Inside Donald Trump’s criminal trial
“Todd? It’s Donald Trump.” Lounging around in his rented condo after a day’s skiing on Copper Mountain in Colorado, Todd Blanche hadn’t expected to take any work calls. It was a February Sunday in 2023, and the New York defence attorney planned to finish his weekend watching the Kansas City Chiefs play in the Super Bowl. But when he heard the unmistakable voice on the other end of the line, Blanche worried no one would believe him. He pulled his adult daughter aside and put his phone on speaker. She listened, mouth agape, as the former president said he had heard that Blanche was a “phenomenal lawyer” and asked whether he and his wife, Kristine, would come down to Mar-a-Lago for dinner. Stunned, he agreed without checking his calendar.
Blanche, who had never spoken to Trump or expressed any interest in representing him, knew what the conversation was likely to concern: the first criminal indictment of a former president in American history. Emboldened by his victory prosecuting a fraud case against the Trump Organization, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg had recently revived an investigation into Trump falsely accounting for a pay-off to porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election.
Blanche also knew things weren’t looking great for the ex-president. His political prospects seemed to be dimming, with Florida governor Ron DeSantis raising vast sums of cash and handsomely beating Trump in polls of likely Republican primary voters. Blanche had watched as, one by one, high-profile individuals in Trump’s entourage either seemed to go off the Maga deep end or turn on him under legal pressure. In fact, Bragg’s star witness in the criminal case — attorney-turned-convicted-felon Michael Cohen — was an example of both. Not to mention a walking cautionary tale about the potential consequences of lawyering for Trump.
But at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks later, Trump wasn’t the caustic, rambling loudmouth of his political rallies or the late-night social media poster prone to conspiracy and bitterness. He was the raconteur club-owner regaling the couple with anecdotes. It was clear he wanted Blanche to represent him though, and Blanche had to admit the offer appealed to both his ambition and his vision of the law as requiring fairness for all defendants. Something in him had bristled at the way the New York legal establishment had walked away from the notion of defending Trump but had no qualms about lionising lawyers who defend the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.
When they got back to Manhattan, Blanche and Kristine discussed the pros and cons. He’d have to leave his hard-won partnership at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, New York City’s oldest white-shoe law firm, and the invites to Chelsea gallery openings might thin out for a while. But their liberal-leaning children had both graduated and were living in states where they weren’t as likely to suffer social sanction for their father’s association with Trump. Looking out over the East River from their penthouse in the Financial District, Blanche asked the question out loud: “Should we just do this?”
A few weeks later, Blanche officially accepted the job. In doing so, he was betting that he could tread a line others had tripped over so badly they’d ended up jobless, in jail or worse. He told himself that, one day, the power brokers in his profession, along with much of the rest of the country, would see that what he was doing was honourable. Most of all, Todd Blanche told himself he could handle Donald Trump.
To many who knew him, Blanche’s decision to represent Trump came as a surprise. At the time, he seemed a creature of the liberal metropolis in which he had built his career. As his children often remind him, he’d even shed a tear the night Hillary Clinton lost, fearing for America’s institutions under Trump. In truth, Blanche had long seen the cut-throat world of criminal law differently from many of his Ivy League-educated peers.
Blanche, 50, grew up in a blue-collar suburb of Denver, Colorado. His father, a Canadian hockey player who came to the US on a sports scholarship, and his mother, a nurse, were Republicans. As a teen, Blanche was more taken with Bill Clinton’s charisma and oratory, and by what he saw as the Arkansan’s ability to coolly arbitrate competing views. An interest in government led him to American University, a private college in Washington, DC. During a summer abroad, he met Kristine, a quick-witted biology major from Long Island, New York, who was studying at the nearby Catholic University, also in DC.
An internship Blanche landed at the US attorney’s office in Washington turned into a full-time job, and the couple married and had two children. Later, Blanche got a paralegal job at the Southern District in New York, known as SDNY, commuting an hour-and-a-half each way from Long Island, five days a week. The family struggled on a government salary and were forced to live with Kristine’s parents for a time. So Blanche put himself through law school at night in Brooklyn. In 2006, he returned to SDNY, this time as a fully credentialled federal prosecutor.
