I note over at Townhall the always-worthwhile Matt Vespa’s latest, wherein we read:
President Trump was interviewed by his former attorney, Michael Cohen, the star witness in the hush money case, which verdict is under appeal. Trump said Cohen was weaponized against him by the Justice Department. Cohen agrees, adding that he felt coerced by the Feds. The case stems from the president’s effort to pay adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 during the 2016 election.
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig effectively pronounced the case dead, leaving its former cheerleaders with nothing but a pile of sad confetti. There’s a reason federal prosecutors originally passed on this nuclear hot potato while Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg sprinted to pick it up: the Feds knew Michael Cohen’s credibility was a nuclear biohazard. As Honig pointed out, if Cohen is a liar, the entire foundation crumbles. If he was coerced, the trial was a farce. Take your pick — either way, the shell of a case is empty.
Yeah, about that…
While I’ve never fully trusted a word out of Michael Cohen’s mouth in either direction, I lean toward believing his coercion claim here. It fits the pattern too cleanly not to. (Cohen is pictured above, by the way.)
Be honest, now. If Bragg was willing to weld together the legal Frankenstein’s monster he actually built to get this conviction in the first place, there’s no particular reason to think he’d suddenly develop scruples about how hard he leaned on his own star witness to get there.
Mind you, none of this is coming from some late-night outrage merchant on conservative talk radio, howling into a ring light. This is CNN’s own senior legal analyst, standing on CNN’s own soundstage, calmly dismantling the exact legal drama CNN itself spent two solid years treating as if it were holy scripture handed down from Sinai. Honig didn’t bury this in an obscure Substack nobody reads. He dropped it directly into Jake Tapper’s lap, on live television, and let the silence that followed do the talking. I’d genuinely have paid money to watch Tapper’s face in that exact moment.
Vespa adds:
Honig has long said this case was being overblown, the process a mess, and has heavily criticized how the law was twisted to achieve liberal America’s desired outcome.
Let’s be clear about the timeline here:
Honig didn’t have some sudden road-to-Damascus epiphany this week. Indeed, he’s been saying this since before the ink on the original verdict had even finished drying. Back in May 2024, writing for New York Magazine, he was already warning that the prosecution’s legal theory was held together with little more than Scotch tape and wishful thinking, writing plainly that prosecutors “contorted the law in an unprecedented manner in their quest to snare their prey.” He doubled right back down the following day, torching the entire proceeding as an “unjustified mess.” That earned him a live on-air scrap with Democrat strategist James Carville, who called the criticism “downright awful” — to which Honig calmly pointed out that Carville himself would hardly be defending a judge who’d donated to a “Re-elect Trump, MAGA forever” fund with the same enthusiasm.
Hellbound and Down 