Prosecutors need jurors to trust Trump’s former fixer, who was uncharacteristically even-tempered in a marathon day on the witness stand.
The world has long known two Michael Cohens.
There’s the fire-breathing “fixer” who famously bullied Donald Trump’s foes. And there’s the social media resistance hero he became after breaking with his former boss, lobbing insults at Trump with the same expletive-laden fury he used to reserve for Trump’s enemies.
On Monday, the jury in Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial met a third, one who seemed to manifest in real time on the witness stand: mild-mannered, self-deprecating, just-the-facts-ma’am. (In fact, he said ma’am more than 100 times when addressing prosecutor Susan Hoffinger.)
It was a reinvention that could define and even 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, while recasting himself, also revealed perhaps the most damaging bit of evidence yet: a meeting just days before Trump assumed the Oval Office, in which, according to Cohen, Trump reviewed and endorsed a plan to reimburse him for paying off Daniels.
That is a critical piece of testimony because the alleged reimbursement scheme — and records related to it — are at the crux 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. And Cohen’s description of the January 2017 Trump Tower meeting is the first piece of direct evidence to suggest that Trump personally green-lit the scheme.
But it is also a tricky piece of evidence for prosecutors, because the jury may need to rely solely on Cohen’s account of it.
In Cohen’s telling, only three people attended the meeting: Cohen, Trump and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg. Of those three, two — Cohen and Weisselberg — are convicted felons with a history of dishonesty. Weisselberg is currently serving jail time for perjury and appears unlikely to testify in the trial. Trump is under no obligation to testify in his own defense, which would open him up to cross-examination. And if he did testify, he would surely dispute Cohen’s version of the meeting — or deny that it happened at all.
That means prosecutors need the 12 jurors to trust Cohen, and Cohen alone, on what really happened in that meeting in which a significant chapter of the cover-up was purportedly written.
That’s where Cohen’s efforts to rebrand himself inside the Manhattan courthouse came into play. For nearly six hours, Cohen displayed uncharacteristic modesty, dispassion and a measured temperament, even while he acknowledged his former bouts of anger, bullying, lying and egotism.
The Michael Cohen who testified Monday was not the witness anyone expected – POLITICO