Trump trial stay updates: Michael Cohen returns to the stand

When Donald Trump sat down with his lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to discuss his plans to run for president in 2016 he had a simple warning.

‘You know that when this comes out, meaning the announcement, just be prepared, there’s going to be a lot of women coming forward,’ is how Cohen remembered the conversation.

During more than five hours of riveting testimony on Monday, Cohen described the extraordinary lengths he went to in keeping their stories out of the headlines.

He worked his contacts in the media, set up front companies and received invoices from businesses with meaningless names like ‘Investor Advisory Services.’

And in so doing the prosecution’s star witness added the one link missing from the past three weeks of evidence: He told the court that Trump told him to do it.

Donald Trump is growing the number of allies he is bringing into the courtroom for the hush money trial.

On Monday, Republican senators J.D. Vance and Tommy Tuberville joined the former president and held press conferences outside to slam the case.

On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson and potential vice presidential pick Vivek Ramaswamy will support their party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

Michael Cohen was new on the job, and anxious to please his new boss that he was worth his new $375,000 salary and Fifth Avenue skyscraper office.

So in an early display of his tough guy lawyer chops, he went to work on an outstanding billing conundrum at the ill-fated Trump University. About 50 vendors had not been paid, with a total that ‘far exceeded’ the $2 million available in the venture’s bank account.

The personal injury lawyer got to work, creating a hand-written spread sheet that ‘came up with basically 20 percent of everyone’s invoice’ – denying each of them 80 per cent of what they were owed. (Two other vendors ‘just went away.’) He called each of them one-by-one to tell them what they were getting.

Donald Trump’s response when Cohen told him what he accomplished? ‘Fantastic,’ Cohen testified. It made him feel ‘like I was on top of the world,’ at a company that he described as like ‘a big family.’

Years later, it would be Cohen’s turn to feel what it was like to feel stiffed, even after helping guide Trump to the White House. His annual bonus came in at two-thirds of what it had been before.

‘I was truly insulted, personally hurt by it,’ Cohen told prosecutor Susan Hoffinger. He told her he was ‘truly pissed off and angry’ and that ‘I used quite a few expletives.’

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Michael Cohen will return to the stand on Tuesday morning to deliver more testimony against his old boss, Donald Trump.

The fixer and lawyer, who was convicted over the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and lying to Congress, is set to face grueling questioning from the former president’s lawyers.

Cohen also described working at ‘the direction of and for the benefit’ of the presumptive Republican nominee.