John Dean, the former White House Counsel to President Richard Nixon and CNN contributor. John, nice to see you. We are now through another week. This was a big one with Stormy Daniels. We saw some documents and records coming into play. What's been your main takeaway from the trial up until this point?

I've been reading the transcript. I'm about a day or so behind where they actually are, and it's a very powerful case the government has put on in New York. They have really filled in so many of the blanks, and they have built such a structure that Michael Cohn can come in and testify. He's largely cooperated already with either other witnesses who don't necessarily have an ax to grind, as well as documents. So they have laid a real foundation for this coming week.

It has been very interesting to see how they have really tried to buttress anything that Michael Cohen is going to say with, to your point, other people that don't have an ax to grind, that don't have as checkered of a history as Michael Cohen does. But knowing that, how much of Cohen's testimony do you think could potentially be undercut by his clear grudge against Trump? Before we had you on, we were showing people some of the social media posts of him wearing or showing a picture of a cartoon Trump behind bars, things like that.

Well, that's going to be up to the jury, obviously, and different people will take it in different ways. The The fact that there is a grudge match going on here doesn't mean the jury won't believe him. It will put the burden a little bit higher on him to be persuasive. But I've watched Michael testify in front of the House Committee several years ago. He was very good as a witness. They tried to impeach him then, the Trump supporters on the panel, and they didn't do very well. He handles himself well. He has a charisma about him. I think he's being very brave in what he's doing, and people will recognize that. It's not easy to take on the Trump team, and particularly when it's a campaign going as well.

I'm thinking back to what you just said about how you've been reading the transcript that you really see this so far as a pretty strong case for the prosecution. It is interesting, and I'm curious if you were surprised by that, just because the conventional wisdom going into this trial was of all the cases against Donald Trump, this one was the flumsiest or the weakest. What do you make of that now that we've seen some of it?

Well, it shows that Bragg was smart to delay and do the case on his own timing and his own schedule after developing facts way beyond where the initial team under Vance and Pomerantz in the New York DA's office had done. This is a very strong case. They tailed it to what it was really the offense, which was the false records, which is something that office tries on a regular basis. I think something like 400 cases of this nature can go through that office in a year. So they know how to try these cases. They know how to read a jury, and they're bringing this case. It's good theater for the jury, but it's also they're getting the essential elements of the case in front of them.

And we also heard from Stormy Daniels week, and at times it was salacious. There was a lot going on there, a lot of detail. The defense didn't object to a lot of the testimony, even though the judge said he thought they would object more often and more aggressively But it seems like that could also be a strategy in case they want to appeal a conviction that this could potentially be a place where they could focus on.

I think that is their strategy, that they want to take things that they feel could be declared to be presidential. Sorry about that. And use those later on appeal to try to overturn a verdict. If it comes down against Trump. The sophistication of their doing it, though, is really questionable because on cross-examination, they went in the same areas themselves. It appeared at Donald Trump's request to They had to get in and mix it up with Stormy, and they did not do well at it. She actually came out as a very strong witness, and her own story certainly held up in front of the jury, so they didn't impeach her in any way as far as the encounter that she'd had with Donald Trump. So I'm not sure it worked, and I'm not sure... I don't think it'll work on appeal.

I want to shift gears before I let you go and ask you about a new report from the New York Times in Propublica. And this piece says, former President Trump used a questionable accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his Chicago Trump Tower. And according to an Internal Revenue Service inquiry, uncovered by the New York Times and Propublica, a years long audit battle over the claim could mean a Trump tax bill of more than $100 million. Do you think that that has any impact at this point on any of the current proceedings in New York or any of the other legal cases against him?

Well, obviously, I read the story. It's a lengthy story. It's a well-reported story, and it's been going on for quite a while. A number of years. We just are now, the public, becoming aware of it through this report of the Times and ProPublica. So I don't think it will affect any of the cases that are now pending or that have been Many of them are on the appellate level at this point. The article does cite the fact that he owes almost a half a billion dollars already in damages for cases he's lost and just shows how much this would add to his agony if indeed the IRS is holding him to account for this. Maybe this is, again, why he wants to be President, because the IRS will back off if he's sitting in the oval office and that's at least 100 million he won't have to worry about. It's a fascinating report. We know so little about Trump's true finances. He's one of the unique characters in history that has run for the presidency, and the public knows nothing about his finances. This just adds more to that fuzzy picture we have of what his own exposures are financially.

Right, what those facts are. All right, John Dean, thank you so much. We appreciate it.

Thank you, Jessica.