Former Trump advisor affirms in court that he wants to see the former president convicted

Michael Cohen, who was once Donald Trump’s political fixer, told a jury on Tuesday in the trial of the former president in New York who wants Trump convicted.

While cross-examining Cohen, Trump defense attorney Todd Blanche described him as a Trump loyalist who for years did what Trump wanted before turning against him in 2018.

And now, Blanche suggested, Cohen is still obsessed with Trump, makes money selling anti-Trump merchandise and books he wrote about Trump, and seems determined to get back at Trump for turning his back on him.

“Do you want President Trump to be convicted in this case?” Blanche asked Cohen.

“Sure,” Cohen responded.

During roughly nine hours of questioning over two days by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, Cohen told the 12-member jury that as voters headed to the polls in the 2016 election, Trump attempted to influence the outcome by ordering to make a payment of $130,000 to keep porn star Stormy Daniels quiet.

The goal, Cohen said, was to silence her claim that she had a one-night stand with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied the relationship and the 34 charges he faces in New York in the first criminal trial against a US president.

If convicted, he could be placed on probation or sentenced to up to four years in prison.

Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, is accused of falsifying business records at his real estate conglomerate Trump Organization to disguise his $130,000 repayment to Cohen in 2017 for his hush money to Daniels as a payment he was owed for his legal work.

But Cohen testified that Trump approved the hush money repayment deal twice, including in a meeting in the White House Oval Office less than three weeks after Trump took office in January 2017.

When he turned against Trump in 2018, Cohen said he apologized to the American public “for lying to them, for acting in a way that suppressed information that the public had a right to know in order to make a determination about the individual seeking the highest office in the country.” country.”

However, Cohen has been a flawed witness for the prosecution after pleading guilty to several crimes, including a campaign finance violation related to hush money and perjury for lying to a congressional panel about a potential company real estate deal. Trump Tower in Moscow that never materialized.

He served 13 and a half months in federal prison and a year and a half in house arrest.

Trump appeared to fall asleep during much of Cohen’s testimony. Later, he told reporters: “I think it was a very good day.”

During Blanche’s cross-examination, Cohen told the jury that when Trump grandly entered the American political scene in 2015 with his descent down the escalator of Trump Tower in New York, “I admired him tremendously.”

He said Trump paid him $375,000 a year plus a $150,000 annual bonus, except in 2016.

“At the time, I was knee-deep in the cult of Donald Trump, yes,” Cohen said, adding, “I wasn’t lying, that’s how I felt.” He said that at some point he would have taken a bullet for the man he called “the boss” and that he viewed Trump and his immediate family as his own surrogate family.

But that changed after FBI agents raided his then-home, a hotel room in New York, in April 2018, months after news of Cohen’s money payment to Daniels became public.

Agents confiscated their cellphones and many of their documents, Cohen said.

Cohen said he was scared by the raid, but that Trump told him: “Don’t worry. I’m the president of the United States. There’s nothing here. Everything’s going to be okay. Stay strong. You’re going to be okay.”

Cohen said it was the last time he spoke to Trump, and soon Trump and his allies began refusing to pay Cohen’s legal bills to defend him. Cohen said he turned against Trump after his wife and children questioned why he should remain loyal to them.

“My family (my wife, my daughter, my son) said to me, ‘Why are you holding on to this loyalty? What are you doing? We’re supposed to be your first loyalty.'”

“I made a decision based again on the conversation I had with my family that I would no longer lie for President Trump,” he testified.

When Cohen pleaded guilty to some of his crimes in 2018, Trump tweeted: “If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I strongly suggest you do not retain the services of Michael Cohen!”

Blanche asked Cohen if he had renounced his reverence for Trump in February 2019, telling a congressional panel that Trump was “a con man and you were ashamed.”

“I said yes,” Cohen said.

More recently, Cohen said, he has written two Trump-related books for which he has earned $3.4 million in royalties and promoted the sale on his website of anti-Trump trinkets such as a T-shirt depicting Trump handcuffed in a jumpsuit. orange and a coffee mug that says, “Send him to the big house (jail), not the White House.”

Blanche asked if Cohen, speaking on his podcast four times a week, called Trump a “rude cartoon misogynist.”

“It sounds like something I would say,” Cohen said.

Blanche then asked if Cohen had called Trump a “Cheetos-dusted cartoon villain.”

“That sounds like something I said, too,” Cohen responded.

Blanche also sought to portray Cohen as conveniently forgetful in his recollections, unable to recall multiple recent conversations with prosecutors who asked him to end his attacks on Trump during the trial, but able to recall 2016 conversations with Trump about paying money to Daniels to keep his silence.

“I remember all the phone conversations with Mr. Trump at that time, yes,” Cohen testified.

With the trial recessed Wednesday, Blanche’s cross-examination of Cohen will resume Thursday.

The case is about to conclude. Prosecutors said Cohen was the last of 19 witnesses for him, while Trump’s team said they had an expert witness to testify in his defense, although the matter was not disclosed.

The biggest question remaining among witnesses is whether Trump will testify about his version of events that have unfolded in more than three weeks of testimony. He has said that he wants to take the stand as a witness, but it is unknown if he will actually do so.

Should Trump testify, New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchán has already ruled that prosecutors can question him about two civil cases he lost in recent months and for which he was ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars. in damages.

Only one Trump relative, his second son, Eric, has occasionally appeared at the trial.

But the proceedings have become increasingly politicized, and Trump encouraged his core Republican supporters to fly to New York and sit in the courtroom as a show of support.

Senators Tommy Tuberville and JD Vance were at the trial on Monday and House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared on Tuesday.

Johnson called it a “sham trial” and characterized Cohen as “a man who is clearly on a mission of personal revenge and who is widely known as a witness who has problems with the truth. He is someone who has a history of perjury and is well known for it.”

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