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4 months ago
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Michael Cohen, Donald Trump‘s former attorney and fixer who has since turned into one of his chief antagonists, took the stand today in the former president’s hush money trial.
Prosecutors view Cohen as a critical link in their case against the former and possibly future president: the co-conspirator who connects Trump directly to hush money for adult entertainer Stormy Daniels. Cohen made multiple appearances before the Manhattan grand jury that indicted Trump in 2023.
But he comes to the witness stand with baggage: prison time and disbarment after a 2018 guilty plea for tax evasion and federal campaign finance violations — the latter tied to his $130,000 payment to Daniels. Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying under oath to Congress in 2017 about a Trump real estate venture in Moscow.
A Trump attorney, Todd Blanche, said in opening statements that Cohen can’t be trusted. “He is an admitted liar,” Blanche said.
Cohen has also been busy trolling his old boss online, to the irritation of lawyers on both sides. On Friday Blanche asked the presiding judge, Juan Merchan, to make Cohen stop. Prosecutors replied that they, too, had asked Cohen to keep his opinions about the trial to himself, but weren’t having much luck.
Merchan told the Manhattan District Attorney’s team to urge their star witness to restrain himself, adding that the advice was coming straight from the bench — a gag request, but without the threat of fines and jail behind the gag order imposed on Trump for criticizing trial figures including Cohen himself.
Today, Cohen finally has everybody’s permission to speak, and he is prepared to say that he acted on orders from Trump.
Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 days before the 2016 election to stay quiet about her claim of a sexual liaison years earlier with the star of Celebrity Apprentice, at the time a married real estate mogul with a newborn son and a short political resumé. Trump spent four months in 2000 as a Reform Party candidate for the White House.
Prosecutors say that Trump, as president, disguised his reimbursement of Cohen by calling it taxable income for routine legal work, in an arrangement set up by the Trump Organization’s then-chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. The former Trump CFO is in jail for lying under oath in a New York civil case against Trump, and could be summoned to testify in the hush-money case.
The 34-count indictment lists falsified business records — checks, pay stubs, ledger entries — intended to conceal the repayment to Cohen. Prosecutors will have to convince jurors that a scheme relying on misdemeanor counts of business wrongdoing became a felony because Trump employed it to interfere with a presidential election by keeping voters in the dark about a tryst with a porn star.
Trump has denied any sexual contact with Daniels and said that his payments to Cohen were legitimate. His lawyers have argued that Trump wanted to spare himself and his family embarrassment. Any impact on an election that Trump won was secondary and within the bounds of campaigning, according to defense lawyers.
