Trump trial reside updates: Star witness Michael Cohen to take the stand

Prosecutors took Cohen through the period where he learned about bombshell claims by former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal’s claims of an extended affair with Trump. ‘Boss I gotta talk do you,’ Cohen told Trump as he walked into his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, he recalled.

‘Come in,’ I went in

Cohen says he asked Trump if he knew who Karen McDougal was, or ‘anything about the story.’

‘His response to me was: ‘She’s really beautiful.’

‘I said, “Okay but there’s a story …”‘ Cohen testified.

That was just one early scene in a chain of events that would result in a $150,000 payment to McDougal. According to Cohen, ex-National Enquirer boss David Pecker would put up the money, but Trump told him, ‘I’ll take care of it,’ meaning he would pay him back.

Cohen is going through another infamous ‘catch and kill’ episode, this one involving a Trump Tower doorman who claimed ‘that there was a love child’ involving Trump.

Cohen said he heard about it from American Media Inc., after earlier speaking about his contacts with David Pecker and Dyland Howard, and testifying about what he called a plan to kill negative stories about Trump.

The story – which was never established as true – was about the doorman’s claim that Trump fathered a child with a Trump Tower housekeeper.

Cohen says he went to Trump ‘immediately’ to advise him ‘there was a negative story and to get his direction on what he wanted me to do.’

From Rob Crilly, Senior Political Reporter inside the courtroom:

Michael Cohen’s delivery is considered, cautious, flat.

If jurors were expecting a ‘pants on fire’ type, or a ‘jerk’, as other witnesses put it, then they are not getting one.

And that is exactly why prosecutors were so happy to get previous witnesses to dish the dirt on him.

In doing so, they have ‘inoculated’ the jury against his worst points.

We know that Cohen is a convicted perjurer but the prosecution is hoping the jurors are all thinking: Oh, maybe he’s not so bad after all.

Donald Trump was over the moon when the National Enqurier ran positive stories about him or negative ones about his rivals.

The tabloid magazine would send over stories before they were published, and the editorial team often sought input from Trump.

Cohen would show Trump, and he would say: ‘It’s fantastic! That’s unbelievable!’

Donald Trump was concerned that many women would come forward when he announced his run for president, Michael Cohen told the court.

The former president’s ‘fixer’ also detailed how he would preview National Enqurier stories and covers before they were published.

Trump and his team knew the power the tabloid had as it was sold in so many supermarkets and bodegas.

Therefore they tried to place positive stories about Trump and negative articles about his opponents.

Cohen revealed that he was in close contact with the National Enquirer publisher at the time, David Pecker, and editor Dylan Howard.

‘Negative ones (stories) I would receive from David or Dylan Howard was Hillary Clinton wearing very thick glasses, some allegations she had some brain injury

‘It was Ted Cruz, a photo of his father with lee Harvey Osawald claiming (he) was involved in the assaination of JFK

‘Article on Marco Rubio in a swimming pool with a bunch of other men claiming they were having a drug binge of some sort.’

Early in his testimony, Cohen spoke about his happiest times working for Donald Trump, as the defendant sat just feet away from him in Manhattan Criminal Court. ‘I enjoyed working with my colleagues at the Trump organization, the Trump children. It was a big family,’ he said, smiling and recalling those times.

Asked how he felt about working for Trump, Cohen flashed nostalgia and emotion, replying simply, ‘Fantastic.’

‘Working for him, especially during those ten

years was an amazing experience in many, many ways. There were great times. There were several less than great time.s

Michael Cohen told the court that he spent so much time with Donald Trump that the real estate mogul chose to ‘sync’ his cell phone.

‘We ultimately decided, he agreed, to have his contact numbers synced to my cell number,’ he said.

It meant Cohen could get anyone Trump wanted on the line.

As a result, he had more than 30,000 contacts on his phone.

Michael Cohen was asked by prosecutors about whether he would sometimes bully people while working for the Trump Organization.

