Washington (CNN) Donald Trump’s legal team will try to challenge “every potential issue” in the indictment after the charges are unsealed, a lawyer for the former president said Sunday.
“We are not doing anything during the indictment because that would be a show and nothing more because we haven’t even seen the indictment yet. We’re going to take the indictment, we’re going to analyze it, the team is going to look at every … every … — potential issue that we’ll be able to challenge and we will challenge it,” Joe Tacopina told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
Tacopina and other Trump lawyers did several television interviews in anticipation of the former president’s first court appearance on Tuesday, when he will learn the charges a Manhattan grand jury has approved against him.
Sometimes lawyers promise to ask for the charges to be dismissed. But the full charges are not yet known. And most importantly, the judge will ultimately determine whether the law is sound enough for the case to go to trial.
Former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said in an interview with NBC News on Sunday, “We can speculate about what evidence we think they may or may not have, but even with the release of the indictment, we really won’t know what the evidence is.” the district attorney and what they will create at trial.”
Vance’s team investigated the case but did not charge him, leaving it under the control of his successor, Alvin Bragg.
Trump faces more than 30 counts of business fraud in the indictment. The Manhattan district attorney’s investigation began when Trump was still in the White House and concerns a $130,000 payment made by his then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to adult film star Stormy Daniels in late October 2016. days before the presidential election, to silence her from speaking publicly about an alleged affair with Trump a decade ago.
Trump has denied the affair.
The Trump team’s legal strategy may focus on contesting the case because it can rely on records in business records that prosecutors link to Daniels’ evasion of cash payments seven years ago, after the statute of limitations on the criminal case expired.
Tacopina suggested in television interviews Sunday that the statute of limitations may have run out and said Trump’s business did not make false records.
“They are not fake records. But assuming they are, they are crimes well beyond the statute of limitations, so they had to combine them to try to get a felony,” he said.
Tacopina on Sunday also said a request to move the case to another New York district was not yet on the table for Trump’s legal team.
“It hasn’t been discussed at all,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in another interview. “It’s too early to start worrying about venue changes until we actually see the indictment and deal with the legal issues.”