At 5ft 10in and broad-shouldered, Blanche looks something like a linebacker in a tailored suit. In court, he carries a honed “do not fuck with me” expression, in which the lines of his face appear perfectly flat and symmetrical, like a stack of bricks. In person, he is more convivial than confrontational. At the SDNY, his lack of airs helped him form relationships with FBI officers and DEA agents, who tend to reserve the juiciest cases for the federal prosecutors with whom they like working. Blanche rose through the ranks, becoming co-chief of the office’s violent crimes unit. Colleagues considered him marked for nomination as a judge one day.
Blanche says he can pinpoint the moment he realised that his years of hard work might not be enough. In his recollection, it was during the Manhattan induction ceremony of an Obama-appointed federal judge, one of several during the Democrat’s second term, he cannot remember precisely which. With a hint of hurt in his voice, he recounts how US senator and Democrat Chuck Schumer told the largely sympathetic crowd that people like him — straight, white guys — would no longer be automatically considered leading candidates for key posts. “The reason why it made me so frustrated is that I was the first lawyer in my family,” Blanche says. “I went to night law school. At the time, I had no money. I’m not some north-east rich, entitled person. I literally had to work for everything I had.” Schumer’s criteria, Blanche felt, betrayed “a very narrow view of diversity”. (Schumer’s office denied he said anything to that effect.)
Blanche is keen to stress that the privileges previously afforded white men were “completely crazy” and that he agrees with measures designed to level the playing field. As a recent grandfather, he wants me to note he believes “that lady” — his granddaughter — “needs to have every opportunity that I have”. But Schumer’s comment, Blanche says, was a “big turning point”. He went into private practice not long after.
From the start, Trump believed there were no circumstances under which a Manhattan jury would ever acquit him. At best, the case was a chance to claim political persecution in front of a national audience. Blanche was more optimistic. In his early discussions with his new client, he stressed the indictment’s inherent weaknesses. After all, even the government had wavered on the strength of the so-called “hush money” investigation. Under Bragg’s predecessor, the DA’s office had cooled on the idea of bringing the case, while the heavyweights at SDNY decided it could never convict anyone, let alone a former president, on the word of Cohen, who had pleaded guilty to perjury and other crimes in 2018 and served more than a year in prison. Blanche believed reports that Bragg himself was initially sceptical of the case, before being convinced of its merits.
Bragg, who attended Harvard Law School, became the first African-American elected to the position of Manhattan DA in 2021, pledging in his campaign to go after Trump. Blanche knew him well when they were both line prosecutors at SDNY. As is common, they occasionally sat in on each others’ trials and had a cordial, if not particularly close, relationship. A self-confessed “collar-stay fanatic”, Blanche would regularly hand out the little plastic inserts to colleagues whose sartorial standards he found lacking. Bragg, according to former SDNY employees, was a grateful recipient on repeat occasions.
But Blanche increasingly felt Bragg was no longer playing fair. For a start, the indictment provided almost no detail on the underlying crime which Trump was alleged to have committed by obscuring the payments to Daniels. This lent the prosecution greater flexibility in building a case based on federal campaign finance law, say, or an obscure bookkeeping statute and complicated the defence’s preparation. Even if such vagueness is entirely lawful, Blanche was convinced it fell short of a public prosecutor’s ethical standards.
Worse, the historic case was proceeding in almost complete obscurity. Unlike federal court, which has an online filing system available to the public, case documents in New York’s courthouse are kept in manila folders in the clerk’s office on the 10th floor. Anyone wishing to access filings has to request the papers be temporarily handed over, only to sift through hundreds of pages that have long ceased to be in proper order. Sometimes, crucial correspondence between the parties and Justice Juan Merchan, who was assigned to the case, would not make it into the folder for several days. Blanche and his team tried to force the court to establish a digital version, but failed.
