Donald Trump’s ex-lawyer Michael Cohen will continue testifying at the Republican candidate’s trial. He previously told jurors that Trump personally allowed him to make a payment to a porn star shortly before the 2016 election.
Cohen, once so loyal to Trump that he claimed he would take a bullet for his boss, is the prosecution’s most important witness. In hours of testimony on Monday, he said Trump ordered him to pay the adult film actress Stormy Daniels – “Just do it,” Cohen remembered Trump saying – to ensure her silence about an alleged 2006 sexual encounter.
Cohen’s $130,000 payment in October 2016 is at the heart of Trump’s trial, the first for a former U.S. president, which began in New York state criminal court in Manhattan a month ago.
Prosecutors say Trump paid Cohen back after the election and hid the reimbursements by creating false records indicating they were for legal fees. Those reimbursements provide the basis for the 34 counts of falsifying business records that Trump faces.
Trump, 77, who is running against Democratic President Joe Biden in November, has pleaded not guilty and denies any sexual encounter with Daniels. He has characterized the case as a partisan attempt to interfere with his campaign to take back the White House.
During his first day on the witness stand, Cohen, 57, described multiple episodes in which he said Trump approved payments to keep damaging sex-scandal stories out of the public eye, lest they torpedo his
“Everything required Mr. Trump’s sign-off,” Cohen said.
In October 2016, he said, he learned that Daniels was shopping her story to tabloids. At the time, the Trump campaign was in crisis mode after the release of an audio recording from the TV show “Access Hollywood” in which Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitals.
“He said to me, ‘This is a disaster, a total disaster. Women are going to hate me,’ Cohen told jurors Trump had said. “‘Guys, they think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.'”
The Author
Discover more from News Network Plus
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
