A lawyer for Donald Trump said he hopes the former president’s upcoming trial over allegations he paid undisclosed money to a porn star will be “as painless and graceful as possible.”
“I expect they’re going to try to get all the publicity they can,” New York District Attorney Joe Tacopina said in an interview Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Trump is expected to appear in a Manhattan court on Tuesday, where he will learn about the charges a grand jury brought against him. While those charges have not been made public, they are said to include multiple counts of falsifying company documents and at least one felony, the Associated Press reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
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Tacopina, in an interview with ABC News This Week, said that while she had not seen the allegations, she did not believe the case against Trump would “survive a legal challenge in a courtroom.”
“We all know it has to do with a confidential settlement agreement, a completely legally confidential settlement agreement with Stormy Daniels,” she said of a $130,000 payment made to the porn star during the 2016 presidential campaign. Michael Cohen and Atty. his co-signed This. Donald Trump doesn’t,” Tacopina said.
Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, later pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign finance law in connection with the payment.
Tacopina said Trump’s legal team would not immediately move to dismiss the case when it goes to court on Tuesday. Instead, they will look into the allegations and then determine their next move.
As for what people might see on Tuesday, Tacopina said he doesn’t know if Trump will have his signature photo taken or if, while he’s under arrest, he’ll be taken out in public by authorities, which he calls a “criminal’s walk. “. “.
“What I’m hoping is that we get in and out of there as quickly as we can, which is, at the end of the day, a typical arrangement where we sit in front of the judge, say ‘not guilty,’ set up schedules for you to file motions and stuff or find out and we’re moving on and we’re out of there,” he told ABC News.
Cohen, who recently testified in the Hush Money case, said he personally expects “total chaos” during Tuesday’s trial.
“That’s his biggest fear: being shot, being fingerprinted, being called a criminal,” Cohen said of Trump in an interview Sunday on CBS News’ “Sunday Morning.” “He’s petrified.”
Cohen also said last week that he hoped Trump’s arrest would be “classy” so that the country would not be “the laughing stock of the world.”
Even former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a staunch Trump ally, said he did not believe the allegations could be made in Trump’s favor.
“All this bravado in the Trump camp is bullshit,” the former prosecutor told ABC News’ This Week in a separate interview.
“He will have to be photographed, fingerprinted and tried in Manhattan. He won’t be able to avoid it. You can’t make a good day of it,” he said.
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