Cohen replied: ‘Yes.’

He went on, saying the ‘only thing that was on my mind’ was to ‘make him happy,’ referring to Trump.

From Rob Crilly, Senior Political Reporter inside the courtroom:

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger has got quickly to the heart of one of the issues about this case: That Trump has not left a paper trail.

Did Trump ever use email, she asks Cohen. No, he replies.

‘During certain conversations, he would comment that emails are like written papers,’ he continued.

‘He knows too many people who have gone down … by having emails that prosecutors can use in a case.’

Michael Cohen testified that it would be ‘fair’ to characterize him as Trump’s former ‘fixer.’

‘Some have described me as that,’ he told prosecutors.

‘If it was in order to place a story that would be advantageous I would speak with them,’ he said. He would also bring down the hammer. ‘If there was an article that caused him displeasure I’d speak with them as well,’ he said.

He agreed his role was to minimize negative stories and enhance positive stories.

Trump has not looked directly at Cohen thus far.

Cohen is describing some of the tasks he did for Trump, like figuring out how to pay now-defunct Trump University vendors, when bills were far beyond the $2 million in a company bank account.

Cohen said he ‘came up with basically 20 percent of everyone’s invoice’ – the amount each vendor would get. He ‘contacted each and every one.’

All but two accepted the lowball offer, other than two, who got nothing.

Cohen testified he would tell Trump about each arrangement.

Trump said it was ‘fantastic.’ Asked how the accomplishment made him feel, Cohen said it was ‘like I was on top of the world.’

Cohen told the court he was honored to be offered a job at the Trump Organization in 2007.

He explained how Don Jr. introduced him to the former president after buying several units at one of his properties.

Cohen then got involved with resolving an issue with one of the building’s boards, sparking negotiations over a new position.

‘I was asked to review a series of documents that deal with Trump resorts,’ Cohen said.

Then they started talks over salary, and ended up on a ‘middle number’ of $375,000.

Cohen said he never went back to his old employer’s office and Trump got some of his staff to pack his belongings.

He then started work from Ivanka’s old office.

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger is establishing how Cohen went from being a personal injury lawyer to someone with extremely close access to Donald Trump. When Trump offered him a job and got him to leave his firm, ‘I actually never went back. Not even that day,’ Cohen said. Trump ‘‘gave me Ivanka Trump’s old office on 26’ – meaning the 26th Floor of Trump Tower. As for his role: ‘I would only answer to him and I would work on issues that were of concern to him,’ Cohen said.

Donald Trump spoke for six minutes before entering the court to face his nemsis Michael Cohen.

His attorney, Todd Blanche, stood next to him as he spoke about a number of press articles that he said show the case against him is flawed.

The former president also celebrated the New York Times poll that shows him leading Joe Biden in five swing states.

Cohen was asked to identify Trump from the witness box where he is delivering testimony.

He had to stand up to get a gander of the man he was introduced to by Donald Trump Jr. after getting into real estate buy purchasing Trump properties.

He was asked to identify Trump by an article of clothing. ‘He’s wearing a blue and white tie,’ Cohen said.

Here we go. With a call of ‘Witness entering’ from a court officer, Michael Cohen walks stiffly into the courtroom.

Trump looks straight ahead as his nemesis steps into the witness box and is sworn in. Cohen is wearing a light pink tie and his most earnest expression.

This is not a man who does humility easily, but he’ll need every ounce of it to get through what will be a very testing time on the stand.

He begins with soft balls from prosecutor Susan Hoffinger about his age, marital status and early career.

Trump complained about being sidelined while he’d prefer to be campaigning due to his criminal trial.

He told reporters before entering the courthouse on Monday morning: ‘I should be out campaigning now, instead of sitting in a very cold courthouse all day long.’

Judge Merchan’s first act of business is to disallow as evidence a ‘separation agreement’ that former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg got when he left the company.

It would ‘just provide an explanation for why somebody’s not here,’ said Merchan. Weisselberg is currently serving time in prison at Rikers Island.

