According to a recent New York Times report, Donald Trump vented that he does not have a “Roy Cohn,” a reference to his notoriously ruthless lawyer who was repeatedly indicted and disbarred. While Trump reportedly griped that his lawyer Todd Blanche has been insufficiently aggressive, Blanche has, in fact, employed the same kinds of aggressive tactics that made Cohn infamous. Cohn, who died in 1986, used delay to his advantage, was unapologetic in his belligerent attacks on others and had a reputation for breaking the rules. Taking a page out of Cohn’s playbook, Blanche has attacked prosecutors and the judge to delay the trial, has been unapologetic in defending Trump’s attacks on jurors and witnesses and has already broken the rules by making improper arguments to the jury in his opening statement.
Blanche attacked the judge in the hopes of delaying the trial and advancing Trump’s false narrative that he’s the victim of political persecution.
With Blanche seemingly under pressure from Trump to display even more aggression, Judge Juan Merchan must be prepared to lay down the law and ensure that there will be serious consequences for any Cohn-style antics.
When Blanche accused the Manhattan district attorney’s office of violating its discovery obligations by not producing certain materials from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), Merchan scolded him. “You’re literally accusing the Manhattan DA’s office and the people assigned to this case of prosecutorial misconduct and trying to make me complicit in it,” he said, “And you don’t have a single cite to support that position?”
Merchan noted that Blanche, as a former SDNY prosecutor, knew that he could have requested materials himself, yet he waited until two months before trial to request them. Blanche also waited until roughly two weeks before the scheduled trial to inform the court that he had requested materials from SDNY that could delay the trial. His request to toss the case based on meritless prosecutorial misconduct accusations shortly before trial was an unusually braz