Live Updates: Cohen Says He Sought to Influence Election With Payment ‘on Behalf of Mr. Trump’

 

Live Updates: Cohen Says He Sought to Influence Election With Payment ‘on Behalf of Mr. Trump’

 

Michael D. Cohen, Donald J. Trump’s former fixer, will be questioned by the defense after the lunch break. He has described buying the silence of a porn star, Stormy Daniels, and the reimbursement by Mr. Trump that is at the center of the criminal charges against him.

 

Updated

May 14, 2024, 1:28 p.m. ET12 minutes ago

12 minutes ago

Michael Wilson, Jonah E. Bromwich and Maggie Haberman

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/14/nyregion/trump-trial-news-michael-cohen

 

Cohen’s testimony is the linchpin of the case. Here’s the latest.

Michael D. Cohen, the key witness in the criminal case against Donald J. Trump, testified on Tuesday that the hush-money payment he made to a porn star in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign was an attempt to influence the election “on behalf of Mr. Trump.”

 

Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s one-time lawyer, will be cross-examined by the defense after lunch. Under questioning from prosecutors, he described a White House meeting where he said Mr. Trump confirmed a plan to reimburse him for the $130,000 he paid the woman, Stormy Daniels, to bury her account of a 2006 sexual encounter. He also recalled the reassurance that Mr. Trump offered him after he was the target of an F.B.I. raid related to the payment: “Don’t worry. I’m the president of the United States.”

 

Key testimony: Mr. Cohen recounted a meeting inside the Oval Office in February 2017 about the reimbursement, the linchpin of the charges against Mr. Trump, who is accused of falsifying business records to hide it. He described the bogus invoices he sent Mr. Trump’s business and the checks he received in return, most of them bearing Mr. Trump’s signature.

 

Mr. Cohen also laid out what happened next: Ms. Daniels’s story was getting out anyway; attempts to limit the fallout included orchestrating false and misleading statements from her; and then Mr. Cohen’s hotel room and offices were raided in April 2018 by federal agents.

 

A back channel to Trump: Mr. Cohen testified that after the raid, a lawyer who was closely tied to Mr. Trump’s legal team, Robert Costello, offered to represent him and serve as a conduit to Mr. Trump. An email from Mr. Costello that was displayed by prosecutors urged Mr. Cohen to “sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.”

 

Mr. Cohen testified that he felt that Mr. Costello became Mr. Trump’s messenger, delivering implicit instructions to, in the former fixer’s words, “stay in the fold, don’t flip, don’t speak.”

 

Mr. Cohen later pleaded guilty to federal charges, including breaking campaign finance laws in connection with hush-money deals with Ms. Daniels and another woman, the Playboy model Karen McDougal, who said she had an affair with Trump.

 

The charges: Mr. Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to the reimbursement: 11 checks, 11 invoices and 12 ledger entries. Mr. Cohen on Monday described Mr. Trump ordering him to “just take care of” Ms. Daniels’s story and said that Mr. Trump knew the records would disguise the reimbursement as ordinary legal expenses — a crucial element of the prosecution’s case.

 

Cohen’s credibility: Mr. Trump’s lawyers are expected to attack the credibility of Mr. Cohen, whom Mr. Trump has called a “convicted liar.” In testimony on Tuesday, Mr. Cohen said that he’d lied while testifying before Congress, although he said he’d done so on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

 

House speaker attends: Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, called the trial a “sham” while speaking to reporters outside the courthouse on Tuesday. Two of Mr. Trump’s vanquished primary opponents, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, were in the courthouse.

 

Frenzied final weeks: On Monday, Mr. Cohen’s testimony offered an inside look at the 2016 Trump campaign during the seismic revelations that threatened the candidate’s appeal to female voters. Mr. Cohen recounted the “Access Hollywood” tape bombshell — a recording of Mr. Trump discussing how he had groped women — and said Mr. Trump credited his wife, Melania, with the strategy of calling it “locker-room talk.”

 

He also described efforts to bury unflattering stories using so-called catch-and-kill arrangements with David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, and the “catastrophic” threat posed by Ms. Daniels’s account of a 2006 sexual encounter. Here are the highlights of Monday’s testimony.