Silence filled the courtroom in the fraud trial of Donald Trump on Tuesday in anticipation of the arrival of the case’s first star witness. Trump, at his usual place at the front of the courtroom surrounded by his lawyers, didn’t turn to look back at his former employee, Michael Cohen, entered to take the stand.
After an eruption of camera flashes from the hallway, Cohen slowly walked to the witness stand in a grey jacket and a white shirt, no tie. But there was nothing grey about his testimony. After days of highly technical testimony from Trump’s former accountants, Cohen outlined a simple scheme designed to fool people about the size of Trump’s fortune.
According to Cohen, Trump directed him and other executives to cook the books and “reverse-engineer” the values of different assets in order to help the former president inflate his net worth. Asked what numbers he came up with, Cohen said: “Whatever number Mr Trump told us to.”
It was a refrain Cohen repeated throughout his testimony. He, along with the former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, were in charge of helping Trump mark up his net worth. They did it in handwritten notes, in red pen.
“He would look at the total assets and he would say I’m actually not worth $4.5bn, I’m really worth more than $6bn,” Cohen said.
Trump sued Cohen for $500m, called him a “rat” and spent his time outside court denigrating his former employee as a “liar” but has since dropped the lawsuit. The former president has made it a point to appear in person for Cohen’s testimony. But inside the courtroom, all Trump could do was cross his arms and scowl. Trump could be seen shaking his head and throwing up his hands throughout Cohen’s testimony. Eric Trump, sitting a few rows behind his father, was also in attendance and occasionally shook his head as Cohen spoke.
“Heck of a reunion,” Cohen, who hasn’t seen his former boss in five years, told reporters as he walked out of the courtroom for lunch break.
Prosecutors wrapped up their questions by the afternoon and highlighted that the trial was really a “documents case”. Multiple emails and statements were pulled up for Cohen to verify, the former lawyer putting on a pair of black reading glasses to see the evidence. A screen projecting the documents faced the audience, though the text was small. Some reporters brought binoculars to read the documents’ fine print.
Once Trump’s most loyal employee, and a man who said he would take a bullet for the former president, Cohen has turned into one of Trump’s most vocal opponents. His anger toward Trump has been palpable in his television appearances and posts on social media. Cohen has served over a year in prison, and at least two more in home confinement, after pleading guilty to various federal charges in 2018.
But Cohen was calm in the courtroom, even as Trump glowered at him from a few feet away. He was asked to list the crimes he had been convicted of, different counts of tax evasion, misrepresentation and campaign finance violations. When asked to elaborate on a charge of lying to Congress, Cohen said: “I did that at the direction of, in concern with and for the benefit of Mr Trump.”
Cohen’s appearance on the witness stand has been a highly anticipated event in the trial, now in its fourth week. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, has cited Cohen’s 2019 congressional testimony, in which he said Trump often “inflated his assets when it served his purposes”, as the reason why her office started investigating Trump over his financial statements.
The spectacle around Cohen’s testimony began hours before he took the witness stand. Cameras and reporters lined the hallway leading into the courtroom. Trump strolled into the courtroom minutes before the trial started for the day, hair slicked back and in a navy suit, flanked by lawyers Christopher Kise and Alina Habba. But everyone seemed to be waiting for Cohen.
Trump’s team seemed keen on delaying Cohen’s testimony, arguing that the judge should postpone the testimony of the “key witness” because multiple lawyers in the attorney general’s office had tested positive for Covid over the last week. Court had been adjourned on Monday because of Covid protocols.
Kise used the opportunity to rail against James for being “irresponsible” and caring about “nothing else except pursuing President Trump”.
“We’re just going to dispense with all the rules,” he said. “We have the leading candidate for the president of the United States in the courtroom today.”
Habba stood up and asked for separate microphones to use. “I don’t want to use the one that the attorney general used,” she said, calling it “contaminated”.
When prosecutors wrapped up their questions in the afternoon, Habba took on cross-examination, pacing in front of the courtroom, trying to paint Cohen as a “serial liar”. Still wearing his reading glasses, Cohen was becoming visibly annoyed during cross-examination and started answering questions with “asked and answered”. At one point, in the middle of a crossfire between Cohen and Habba, Cohen turned to the judge and said “object”, which garnered laughs in the courtroom.
“You can’t object,” Engoron told Cohen.
At one point during the squabble, Kise stood up and implored: “This witness is completely out of control!” Laughter could be heard throughout the courtroom.
Cohen’s cross-examination will continue on Wednesday.
