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4 months ago
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Michael Cohen returns to the witness stand this morning in the New York hush money trial of Donald Trump with a rugged cross-examination looming.
The disbarred lawyer and convicted perjurer spent Monday testifying that his secret payoff to porn actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election had buy-in at every stage from the Republican presidential candidate.
“When he would task you with something,” Cohen testified, “he would then say, ‘Keep me informed. Let me know what’s going on.’ Especially if it was a matter that was troubling to him.”
Cohen’s credibility as a key prosecution witness will face a trial of its own when the defense’s turn to question him arrives. Trump’s attorneys have already portrayed Cohen — a self-styled fixer and legal attack dog who addressed Trump as “Boss” — as a liar and opportunist.
Trump repaid Cohen in 2017 with monthly checks falsely logged as income for ongoing legal work, the Manhattan District Attorney charged in its 34-count indictment of the New York real estate magnate and former Celebrity Apprentice star. Cohen said on Monday that the repayment scheme was devised by The Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, and approved by Trump in a meeting of the trio at Trump Tower in January 2017, days before Trump’s presidential inauguration.
Cohen gave jurors a view of Trump’s business, political and personal lives as they converged during the 2016 campaign. It was wife Melania Trump’s idea, Cohen said, to explain away the damning Access Hollywood tape as “locker room talk” when it revealed Trump bragging that he could grab women by the genitals without their consent.
Cohen’s testimony also drew other Trump employees including Weisselberg and bodyguard Keith Schiller back into the prosecution’s narrative, raising the question of whether they might be called to testify. Weisselberg is serving a jail sentence at New York’s Rikers Island for perjuring himself in the New York Attorney General’s civil case against Trump for deceiving banks about his wealth. Last week Judge Juan Merchan urged prosecutors to try to put Weisselberg on the stand.
Schiller, who followed Trump to the White House, is a recurring figure in witness accounts. Checks sent from Trump Tower for the president to sign in the Oval Office went through Schiller. Stormy Daniels testified that in 2006, when she had sex with the married Trump in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite, Schiller stood guard outside.
Cohen said he knew that sometimes when he couldn’t reach Trump directly, to call Schiller. Throughout Cohen’s testimony, the prosecution put up texts, call logs and emails for jurors to bolster Cohen’s timeline of conversations and events.
The jury also heard Cohen’s secret recording of a talk with Trump in 2016 about a payoff to contain another potential scandal: former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s tale of a long-running affair with Trump in the 2000s.
“So what do we got to pay for this? One fifty?” Trump said on the recording. He and Cohen were discussing a plan for David Pecker, CEO of the Trump-friendly periodical publisher American Media, to pay McDougal $150,000 for exclusive rights to her story and bury it in a “catch and kill” arrangement.
Why Cohen would record a client without his knowledge is a question likely to be asked by the defense. Cohen told Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Susan Hoffinger that he did it to provide Pecker with proof that Trump would repay the money being advanced to McDougal. Cohen said that as it turned out he never had to share the audio, because Pecker forgave the money. But a potential violation of attorney-client privilege could be ammunition for a defense team looking to undermine Cohen’s believability.
Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 using a home equity loan and a shell company to funnel the money to her lawyer under a written agreement that Trump himself did not sign. Trump was referenced only in a so-called “side agreement” to the NDA that identified the parties — Trump and Daniels — by their real names, versus the pseudonyms chosen by Daniels’ lawyer, Keith Davidson, for the main contract.
New York prosecutors — like their federal counterparts who secured a guilty plea from Cohen in 2018 — say the $130,000 was an illegal and unreported campaign contribution to Trump. The New York indictment holds that misdemeanor business fraud becomes a felony when it is committed to further another crime, in this case election interference.
Trump denies he had sex with Daniels, and contends that Cohen’s legal fees after he no longer worked for The Trump Organization were legitimate. Outside the courtroom on Monday afternoon — during one of his twice-daily monologues to courthouse hallway press — Trump said the Federal Election Commission absolved him of any campaign wrongdoing.
“You know the FEC wrote this off,” Trump said, adding, “they took a pass they said there’s no problem here.” He then turned, as he usually does, to the topic of the “corrupt judge” who is overseeing the trial and “keeping me from campaigning.”
Trump surrogates including eldest son Eric Trump — a regular in his father’s courtroom entourage — have also defended the non-disclosure agreement as an ordinary, accepted business practice. “Every organization, including this one, would go down in flames if an NDA was illegal,” Eric Trump said Monday on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program.
