Michael Cohen testified Monday that he secretly recorded Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election, discussing plans to buy a Playboy model’s article about her affair with the then-candidate.
Cohen, who worked for Trump for more than a decade, told a Manhattan Supreme Court jury that a Sept. 6, 2016 conversation recorded on an iPhone voice memo app was a secret recording of a conversation he had with his former boss. He said it was the only moment he had done so.
“So what do we have to pay for this? Fifty-tenths?” Trump can be heard saying in a roughly three-minute recording played in court by Assistant District Attorney Susan Hoffinger. It is said that he was
According to testimony, the conversation centered on a plan to buy from the National Enquirer the rights to an article about former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougall’s affair with a married Trump.
Mr. Cohen said the recording was a promise to David Pecker, then publisher of the National Enquirer, that Mr. Trump would repay the $150,000 he paid Mr. Pecker for exclusive rights to Mr. McDougall’s article. He said it was intended to give.
“The idea was to show it to David Pecker so he could hear the conversation and know that Mr. Trump was going to pay him back,” Cohen said on stage.
Cohen, President Trump’s former “fixer” and lawyer, began testifying Monday as the prosecution’s star witness in the hush money trial against the former president.
Mr. Trump, 77, was seen grinning and shaking his head as Mr. Cohen explained how he recorded the video without his permission, sitting at the defense table in court.
Jurors had previously heard snippets of the same tape during testimony from technical expert Douglas Dowse.
Mr. Cohen stressed that his role in brokering the “catch-and-kill” deal with Mr. McDougal was done solely at Mr. Trump’s behest.
“What I was doing was doing it at the direction and benefit of Mr. Trump,” he testified.
Cohen told jurors that when he first informed the real estate mogul of McDougal’s allegations, Trump did not deny they had happened, only pointing out how attractive she was. Ta.
“His response to me was, ‘She’s really beautiful,'” Cohen said.
Part of Mr. Cohen’s early testimony showed Mr. Trump sitting slumped in a chair with his eyes closed for at least 30 minutes.
After a morning break, Cohen looked even more animated as he continued to speak, flipping through a stack of documents in front of him at the defense table.
Trump’s aides were seen handing him news clips to read at other points during the trial, but it’s difficult to know exactly what Trump was looking at inside the room. .
