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Every day in U.S. courts, state and federal prosecutors put convicts on the stand to help them prove cases because our justice system is set up to ensure they'll be honest an overwhelming percentage of the time. Only when Trump is involved do we talk as we are now—it's maddening.
1/ I don't rightly know why both journalistic and legal professionals seem to have a great deal invested in *de*-normalizing things we do in situations involving poor defendants *every day in America* the moment a rich, powerful man is the defendant, but that's what's happening.
2/ Corroboration is *always* critical in criminal cases, not just when a witness has credibility issues (as so many witnesses in your typical criminal case do). But Cohen has *far* more pressing legal reasons to be straight with Congress than almost any witness you could imagine.
3/ Moreover, we have years of public behavior by the individual Cohen will be testifying about that themselves act as partial corroboration for the sort of character Cohen will be giving Trump in his Congressional testimony. I've no idea where all this trepidation is coming from.
4/ In my many years of experience trying criminal cases, the average witness in a criminal case was someone who themselves had some kind of criminal record and at least one basis to question their credibility. What sort of system do folks think we have? All this is standard fare.
5/ Were I prosecuting cases, it'd be a dream come true to have a witness like Cohen who's spent so many *scores of hours* speaking to federal prosecutors that jurors and the public can be absolutely sure that he's *terrified* of changing his story even *one iota* before Congress.
6/ Yet some incredibly talented former federal prosecutors are trying to give us the impression that Cohen's testimony comes with no indicia of reliability contextually or based on Cohen's legal liability unless and until he gives us a series of smoking guns. It's *preposterous*.
7/ May every poor black/brown defendant in America get the sort of wildly charitable legal analysis applied to their cases that former prosecutors on TV/radio are now giving to one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Maybe we should revisit some closed cases, too.
8/ One reason I suspect you don't often see public defenders on television or radio is that as a class we are tempermentally prone to prick up our ears the very second our colleagues on the other side begin treating the wealthy and powerful better than they ever have our clients.
9/ For this reason, when media institutions choose to exclude those who represent the poor in court from their panels, they're making a conscious decision to let their on-air analyses be both politically influenced and *systematically* favorable to the rich, famous, and powerful.
10/ You want the truth about how America daily handles Obstruction, Witness Tampering, and Conspiracy cases, @CNN and @MSNBC? Bring @ScottHech on-air and you will hear about the justice system the *other* 99% of us live under, not some fantasyland for rich white-collar criminals.