Then there was the matter of the Manhattan jury pool, which would be overwhelmingly and, Blanche felt, unfairly biased against Trump. “We know that . . . you take it out of literally the most anti-Trump — except for maybe some places in California and Washington, DC — the most anti-Trump place in the United States of America and you don’t get a conviction,” he says. Even if the trial were moved a few miles away to the Trump-supporting borough of Staten Island, Blanche contests, an acquittal would have been likely.
Nonetheless, Blanche had a plan. All he needed was one juror. One juror who would doubt Cohen’s account; one juror to baulk at the idea that Trump had intricate knowledge of the precise structure of the payments Cohen made to Daniels. One juror was all he needed for a hung jury, resulting in a mistrial.
As jury selection got under way in April, Blanche honed in on two potentially favourable jurors. The first was a middle-aged salesman from West Harlem, his grey hair in a buzz cut and biceps bulging out of a tight black T-shirt, who indicated he watched both MSNBC and Fox News. The second was an investment banker living in Midtown Manhattan. He revealed that on social media he followed both Michael Cohen and former Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway, who famously described the Trump White House’s lies as “alternative facts”. Crucially, he claimed not to have “any strong opinions” on Trump. In a jury pool packed full of people whose posts showed untempered loathing for the Maga movement, Blanche knew that would have to do.
Soon after taking on Trump as a client, Blanche and his wife bought property in West Palm Beach and moved there in order to be able to dash to Mar-a-Lago at a moment’s notice. (By then, both had registered as Republicans.) Kristine, who also has her own integrative health practice, opened the new family business, the boutique Blanche Law firm. The relocation was more than practical. Blanche’s continued employment, he quickly realised, was contingent on making sure there was never a prolonged period during which his client was able to seek counsel from the outer realms of his entourage.
Trump is no stranger to the American legal system. He has been tied-up in litigation of one kind or another almost since the moment he entered the family real-estate business in the late 1960s. In practice, this means he knows just enough to make his lawyers’ lives miserable. In addition to a penchant for taking advice from talking heads on Fox News, there are large gaps in his legal knowledge. At times, people in Trump’s orbit told me, he confused his civil and criminal cases, the scope of the Supreme Court’s powers, even the meaning of simple orders handed down by judges.
In a manner reminiscent of The Apprentice, Trump would sometimes assemble many of his attorneys — civil, criminal and corporate — and various advisers around a table at Trump Tower and ask them to posit what they thought the best tactic was for a particular motion or appeal, no matter whether they had any relevant experience. He would then turn to Blanche and ask him what he thought of the ideas, relishing what he assumed would turn into something like the televised boardroom fights that had made him an internationally recognised celebrity.
Initially, Trump pressed Blanche to adopt a pugilistic stance with the court, in the manner of Roy Cohn, the McCarthy-era communist-hunter turned fixer who was his first and fiercest personal attorney. It was Cohn who taught Trump how to operate on the national stage. Cohn, who was fond of spouting off on the courthouse steps, instilled in Trump the essential lesson that to stop attacking was to begin losing.
When I asked Blanche how he responded to the comparison with Cohn, who lost his licence to practise law thanks to a series of misdeeds, he said: “I am not Roy Cohn.” Blanche had chosen to strike a comparatively moderate tone in his comments to the press, emphasising that he respected the judge and the judicial process, and avoiding Trumpian terms like “witch-hunt” and “rigged”. Cohn’s behaviour on the courthouse steps, he might have pointed out, had contributed to a rule change, barring attorneys from prejudicing proceedings by holding forth in front of limestone porticos in Lower Manhattan.
People familiar with the inner workings of the defence said Blanche offered his client a deal. He would not try to limit what Trump said about the case on social media or on TV, but he would otherwise do things his way. This détente extended to the courtroom. Blanche did not tell Trump, who often sat for hours at trial with his eyes apparently closed, to stay more alert in front of the jury. When a court officer called Blanche over at one point and instructed him to tell Trump to stop using his phone in court, Blanche replied: “You tell him.”
