Michael Cohen to testify today?

Disbarred former attorney, convicted felon, and two time perjurer is the key to prosecution's case!

The fact of the matter is that the prosecution has not really established either the underlying crime of falsification of business records or provided any sort of evidence that Donald Trump had any intentions at any time of trying to get around campaign finance laws.

This is one of those cases where the facts of the case are not so much in dispute as much as the meaning of the facts. What we know is stipulated by most everyone:

• Trump and Cohen reached an agreement on legal charges. $130K to reimburse for the NDA. $50K for a variety of polling work making a total of $180K. $180K was doubled to provide for fees. A $60K bonus was also provided that is also suggested to act as on ongoing retainer for the 2017 calendar year. They agreed to pay in 12 monthly payments of $35K with an initial double payment for Jan/Feb.

• An invoice from Michael Cohen was to be sent to the Trump organization for each payment. Cohen marked these as services for the specific month that was being paid ($35,000).

• A Trump organization bookkeeper, then wrote out the check, attached it to the invoice, and entered the payment into their accounting system using the dropdown expense type of "legal expense".

• The invoice/check was shipped to Trump at the White House along with other checks, which he would sign and then ship them back to the Trump organization so they could disperse the various payments.

Now the two odd things about this are the doubling of the fee (the extra $180K with little explanation) and the fact that Cohen sent an invoice that suggested that the services were performed in that particular month. However, no client should be held criminally responsible for how an attorney bills his client, invoices his client, or how an attorney reports those earnings. Trump neither wrote the invoices or entered "legal expenses" as the code assigned to the checks. While the invoices seem odd, most all experts believe "legal expenses" was the correct way to book this and the State has not provided the alternative as to how they should be booked.

So at the end of the day, Donald Trump simply signed checks. There is no evidence or anything else that suggests he even bothered to look at any of the invoices attached to any of the checks. Even if he had, should he have not paid the Michael Cohen invoices because of the way they were written?

So it would appear that somehow Michael Cohen will have to come up with the proof beyond a reasonable doubt that even as Donald Trump reported the $130K interest free loan from Michael Cohen on his financial statements when he ran for President, that he was actually trying to hide that loan (and NDA) because he planned to get around the campaign finance laws that he was not violating according to the Federal Elections Committee. He will need to show beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump (not Cohen) was responsible for how the invoices looked and that the doubling of the fees was Trump's idea and that it corresponded with Trump wanting to hide the NDA from the FEC.

Because at this point in the prosecution, there is no evidence of any of this.