Att’y a flipper ‘nixer’
Uses Don’s words
There’s at least one group that agrees with President Trump’s stance against “flipping’’ suspects — drug dealers and their lawyers.
Last week, a lawyer for a narcotics peddler argued to a Manhattan federal judge that he should be allowed to suggest that jurors ignore testimony from a government cooperator in the case — because even the president of the United States thinks flipping is bad.
“I believe that the president’s opinion of cooperators is just as pertinent as anyone else’s opinion about cooperators,” lawyer Kafahni Nkrumah told the judge outside the jury’s earshot.
The lawyer’s assertion came the same day Trump said the government’s practice of “flipping” cooperators to rat on each other ought to be outlawed.
The president spoke hours after his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, copped a plea deal on fraud and other charges — and amid reports that Cohen is set to turn on the president.
“It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal,” Trump seethed. “I know all about flipping, 30, 40 years, I have been watching flippers. Everything is wonderful, and then they get 10 years in jail, and they flip on whoever the next highest one is or as high as you can go.”
Nkrumah was just starting to try to work the president’s remarks into his closing arguments in the narcotics trial of Jamal “Mally” Russell when the lawyer was quickly sidelined by Judge Gregory Woods.
Woods halted the proceeding, called lawyers from both sides to the bench and soon ruled that Nkrumah was out of line.
Woods noted that flipping suspects is legal and besides, the whole issue is “politically charged, polemic” and not relevant to Russell’s case.
“As we all know, and as I am going to instruct the jury, it is not illegal,” Judge Woods said of flipping suspects, according to a transcript of the proceeding.
The jury ended up convicting Russell, 24, on one count of conspiring to sell crack cocaine but acquitted him of a count of carrying a firearm in connection with his drug dealing.