As the trial went on, Blanche’s relations with the court nonetheless began to fray. At one point, in an extraordinarily unusual move, Justice Merchan warned Blanche that he was “losing all credibility with the court” by defending incendiary social media posts made by Trump. Such dressings-down did not diminish Blanche’s standing with his client, who was never more delighted than when he thought his lawyer was fighting back against the “corrupt” system.
Blanche’s hopes of hanging the jury, meanwhile, suffered blow after blow. Bragg steadily built up corroborating evidence from the likes of former tabloid publisher David Pecker, who testified about the “catch and kill” scheme he had agreed to with the Trump campaign, to bury potentially damaging exposés. Former top aide Hope Hicks testified that Trump was worried about the electoral effects should the Daniels affair come out after the emergence of the Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about groping women.
Daniels, who was not cross-examined by Blanche, set off a bombshell when she revealed Trump hadn’t worn a condom and seemed to suggest — for the first time — that the alleged sex was not entirely consensual, due to the presence of a bodyguard outside the hotel room door. Increasingly, any defence hinged on the witness the prosecution had saved for last: Michael Cohen.
Lawyers in Trumpworld have, in the long run, not fared very well. Cohn was disbarred for unethical and unprofessional conduct in 1986, shortly before dying from complications of Aids. After his death, the Internal Revenue Service seized his property and possessions, aside from a pair of knock-off Bulgari diamond cufflinks, given to him by Donald Trump.
Among those who have worked for Trump more recently, Nick Gravante, who was counsel to the convicted former Trump Organization chief financial officer, and Chris Kise, a former Florida solicitor-general who left his prestigious firm to represent the ex-president, reportedly resisted their client’s exhortations and were either sidelined or fired. Alina Habba, an attorney who agreed to file a frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and other Trump political enemies, was sanctioned by a federal judge for wasting the court’s time and forced to pay almost $1mn in penalties. Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, narrowly avoided a prison sentence after pleading guilty to election interference. And Rudy Giuliani, widely lauded as an American hero in the post-9/11 era, has consistently disgraced himself with his farcical “stop the steal” advocacy in the wake of the 2020 election. He is currently en route to bankruptcy, after defaming two entirely innocent Georgia election officials.
But there is only one Michael Cohen.
A Long Island native who adored Trump so much in his teens that he read his book The Art of the Deal twice, Cohen became the New York mogul’s lawyer and problem-solver. In 2016, he remortgaged his home to pay off Daniels, allegedly at the behest of Trump himself. After Trump won the White House and he was denied a position in his old boss’s administration, legal trouble caught up with Cohen. He flipped, becoming one of Trump’s most vituperative critics. To many, Cohen’s sorry state by the time the hush money trial began was the moral to the story of the costs of personal and professional fealty to Trump.
In the months leading up to the trial, Blanche spent more time with Cohen than perhaps any other person in America. As well as showing up in person to watch him give evidence in a civil fraud trial and watching recordings of his depositions and testimony to Congress, Blanche had listened to hundreds of hours of Cohen’s rant-laden podcasts, while he was out for his daily six-mile run. There was not much point in taking notes, as the tirades were too voluminous to be used constructively during cross-examination. But Blanche “was listening for little nuggets . . . like the times that he would talk about his desire to see Trump and his family in prison”. This bias, he felt, was something the jury needed to understand.
Blanche insists he bears no animus towards Cohen. “I think I understand his motivation now,” he told me soon after the trial. “The same passion that he brought to his work helping and working for Donald Trump for many years is the same kind of passion that he now has against him . . . He feels betrayed.” Blanche believes Cohen’s frustration came from not getting a “little more loyalty and love” from Trump and his entourage, to whom he had given his soul.
This sympathy was not on display in the opening moments of Blanche’s cross-examination of Cohen, which began just after lunch on Tuesday, May 14. Cohen, wearing his usual lopsided, hangdog expression, took a sip of water as Blanche stalked towards the lectern a few feet away from the witness box. After shuffling some notes, he began.
