Donald Trump told his one-time fixer Michael Cohen only weeks before the election to bury Stormy Daniels’s account of an alleged sexual liaison, demanding that he “just take care of it”, according to trial testimony in Manhattan court on Monday.
“This was a disaster, a fucking disaster,” Cohen, after he took the stand, recalled Trump saying. “Women will hate me.”
Cohen described Trump as angry at the possibility that Daniels, an adult film star, might come forward shortly after the Washington Post published a hot-mic recording from an Access Hollywood taping in which Trump bragged about groping women “by the pussy” without their consent.
Cohen is core to the case against Trump, because he is accused of shuttling $130,000 to Daniels days before the 2016 election – in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump 10 years earlier. Cohen told jurors that he had kept Daniels’s account under wraps in 2011, working with her then lawyer to remove a story about it that had been on a gossip site.
“He was really angry with me,” Cohen recalled of Trump’s reaction after he informed him about Daniels. Trump, he said, remarked: “I thought you had this under control? I thought you took care of this.”
Prosecutors contend that Trump’s repayment of Cohen in 2017 was criminal because he listed the reimbursements as legal expenses in financial documents. Cohen’s testimony is crucial in establishing that Trump knew that the repayment scheme would be logged in the Trump Organization’s books as “legal expense”, and that the false entries were in violation of election law.
As he took the witness stand wearing a pale salmon tie, Cohen said he first met Trump through the former president’s son, Donald Jr, as he was moving into one of his properties, when the elder Trump asked him to fix an issue with the board at Trump World Tower.
“What we did was, we ended up overtaking the board and resolving the issue,” Cohen said. “He liked the way that occurred, and then continued to ask me if I would assist in other issues, legal issues, or other matters that he had.”
Eventually, Cohen said, Trump hired him full-time as an executive vice-president and counsel, giving him an office approximately 50ft from Trump’s. “I was honored, I was surprised,” Cohen said. Of his role in the Trump Organization, Cohen said, “I would only answer to him,” adding that he worked as Trump’s special counsel for 10 years, until January 2017, and said he was making approximately $525,000.
Through her questioning, the Manhattan prosecutor Susan Hoffinger worked to establish that Trump and Cohen had a direct connection and that even from the outset, Cohen’s performing legal work was not his only duty – that he was in effect Trump’s right-hand man. “It was whatever concerned him, whatever he wanted,” Cohen said.
He explained how he extricated Trump from the controversial Trump University business courses by offering “approximately 50 vendors that had not been paid” a lesser amount, and claimed all but two accepted.
He also described legal fixing for Trump with the press: “If they said something that angered him, I would reach out to the press and express to them they needed to redact or take the article down, or we would file an action against him.”
Cohen confirmed what many others have said, that Trump did not communicate by email, and provided an eyebrow-raising explanation – that Trump never had an email address. “‘Emails are like written papers,’” Cohen recalled Trump saying. “‘It’s too many people that have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case.’”
Hoffinger tried to convey through questioning that Trump was well aware of workings at the office – undermining a potential defense argument that he was distracted when he signed the checks. “When he tasked you with something, he would say: ‘Keep me informed,’” Cohen said. “You would [go] straight back and tell him, especially if it was a matter that was upsetting to him.” If Trump found out from someone else, “that wouldn’t go over well for you.”
Cohen described his time at the Trump Organization in a wistful tone. “It was fantastic. Working for him [Trump], especially during those 10 years, was an amazing experience in many, many ways. There were great times, there were several less-than-great times, but for the most part, I enjoyed the responsibility that was given to me. I enjoyed working with my colleagues at the Trump Organization, the Trump children. It was a big family.”
Prosecutors then asked Cohen about a meeting with the tabloid publisher David Pecker in summer 2015, shortly after Trump announced his presidential candidacy and where they say Pecker, Cohen and Trump hatched a catch-and-kill plan to bury negative press about the then candidate. Pecker testified in court that he had vowed to give them a warning about any damaging information about Trump.
Pecker offered to “keep an eye out for anything negative about Mr Trump and that he would be able to help us to know in advance what was coming out and try to stop it from coming out”, Cohen recalled.
Pecker’s then company, AMI, would do hit pieces on Trump’s opponents in the National Enquirer – for example, showing Hillary Clinton with glasses to imply brain injury, or publishing a photo of Ted Cruz’s father with Lee Harvey Oswald to imply he had a role in killing John F Kennedy. AMI would even send Cohen covers with these pieces before they ran, Cohen said. Trump’s reaction to the scandal sheets? “‘That’s fantastic. That’s unbelievable,’” Cohen recalled.
Cohen said he learned that in fall 2015, he had heard that a former Trump Tower doorman said Trump had a “love child” and Cohen wanted Trump’s direction on what he wanted done.
“He told me to make sure that the story doesn’t get out – you handle it.”
To prevent it from going public, Cohen said he worked with Dylan Howard of the National Enquirer, and Pecker, and that Pecker was going to buy the life rights to the doorman’s story for $30,000 “to take it off the market”. Cohen said Pecker and Howard would keep him updated, and that Cohen would pass those updates “immediately” to Trump.
Asked if Trump was grateful, Cohen said: “Absolutely.”
Cohen also said he was present in 2016 when Trump had a conversation with Pecker on speakerphone, during which Pecker said: “It’s going to cost him $150,000 to control the story, to which Mr Trump replied, ‘No problem, I’ll take care of it.’”
Cohen added he learned in 2016, from Howard and Pecker, that an agreement had been reached with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, for $150,000, and that “they were going to provide her with 24 penned articles that would bear her name” and that she would appear “on two covers of those various magazines that they owned”, effectively killing the story. Trump’s reaction to hearing that an agreement had been done was: “Fantastic! Great job!”
Pecker then wanted to know “when he should anticipate receiving, being paid back the $150,000”, Cohen said. “It was too much money from him to hide from the CEO of the parent company, and he had also just laid out $30,000 previous – so he was putting pressure on me to speak to Mr Trump and get the money back.”
The court also heard an audio recording Cohen said he made on his phone of Trump talking about AMI, where the president says: “It’s so false ... it’s such bullshit ... I think this goes away quickly.”
In the afternoon, Cohen once again provided testimony that put Trump at the center of the hush-money scheme.
“Would you have made that payment to Stormy Daniels without getting a sign-off from Mr Trump?” Hoffinger asked Cohen.
“No, because everything required Mr Trump’s sign-off. And on top of that, I wanted the money back,” he said.
Cohen’s testimonycame in the wake of a particularly hard trial week for Trump. Daniels testified for nearly two days about her alleged liaison with Trump following a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.
