Jurors’ tough time finding truth in the murk

After the week-long process to choose a jury in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, the hard work now begins for the panel of seven men and five women.

But in this case it will be especially challenging because the cast of murky characters will leave them wondering who to believe.

The jury at the court in New York will hear from convicted liars, perjurers and the publisher of a tabloid magazine that made a cottage industry of headlines about celebrities having just weeks to live (they almost always endured beyond the deadline).

That poses unique issues of credibility that will complicate the deliberation process on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Prosecutors claim it amounted to an attempt to deceive the American public. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

The star witness for the prosecution will be Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer. By all accounts, he will be the only witness who will directly link Trump to the scheme he is charged with.

Cohen (inset) is expected to say that the former president approved repayments to him for the hush money, repayments that prosecutors say were illegal. That’s a lot of weight to put on the shoulders of a man who was sentenced in 2018 to three years in jail for lying to Congress, lying to banks and breaching campaign finance laws, among other crimes.

Worse, last month the judge who sentenced Cohen refused to release him early from court supervision following his release, because he may have perjured himself in his submissions when he was sentenced – a liar who is lying yet again, Trump’s lawyers will no doubt claim.

Another problematic witness will be David Pecker, the former chief executive of American Media Inc, the parent company of National Enquirer. He is set to testify about meetings with Trump where they allegedly agreed to buy up the rights to Daniels’s story, but not publish it.

Yet how can you believe a word said by a man who published baseless conspiracy theories insinuating that the father of Senator Ted Cruz, who ran against Trump in 2016 for the Republican nomination, helped the man who shot dead John F Kennedy?

Other witnesses with a chequered past include Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategic adviser, who was jailed for four months for contempt for refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena. Then there’s Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s former personal lawyer, who is now bankrupt and facing election interference charges in Georgia.

And of course there’s Trump himself. In that context, the accusers may well turn out to be some of the most believable witnesses.

Yet the most reliable – and damning – evidence of all is likely to be the cheques Trump wrote to Cohen repaying him for “legal services” that didn’t actually exist.

This case may well hang on the fact that the documents don’t lie – even if everybody else does.