devastating, and there’s no question that her crying would underscore to the jury, in my view, that she was not there because she wanted to help the government, that she had all loyalty for the Trump Organization.
And so, it was going to make it impossible for the defense to actually say that she was lying to help the government and to hurt Donald Trump. That’s not why you cry. So, I just thought it was an exclamation point to what had just happened in court, which was I think just very much a very, very difficult witness for the defense to be able to overcome.
Watch above via MSNBC.
