Scowling Trump tosses file in front of lawyer questioning witness about evidence tampering
MANHATTAN CRIMINAL COURT — Donald Trump started the 11th day of his criminal trial clearly peeved with his lawyer.
From inside the courtroom, Raw Story observed Donald Trump throwing a file in front his lawyer, Emil Bove, as he questioned an investigator about his messages taken from his ex-attorney Michael Cohen''s cell phone.
The former president pointed at the file while scowling and declining to make eye contact.
Then-lawyer Cohen had been working full-time for the Trump Organization and was negotiating the 2016 payments to women alleging they'd had an affair with Trump. Among the things Cohen did was record conversations he had with Trump and the lawyer who represented the women.
According to legal analysts in the courtroom, Bove was asking investigator Douglas Daus about whether Cohen's phone could have been tampered with or data modified.
Just Security fellow Adam Klasfeld explained that it is "an uncommonly thorough cross-examination for this type of witness. Bove has been seeking to poke holes in the chain of custody and type of extraction used on the phone to acquire the evidence."
Raw Story then observed Trump slamming the file folder on the desk in front of Bove with an expression that said, "You're staff."
That's when Bove stood to ask about the risk of "evidence tampering" with the phone.
He focused on the fact that one of Cohen's recordings abruptly stopped, implying that Cohen had "modified" it. Daus "disputes the premise at length," said Klasfeld.
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Trump's lawyer immediately moved to strike Daus's comments from the record, an objection that the judge overruled.
At one point, Bove asked about the phone being synced with a laptop in 2017 and an unknown device in Oct. 2020, MSNBC's Katie Phang posted on X.
“Those events present questions about the reliability of the evidence, right?" asked Bove.
Daus replied: "It would seem so."
When it was time for the district attorney's office to re-direct, he asked, "Is it unusual for a phone to be used?"
The court's overflow room, full of members of the press and public, broke into laughter, said Raw Story's reporter.
Phang reported at the start of the questioning that, "Trump closed his eyes with his body positioned toward the witness/the jury."