Trump’s Views on ‘Flippers’ Not Welcome at Trial, Judge Rules

During closing arguments last week in a routine drug trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, a defense lawyer questioned the credibility of one of the government’s cooperating witnesses, a drug dealer named Kenny Ashe.

“Mr. Ashe’s testimony should be disregarded because it’s not true,” the defense lawyer said. Then he added, “You know what’s funny? Yesterday, Manafort was convicted.”

The reference to Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, drew an immediate “objection” from the prosecutor. At a sidebar out of the jury’s earshot, the lawyer, Kafahni Nkrumah, explained that he wanted to tell the jury about Trump’s criticism of cooperating witnesses — “flippers,” as Trump had called them. One such witness, Rick Gates, had testified at Manafort’s financial fraud trial in Alexandria, Virginia.

“I believe that the president’s opinion of cooperators is just as pertinent as anyone else’s,” Nkrumah told the judge, adding, “He is talking about cooperators, the essence of this case.”

Legal experts have debated whether Trump’s sharp commentary on the criminal justice system could erode jurors’ trust in the law. They cite his attacks on the Justice Department and on the FBI, his description of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, as “a witch hunt,” and his criticism of government efforts to turn witnesses into cooperators.

“It’s called flipping,” Trump said in an interview on “Fox & Friends” last week, “and it almost ought to be illegal.”

Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who now teaches at New York Law School, said it came as little surprise the president’s criticisms were seeping into arguments in court. “This is in people’s minds now, and to the extent defense attorneys can play off of that, they may capitalize on the president’s rhetoric,” she said.

Jamal Russell, the defendant in the Manhattan case, was one of 32 defendants charged two years ago in what prosecutors described as a violent and long-standing crack-cocaine selling operation in and around the Lincoln Houses in East Harlem.

They “turned that community into an enormously profitable round-the-clock drug zone,” prosecutor Adam Hobson, said in his closing argument.

Hobson said Ashe and another witness were cooperating in hopes of receiving a lower sentence. “That means they have a lot riding on telling the truth,” he said.

Russell’s lawyer, Nkrumah, said in a telephone interview that he wanted to introduce Trump’s views “to appeal to the jury’s moral sense.”

“Donald Trump is the most polarizing president in my lifetime, but not everything he says is incorrect,” Nkrumah said. “As far as cooperators are concerned, some of them will lie, and he’s 100 percent right on that.”

At the sidebar, Judge Gregory Woods told Nkrumah, “You cannot refer to another case, in another district, involving a polemic issue regarding the president of the United States.”

After the jury left, the judge elaborated on his ruling. He said he had not constrained Nkrumah from arguing that jurors should carefully “scrutinize the testimony of cooperators.” Still, Trump’s view was “not in evidence in this case,” the judge added, “and I do not believe that it should be put before the jurors.”

In the end, Russell was convicted of drug conspiracy and acquitted of a firearm count. Nkrumah said if his client sought to appeal, he would probably raise the issue of the judge’s ruling against mentioning the president’s views.