As soon as Salmond was found not guilty, despite his reprehensible conduct leading his own QC to label him a sex pest, Cherry was leading the charge to have him re-instated as a party member.
His lawyer was not expressing his own opinion of Salmond but how he is being portrayed. That recording was edited to make it appear that he did.
And this isn't merely a case of he said/she said. He was found not guilty because the charges had no merit. (The police went on a fishing expedition and interviewed over 400 people to find something to pin on him. This included talking to all of his protection officers who ensured his safety day and night. Isolated incidents they might not have known about. A pattern of behaviour that amounted to "sex pest" they would.)
Not one of the alleged incidents involved an independent or outside complainer, which is highly unusual where the alleged behaviour is supposed to represent a pattern. The majority of the 14 offences were only brought up because of the Moorov Doctrine (a mechanism in Scottish law whereby corroboration to a similar but unrelated charge can come from an independent additional complainer - this means that if you can prove a systematic pattern of the same behaviour this weighs heavily against the defendant.)
The defence demonstrated in court that none of the charges had merit. For some of the offences that was because Salmond and the complainants in question were not even in the same place at the time the incidents were alleged to have happened.
There is a reason why the very detailed, day-by-day BBC documentary about the case against Alex Salmond skips the defence days completely. Because once you hear the case for the defence, you know he's not guilty.
The issues are connected to current ongoing case of accusations made against Alex Salmond.
I'd like to clarify this, if I may ArabellaScott lest others get the wrong impression:
There is no "ongoing case of accusations made against Alex Salmond". There are however two ongoing parliamentary inquiries into how Salmond came to be charged. One is looking specifically into the role the Scottish Government had in unlawfully changing the rules in order to pursue Salmond for misconduct, the other is looking specifically into the conduct of Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister in relation to the whole affair.
Salmond won not only his criminal case in court, he also won his case against the Scottish Government having created new rules just so they could pursue misconduct charges against him. After contesting the case for the state, the Scottish Government lawyers threatened to walk away if the Scottish Government did not concede the case (that it had acted unlawfully against Salmond). Which is what the Scottish Government finally did in January 2019. In March 2020 he was then found not guilty in the criminal case.
So, Salmond has been cleared of all charges. The Scottish Government and the FM however are currently under investigation by two parliamentary inquiries. What the allegation amounts to, according to Alex Salmond and a number of others, is essentially that they conspired to deprive an innocent man of his freedom in order to get rid of a potential political rival.