“Mr Cohen, my name is Todd Blanche. You and I have never spoken or met before, have we?”
Cohen confirmed they hadn’t.
“But you know who I am, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“As a matter of fact, on April 23, after the trial started in this case, you went on TikTok and called me a ‘crying little shit’, didn’t you?” Blanche stressed the word “shit”.
The courtroom was filled with a stunned silence, interrupted only by the sound of journalists hammering away at their laptop keyboards. Blanche had come out swinging in a bold attempt to destabilise the witness.
“Sounds like something I would say,” Cohen replied.
The prosecution objected, and all parties were called to the bench.
“Why are you making this about yourself?” Justice Merchan asked.
Blanche protested that he had “a right to show this witness’s bias”. Blanche’s point was to show the jury that Cohen harboured such blind hatred for Trump that he even hated his lawyer, who he had never met. Merchan sustained the objection and ordered the jury to ignore the exchange.
Blanche, who has been careful not to accuse Merchan of anything other than using his judicial discretion in disagreeable ways, has not forgotten or forgiven the judge’s interjection. “I found that offensive as a lawyer and a member of the bar, that he would accuse me of making the trial about myself, which I certainly had not done,” he said weeks after the trial. “I didn’t talk to the press. I laid my head low. And here this judge was saying, just because of the single question, that I was making the trial about myself.” (Merchan’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
It was not just Blanche’s pride that was hurt by Merchan’s decision. When he returned to the lectern, any attempt to put Cohen on the back foot had been defused by the interruption. The rest of the day passed without further fireworks, but a day-long break the following day deprived Blanche of any momentum.
With airtime to fill, talking heads took to dissecting his performance. Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, for example, called the attempted broadside “a significant lapse of judgment”. But Blanche knew he had to worry about one viewer in particular. “There was a lot of criticism I was hearing, even getting through to President Trump,” he recalls, “that I was not experienced enough.”
Blanche had assembled a small team, working out of a war room set-up at Trump’s 40 Wall Street property, a short walk from the courthouse. It was staffed by outsiders like himself. There was Emil Bove, who had grown up in remote upstate New York and excelled at the public university in Albany before rising within the SDNY’s National Security Unit. Bove, dour and detail-obsessed, was one of the few attorneys who had deep expertise in the Classified Information Procedures Act, which Trump was separately accused of running afoul of in Miami. And there was Kendra Wharton, a Louisville, Kentucky native and former aide to Mitch McConnell, the US Senate minority leader. Wharton had also put herself through Georgetown Law while working on the Hill.
During the break, they were working to make sure Blanche’s cross-examination got back on track. Wharton, who had been sitting in court during Cohen’s questioning by the prosecution, thought she had something. On the stand, Cohen had recalled, in vivid detail, a short phone call that took place on October 24 2016, in which he claimed to have told Trump that the deal with Daniels had been completed. The conversation was crucial to the prosecution, because it directly tied Trump to the hush-money scheme. What interested Wharton was the fact that she had never heard Cohen mention this conversation before, despite the team having collectively pored over hundreds of hours of tape and pages of transcripts.
Wharton began going through Cohen’s phone records from the 24th, only to make a startling discovery. The call in question, placed to Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, who was with Trump and could pass the phone to him, appeared to have been about another matter entirely. That evening, Cohen had texted Schiller about a series of harassing phone calls he had received. Later, Cohen called him, and they had a conversation that lasted one minute and 36 seconds. Afterwards, Cohen texted Schiller the number of the person making the calls. Wharton thought it was impossible for Schiller to have discussed the harasser and pass the phone to Trump for Cohen to brief his boss, all within 96 seconds.
Blanche recognised that Wharton’s on-the-fly research could give him a chance to deliver the courtroom showdown the jury — and their client — needed to see. Trump often referred to “Perry Mason moments”, referring to the old television show in which the lead character, a lawyer, would elicit an unexpected confession from a teary witness. Unfortunately for Blanche, the trial had been devoid of Perry Mason-esque turns.