‘It doesn’t move the ball in any way towards satisfying the burden of proof .. so I’m going to deny the application,’ said the judge.

Prosecutors said last week the agreement showed that under the agreement Weisselberg was entitled to three payments of $250,000 this year and that he couldn’t disparage the Trump Organization.

From Rob Crilly, Senior Political Reporter inside the courtroom.

Trump has arrived with his biggest entourage so far for the showdown with Michael Cohen.

He has Sens. JD Vance and Tommy Tuberville in the rows behind him. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis rounded out the group of lawmakers.

Son Eric has returned, along with his regular staff Boris Epshteyn, Natalie Harp and Jason Miller.

One question is how Cohen, after prepping with prosecutors, will refer to Trump while on the stand. During dramatic 2019 congressional testimony, he called him ‘Mr. Trump’ while denouncing him, as in: ‘I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is. He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.’

‘Mr. Trump’ was the preferred title inside the Trump Organization, where Cohen once had a 26th floor office. More recently, Cohen has been quoted on his podcast and other commentary calling him ‘Donald.’ During the trial, in an effort to establish his unreliability, prosecutors brought up a tweet where he called the former president ‘Von Schitzenpants.’ Sly comments or outbursts like that could hurt the prosecution’s case.

Cohen left his New York apartment accompanied by his Danya Perry, a white collar criminal defense lawyer and a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

She runs a boutique law firm under her own name, and previously served as New York’s deputy attorney general. She ran investigations for the Moreland Commission, which investigated public corruption. The Harvard College and Yale law grad previously worked at MacAndrews & Forbes and for the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and worked for a federal judge.

Cohen spent hours before Monday’s appearance prepping for testimony and for what is expected to be a brutal cross examination with lawyer Lanny Davis.

Donald Trump’s motorcade has left his Manhattan residence on the way to court for the showdown with his former fixer Michael Cohen.

He will sit in court while the lawyer he has repeatedly berated explains the details of the hush money agreement at the center of the case.

Cohen is set to say that Trump was behind the payment and that the former president personally approved the reimbursements.

Prosecutors say the payments were illegally disguised as legal fees.

The Manhattan District Attorey’s office prosecutors indicated on Friday that this would be the final week of their case.

Michael Cohen’s testimony could last several days and is expected to deliver fireworks.

The prosecution’s final witnesses are set to be less dramatic and could be procedural.

Then the defense will take over. It is not yet clear who they will bring to the stand.

There is a chance Trump’s lawyers may not call anyone.

Cohen walked into the court in downtown Manhattan just after 8am.

Donald Trump is yet to leave Trump Tower for his routine motorcade trip.

Cohen worked for the Trump Organization from 2006 to 2017, serving as Trump’s fixer. He once proudly proclaimed he’d ‘take a bullet’ for his boss.

Cohen took the lead in arranging the payment to Daniels, passing it through a corporation he established for the purpose. He says he was then reimbursed by Trump, whose company logged the payment and related bonuses as ‘legal expenses.’

A few months earlier, Cohen had also arranged for the publisher of the National Enquirer to make a similar $150,00 payment to McDougal for the rights to her story about an alleged affair with Trump.

Cohen made recordings of a conversation in which he and Trump spoke about the arrangement to pay McDougal through the tabloid publisher. At one point, Trump said: ‘What do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?’ Trump denies the affair.

After Trump became president, Cohen held himself out as someone who could potentially advise corporate clients on the new administration, collecting hefty fees from companies seeking influence in the new White House.

Federal prosecutors in 2018 charged Cohen with evading taxes related to his investments in the taxi industry, with lying to Congress and with campaign finance violations related to the hush money payments.

Cohen, who blamed Trump for his legal problems, pleaded guilty and served about a year in prison before being released to home confinement because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is now a key prosecution witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation.

The jury in Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial has already heard three weeks of testimony.

