Former President Donald Trump’s offer to testify in his New York hush-money trial is nothing more than “bluff to his base,” former White House Counsel John Dean in the Nixon administration said Friday.
dean told CNN anchor In response to a question from Sanchez, Boris Sanchez suspected that Trump’s legal team was trying to dissuade the former president from testifying.
“He’s not a good witness,” Dean said of Trump. “He’s — the fact that he’s been on the stand several times and given depositions of some length shows that he’s not a good witness. So this is a good thing for his base. That’s a lot of bravado, because obviously this trial and others have huge political implications for him.”
President Trump has previously said several times that he would testify in the hush money case.
“Yes, I will absolutely testify,” Trump said at a joint news conference with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida earlier this month. . “It’s a fraud. It’s a fraud, not a trial.”
Judge Juan Melchan, who is presiding over the hush-money case, said earlier this month that Manhattan prosecutors can question the former president about his past decisions in civil cases, including the E. Jean Carroll civil case and the civil fraud case. Both incidents were the same. Empire State — If he testifies.
The hush money case, which began last week, is the first criminal trial against a sitting or former U.S. president. President Trump paid porn actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election to keep her then-fixer Michael Cohen quiet about her alleged affair with Trump. He has been indicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with the incident, which he denies.
After the second day of jury selection in the trial, President Trump called the reimbursements “legal costs” and placed some of the blame on the accountants.
“I was paying a lawyer and I recorded it as legal fees. My accountant. I didn’t know,” Trump told reporters. “Please record it as a legal expense. That’s exactly what happened. Is that why you’re going to be prosecuted?”
A recent CNN poll found that a majority of Americans believe former President Trump is being treated differently than most criminal defendants in hush money cases.
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