Hoping for maximum impact, Blanche waited until just before lunch the following day to deliver his blow. He presented Cohen with the texts that preceded the call. Then, Blanche asked the witness to confirm that just two days prior, he had testified that Schiller had passed the phone to Trump, and that they discussed Daniels.
“That’s correct,” a sheepish-looking Cohen responded.
Blanche leaned forward, arms folded and fists clenched.
“That was a lie,” he yelled. “You were actually talking to Mr Schiller about the fact that you were getting harassing phone calls . . . correct?”
Over at the prosecution table, assistant district attorneys exchanged nervous glances. Cohen looked to them for reassurance, but got little back. Turning back to Blanche, he tried to maintain that he had also used the call to talk about the hush money. But there was no conviction in his voice.
Blanche put his notes to the side and began to improvise. “You had enough time in that one minute and 36 seconds to update Mr Schiller about all the problems you were having with these harassing phone calls and also update President Trump on the status of the Stormy Daniels situation because . . . every time you made any decision, you ran it by the boss. That’s your testimony?”
“I always ran everything by the boss immediately,” Cohen said. “And in this case, it could have just been saying everything is being taken care of.”
Shortly after, the jury was dismissed for its midday break and the adulation came in fast. Lisa Rubin, a legal analyst on MSNBC, called the exchange “a moment of real triumph”, saying Blanche had made Cohen look like a “self-assured fabricator”. CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who had been in the gallery that day, described witnessing something “incredible”; Cohen was “cornered in what appeared to be a lie”. Asked what his assessment of the exchange would be if he were seated as a juror in the case, Cooper said: “I would think, ‘This guy’s making this up as he’s going along.’”
The defence had not had much luck when it came to its own witness list. A federal election law specialist had been rendered useless, when Merchan ruled he could not go into the intricacies of whether or not Trump fell foul of campaign finance rules. The risks of putting one of Trump’s sons on the stand outweighed any benefits. Kellyanne Conway, at one time Trump’s most effective defender, had ignored the defence team’s calls for months, only to return them once he was ascendant in the polls again. (Conway claimed this was a “complete absolute lie”, adding she “was surprised when I was not called” to testify. She said neither she nor her attorney had been called by the defence team.)
And despite having repeatedly vowed to do so, Trump had been talked out of testifying by Blanche and others, who gingerly pointed out that his previous appearances had not helped. Cross-examination could remind the jury of the recent E Jean Carroll civil verdicts, in which Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in the mid-1990s and defamation, and in which she was awarded more than $88mn in damages. (Blanche insists the decision for Trump not to take the stand was made jointly with his client.)
After the Cohen fireworks, an obscure lawyer named Bob Costello began making appearances on Fox News. He had briefly advised Cohen when he first came under investigation and said Trump’s former fixer had been lying on the stand. He claimed Cohen told him: “I swear to God, Bob, I don’t have anything on Donald Trump.” On the Wednesday break in Cohen’s testimony, Costello testified to this effect in front of a Republican-led Congressional committee and then went on Fox to call on Blanche to get him on the stand.
Trump saw Costello on TV and, against Blanche and his team’s objections, told him to add him to the witness list. From the moment he took the stand, the scowling Costello made no secret of his distaste for the court, muttering “jeez” into the microphone, when Merchan sustained an objection from the prosecution. At one point, Costello had the audacity to instruct the court reporter to strike a comment from the record. Incensed, Merchan dismissed the jury and told the witness he wanted to “discuss proper decorum in my courtroom”. A few minutes later, the judge’s harangue could be heard from outside in the corridor.
The Costello debacle was the last thing the jury saw before the trial moved to closing arguments. Trump’s interference had relegated Blanche’s “gotcha” moment into background.
