Trump Trial Jury Sees A Different Michael Cohen

The world has known two Michael Cohens -- the “fixer” who famously bullied Donald Trump’s foes and the social media hero he became after breaking with his former boss, lobbing insults at Trump with the same fury he used to reserve for Trump’s enemies. On Monday, the jury in Trump's Manhattan trial met a third, just-the-facts-ma’am, witness who appeared mild-mannered and self-deprecating. (He said ma’am more than 100 times addressing prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, reports Politico.) It was a reinvention that could determine the outcome of Trump’s criminal trial, in which the former president is charged with orchestrating a scheme to prevent porn star Stormy Daniels from revealing an extramarital affair on the cusp of his 2016 presidential victory. That’s because Cohen testified that in a meeting just days before Trump assumed the Oval Office, Trump reviewed and endorsed a plan to reimburse him for paying off Daniels.

That is a crucial piece of testimony because the purported reimbursement scheme, along with its related records, lies at the heart of the 34 felony charges against Trump. Prosecutors say that Trump, while reimbursing Cohen, falsified the reimbursement as a series of legal expenses in violation of New York law. In Cohen’s telling, only three people attended the meeting: Cohen, Trump and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg. Cohen and Weisselberg are convicted felons with a history of dishonesty. Weisselberg is serving jail time for perjury and appears unlikely to testify. Trump is not obligated to testify in his own defense, which would subject him to cross-examination. That means prosecutors need the 12 jurors to trust Cohen on what really happened in that meeting in which a significant chapter of the cover-up was purportedly written. On Tuesday, Cohen testified that he discussed the repayment plan with Trump in the Oval Office when he visited the White House in February 2017, reports the Associated Press. Under Cohen’s reimbursement arrangement, he was paid $35,000 per month for 12 months, for a total of $420,000.