During Monday’s “Fox & Friends,” George Washington Law professor Jonathan Turley hammered fundraising platform GoFundMe as a “site where you can essentially purchase testimony.”
“It’s a strange evolution of the role of this site,” Turley said. “GoFundMe has become a site where you can essentially purchase testimony that people go out there and they really ramp up their expected testimony.”
He explained, “What happens, people like Michael Cohen couldn’t get a dime from anyone on the street when he was still saying he would take a bullet for the president. Then suddenly, he started a promise that he could bag the president, and they rolled out a GoFundMe site, and he got hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so we have this weird type of auction among potential witnesses, both pro and anti-Trump, for people to essentially contribute to their testimony.”
Turley said this evolution is “a little unnerving” for attorneys because people like Michael Cohen can just change their testimony just for money.
“[P]eople could actually change their testimony to give them more of a market position,” he said. “And for Michael Cohen, he’s tried to position himself as far as he can on the anti-Trump site and it has paid off. It has sold like hot cakes. People have gone to GoFundMe and said ‘I like that stuff,’ and they’ve given him a lot of money.”
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