On the docket: the calm before the Cohen
The biggest news out of former president Donald Trump’s trial today wasn’t anything that was said on the witness stand, but who will be on it next week.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and attorney, is expected to be called by the prosecution as soon as Monday.
Cohen is at the center of the case: he’s the man Trump repaid for buying the silence of the adult film star Stormy Daniels, an arrangement that Trump allegedly falsified business records to conceal.
The biggest question is whether the jury will find him credible. Numerous witnesses made it clear during testimony just how bullying, aggressive and unlikable he could be in their interactions with him.
But he’s the witness who can tie everything together. And we may start hearing his story when court resumes on Monday.
A few highlights from a fairly quiet day in the courthouse:
• Trump’s lawyers tried to prove he was a distracted multitasker. They got the former Trump aide Madeleine Westerhout to testify that as president he had to sign “a tremendous amount of items” and often multitasked without paying close attention to what he was signing. Their point is to undercut the claim that Trump signed large checks to Cohen that he knew were marked as business transactions when they were really to pay off Daniels.
• Custodial witnesses laid out more of the case’s paper trail. A paralegal working for the prosecution introduced tweets from Trump attacking Cohen from late 2018, when they had their falling-out, and also read out text messages between the National Enquirer editor, Dylan Howard, and Gina Rodriguez, Daniels’s then manager, in which Rodriguez threatens to have Daniels go public with her story if she doesn’t get paid – the day before Cohen paid Daniels’s attorney $130,000 from a shell company.
• Trump’s team asked for a gag order on Cohen. Trump’s attorney Todd Blanche pointed out that Cohen had been posting nasty things about Trump on TikTok. Prosecutors said they had repeatedly asked him to keep quiet, but he had ignored their pleas. Judge Juan Merchan told them to ask Cohen again to stop talking about the case – but declined to issue a new gag order.
• The two sides are fighting over the admission of a key piece of evidence. Prosecutors want to introduce the former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg’s settlement agreement into evidence because it seems to stipulate he could lose his severance money from Trump’s company if he testifies in Trump’s case. Trump’s team wants it blocked because Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to perjury in March for lying in testimony about Trump’s civil business fraud trial, won’t be a witness at this trial. Merchan didn’t rule on whether the agreement will be admitted.
• We’re getting near the end. “We expect to call two witnesses and it’s entirely possible that we will rest by the end of next week,” the prosecutor Joshua Steinglass told Merchan on Friday afternoon.
