Witnesses line up to slam Michael Cohen ahead of Trump trial star’s turn
by Ella Lee and Zach Schonfeld - 05/01/24 11:16 AM ET
NEW YORK — In 2011, Stormy Daniels’s manager phoned a lawyer to complain that “some jerk” had called her up threatening to sue over a blog post claiming the porn actor slept with Donald Trump.
“I hate to ask it this way,” Joshua Steinglass, a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, said Tuesday while questioning the lawyer, “but who was that jerk?”
Keith Davidson, on the stand in Trump’s first criminal trial, frequently paused before answering Steinglass’s questions. But not this one.
“Michael Cohen,” Davidson replied without hesitation.
A onetime personal attorney and fixer to Trump, Cohen is expected to be a star witness for the district attorney’s office’s case against the former president on 34 counts of falsifying business records connected to hush money deals. Trump pleaded not guilty.
Cohen’s conduct is at the heart of the case. Prosecutors hope to convince a jury of 12 New Yorkers who will determine Trump’s fate that Cohen, now working against his former boss, is credible.
But the image of Cohen portrayed to jurors, at this point, is hardly one of valor.
Some of the prosecutors’ witnesses have torn into him, casting Cohen as difficult to work with to the point where they actively wanted to avoid him.
At one point, Davidson likened Cohen to the dog in Disney’s “Up” who repeatedly becomes distracted by squirrels.
“He was highly excitable, sort of a pants-on-fire kind of guy. He had a lot of things going on,” Davidson said. “I’d frequently be on the phone with him, he’d take another call, he’d be talking out of two ears.”
Cohen paid the hush money to Daniels that prosecutors say Trump unlawfully concealed and helped set up two other so-called catch-and-kill arrangements to keep quiet negative stories about Trump ahead of the 2016 election.
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https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4635754-witnesses-slam-michael-cohen-trump-trial/