Former President Donald Trump's longtime assistant Molly Michael will be "dangerous" to him as she testifies in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman wrote for the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday.
Michael has reportedly told prosecutors that the former president gave her "to-do lists" written on the back of highly classified material — and that he pressured her to lie by saying that she didn't know anything about the boxes of material stored in his country club. And that allegation won't be so easy to get around, Litman wrote.
"What marks Michael as a blockbuster witness is her singular ability to tell the story of Trump’s conspiracy to obstruct justice in unimpeachable terms," wrote Litman. "Prosecutors evaluate a witness from the vantage point of not just the substance of their testimony but also how persuasive they will be to a jury and how vulnerable to cross-examination. Because it’s safe to assume that Trump won’t take the stand and therefore can’t challenge witnesses’ accounts by testifying, cross-examination will be his team’s main strategy for trying to create reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds. And every other witness in the case has at least some vulnerability to skillful cross-examination."
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Many of the other potential witnesses against Trump could be attacked by defense counsel as untrustworthy, noted Litman — like Trump's body man Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos De Oliveira, or Mar-a-Lago IT manager Yuscil Taveras. Even attorney Evan Corcoran's testimony could be discredited, since he would have motive to obscure his own potential culpability in advising Trump about the documents.
But Michael is completely free of these conflicts, Litman continued. "Hired as an assistant at the White House in 2018 before joining him at Mar-a-Lago, she was reportedly uncomfortable with and unwilling to participate in his efforts to hide the records from law enforcement officials. She reminded him that maintenance workers and others knew about the boxes of classified files in a storage room at the estate, according to the indictment. She personally gave him a picture of scores of boxes stacked up against a storage room wall."
While many cases against powerful people involve their associates testifying against them, Litman concluded, there is always a risk that type of witness won't appear credible to jurors. For that reason, "prefer to make their cases with unimpeachable witnesses — the mild-mannered mob accountant or honest low-level aide with no ax to grind. In the classified documents case, that is the role Michael is likely to play to the former president’s great detriment."