They have listened to a range of witnesses from Stormy Daniels – who went into lurid detail about her alleged tryst with the former president – and paralegals and cell phone company workers who have entered evidence.

In the next two weeks, they will likely be sent out to deliberate to decide guilt in the first trial of a former president.

Here is who they are:

Michael Cohen has departed his New York home to head to the lower Manhattan court.

He left with his attorney Danya Perry and is set to take the stand just after 9.30am.

Cohen once described himself as Trump’s ‘spokesman, thug, pit bull and lawless lawyer’.

The fixer could now be a problem for his old boss.

A pair of lead Republicans in the House are demanding to know why the Department of Justice has not yet investigated Michael Cohen despite the former Trump fixer admitting he lied to Congress.

Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner and GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik wrote  the Justice Department (DOJ) six months ago with a criminal referral for Cohen. The DOJ confirmed receipt of the letter but has never followed up.

Cohen admitted in October to lying to Congress in 2019 when he falsely told the House Intelligence Committee behind closed doors that he was not instructed by Trump to inflate his net worth.

Cohen may have been undermining his own credibility as a witness, as he’s been taking to TikTok to talk about the case and requesting donations.

‘Trump 2024?’ Cohen said on the video-sharing platform. ‘More like Trump 20-24 years.’

The reimbursements Cohen received form the basis of the charges — 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — against Trump.

Prosecutors say the reimbursements were logged as legal expenses to conceal the payments’ true purpose.

Defense lawyers have teed up a bruising cross-examination of Cohen, telling jurors during opening statements that the fixer-turned-foe is an ‘admitted liar’ with an ‘obsession to get President Trump.’

His checkered past is focal in the case. The testimony of a witness with such intimate knowledge of Trump’s activities could heighten the legal exposure of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee if jurors deem him sufficiently credible.

But prosecutors relying on someone who was jailed for pleading guilty to federal charges related to the payments and lying to Congress is a risky strategy.

Donald Trump left his criminal trial with a smile on Friday after a judge told the prosecution to control their star witness Michael Cohen.

The former president nodded as Judge Juan Merchan urged the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to direct the lawyer at the center of the case to stop discussing it.

The good news for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee came at the end of a grueling week in court where he sat through six hours of testimony from Stormy Daniels.

The porn star went into detail with her salacious and sometimes lurid claims about the night they allegedly had sex in a hotel room in 2006 – a story Trump has denied.

She finished her appearance on the stand on Thursday afternoon, with Friday a far more subdued affair with witnesses who gave less dramatic but still crucial evidence.

They bore witness to some of the most extraordinary moments of the Trump presidency: The decision to take out Abu Abkr al-Baghdadi. The first statements from the White House about a strange new virus. A ridiculous storm path bearing down on Alabama redrawn with a Sharpie pen. And the president’s ruminating about injecting bleach.

Some cabinet members, longtime aides and top White House personnel remained loyal until the bitter end and still support him. Others bailed out in the last days of his administration, both before and after January 6.

A smattering landed book deals they used to unload on the administration they once served, or penned op-eds denouncing Trump. Others followed him to Mar-a-Lago, helping the former president regroup as he plotted a way forward that took him to the cusp of the Republican presidential 2024 nomination.

Even before he set foot inside courtroom 1530, Michael Cohen’s role as a key witness in Donald Trump’s hush money case put the former president’s lawyer-cum-fixer at the center of proceedings.

Celebrity lawyer Keith Davidson, for example, was asked about a message he received asking him to ‘call that jerk back.’

‘Who was that jerk?’ he was asked by prosecutor Joshua Steinglass during the second week of the trial.

‘Michael Cohen,’ he replied to laughter in the public gallery.

It is one thing for Trump’s defense to start to case doubt on the testimony of a disbarred lawyer who has changed his story about paying $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels; it is quite another for the prosecution, which will rely on Cohen’s testimony to draw a direct link from Trump to the payment, to highlight his shortcomings.