Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen offered a grim assessment on Sunday about the former president’s chances of winning in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.
Last month, Trump pleaded not guilty to 37 counts in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) probe following an indictment alleging he improperly stored classified documents, some of which related to national security, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office in 2021 and attempted to obstruct government efforts to retrieve the files. Trump has maintained his innocence, accusing federal prosecutors of engaging in a politically-motivated witch hunt aimed at weakening his position in the 2024 presidential race.
Cohen, who served as Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, but has since turned on him, said the case would be “impossible to win” for Trump’s legal team, pointing to “significant” evidence against the former president, including an audio tape that appeared to capture Trump admitting to having a classified document about a potential attack against Iran.
In the tape, recorded during a July 2021 meeting at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump is heard saying, “As president, I could have declassified” the document, but “now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
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Cohen weighed in on the evidence during an appearance on MSNBC’s The Katie Phang Show on Sunday morning.
“Alan Dershowitz once said, ‘I don’t lose because I’m not a good lawyer. I lose because the cases are impossible to win.’ That’s the problem with Donald Trump’s cases,” Cohen explained, referring to the Democratic lawyer who has defended Trump. “They are impossible to win, simply because the evidence that is there is so significant and it’s in your face.”
He added that audio tape of Trump allegedly “confessing to taking documents to show top secret national security documents” illustrates him admitting to “the crime that [special counsel] Jack Smith is accusing him of.”
“It doesn’t make a difference if God himself came down from the heavens to represent Donald, you still cannot get past the fact that the recording is Donald’s voice, regardless of what he said. The documents will be shown to be the top secret documents that dealt with Iran and an attack, no matter how many things he wanted to say. They were golf shirts. They were diapers. They were newspaper clippings. It doesn’t make a difference,” Cohen said.
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign for comment via email.
After the audio tape was leaked, Trump has continued to defend himself. He maintained that there was not actually a classified document at the meeting, and that his words on the tape were simply “bravado.”
“I would say it’s bravado,” he told ABC News’ Rachel Scott and Semafor’s Shelby Talcott last week. “If you want to know the truth. It was bravado. I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.”