In the end, it was probably not Costello’s testimony that led to Trump’s historic conviction on May 30. During the two days of jury deliberations, Blanche had allowed himself to believe that he had done enough in his summation to sow doubt in at least one fellow New Yorker’s mind. In a line suggested to him by Kristine, Blanche had emphasised that Cohen had lied to “every branch of Congress” and branded him “the MVP of liars”. He had reiterated that Cohen had been caught in a lie on the stand and that he had admitted to stealing tens of thousands of dollars from Trump.
But none of that had seemed to matter. The jury’s decision was unanimous: Trump was guilty on 34 felony counts. And history was most likely to remember Blanche not as a paragon of lawyerly virtue, but as the attorney who presided over a heinous first in American jurisprudence.
After the trial, Blanche fell into a funk. For his part, the former president reacted to the verdict in the same way that he had greeted the indictment, affirming his belief that a New York jury was never going to exonerate him. If Trump was maligning his defence team behind their backs, or blaming Blanche for the defeat, word never reached the exhausted lawyer. Neither did a dismissal.
Blanche’s depression did not last. In early July, the US Supreme Court ruled that presidents enjoy criminal immunity for so-called “official acts”, leaving another case against Trump — in which prosecutors alleged he fuelled the January 6 insurrection — in tatters. Then, a Miami judge summarily threw out the classified documents case on different constitutional grounds.
Last week, Blanche and Bove succeeded in further postponing Trump’s sentencing in the hush-money case, until after the election in November. In a faintly Roy Cohnian way, Blanche hadn’t let up in lobbying the judge for the delay, arguing with increasing vigour that maintaining the September date would amount to irreversible election interference.
Still Merchan’s decision came as a surprise. The delay, which the judge said he made to “dispel any suggestion” of political bias, means Trump will no longer face any significant criminal proceedings before Americans go to the polls. It also means the years-long efforts by state and federal prosecutors to bring Trump to justice has been temporarily thwarted by persistent lawyering.
Soon after the postponement was announced, Blanche told me the ruling was “a step in the right direction”, emphasising that until the verdict is overturned, “we aren’t there yet”. Trump, who hours before Merchan’s order had publicly harangued his lawyers in a bitter press conference, is far from being in the clear, and is still on the hook for more than half a billion dollars thanks to judgments in civil fraud, sexual abuse and defamation lawsuits. A loss in November could bring several criminal cases roaring back, and with Kamala Harris leading in several crucial swing states, the presidential race has become existential for him. As one of Trump’s lawyers conceded in a candid moment: “If he loses, we’re fucked.”
For Blanche, the grievances over the Trump prosecutions will linger. He still says that the hush-money case should never have been brought and that, in a less-polarised era, responsible prosecutors would never have contemplated it. “I don’t think we lost this at trial,” he says, returning to the morality of building a case on the word of a convicted perjurer, Cohen. “You gotta ask yourself, as a society, are you cool with that?”
He says the verdict hasn’t haunted him as much as he feared it might. Among at least half of his 150-or-so acquaintances, Blanche is sure that he remains “a pretty decent joke at a cocktail party”, but he quietly hopes to become the go-to attorney for “complex” defendants in the long run.
In July, Blanche and Bove went to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where they mingled easily with Eric and Donald Jr. Would the Blanche of a previous era be surprised? He would, he concedes. “I mean, I even like being recognised now . . . When I’m in New York, there’s definitely people that I’m sure are looking at me and like sniffing and walking away. But when I go to Trump Jupiter to play golf, I’m treated like a hero. So, that’s OK. I don’t mind that.”
But, even in his more reflective moments, Blanche does not like to be reminded of someone who made the same journey in reverse. Cohen, who went from being depended on by Trump to being discarded by him, was just a few years ahead of Blanche at American University, and, I suggest as tactfully as possible, perhaps a few years ahead of him in being considered for a job in a Trump administration.
“I think we are very different types of lawyers and very different personalities,” Blanche says, dismissing the notion of a political appointment. “It doesn’t surprise me that [Cohen] thinks that will be the fate of anybody around President Trump, because it’s been his fate. But, we’ll see.”
Joe Miller is the FT’s legal correspondent in New York
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