Legal experts have widely agreed that Donald Trump’s defense in his hush money case has not gone well — but one argued Monday that it’s not too late for his lawyers to claw the case back. Former federal prosecutor Shan Wu wrote Monday that Trump’s lawyers could still convince jurors that he’s innocent of business fraud charges — but only by following a specific strategy. “The best defense closings are not scattergun approaches that rely upon lofty rhetoric or anecdotes about the meaning of reasonable doubt,” he wrote in the Daily Beast.
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The reality is defendants tend to face a ‘presumed guilty”’ attitude that the defense must overcome. To do so, defense counsel needs to present a coherent theory or theories. “For example, the defendant wasn’t present at the crime scene and the eyewitnesses are suspect because they either have bad eyesight or are biased against the defendant.
” So, he wrote, Trump’s defense lawyers need to change what they’ve been doing so far in the five week trial. “Thus far, Trump’s defense team seems to use a throw-everything-at-the-kitchen-wall strategy with a particular emphasis on Trump’s favorite foods: insult and shame.” Using those tactics to attack witnesses adult movie star Stormy Daniels and former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, he wrote, did not go down well.
ALSO READ: Inside Donald Trump’s billion-dollar Big Oil heist “To salvage their inept case, the defense needs to give a closing which is tight.
