Former president Donald Trump has said that invoking the Fifth Amendment is something for “the mob” that makes people look “guilty as hell.”
“He beat him (Trump) up very badly,” Litman said of Engoron. “As George Conway puts it, Trump is quite an escape artist, but his escape routes are really unclear here. He can’t play the delay game he’s played with Congress. They’ve got him on a 21-day timeline. He will appeal, but he has no real legal claims to stand on. The intermediate New York court, and the highest court in New York, will have a chance to enter a stay — even perhaps the U.S. Supreme Court — but you have to expect them to make quick work of it.”
Litman said if Trump takes the Fifth, “there will be unbelievable made-to-order commercials, because they’ll juxtapose his taking the Fifth with his saying that only guilty people do.”
“But second, in a trial, the judge will tell the jury they can have an adverse inference, unlike in a criminal trial,” Litman said. “So the evidence will look like, everybody’s saying inculpatory things, and then to add to it, the cherry on top, will be Trump and Ivanka and Don Jr. saying we take the Fifth, and the jury will assume they would have been saying something bad. The prospects for the civil trial itself are huge.”