Sara Boboltz is an Associate Editor of Viral Content at The Huffington Post. She lives in New York City.
guilty on all 34 charges of falsifying business documents to cover up an alleged affair with porn actor Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 presidential election.
But other days of the trial were comparatively dull, underscoring how the case ultimately came down to a collection of business records. She said the plan was to head to dinner together at a restaurant, but that they never ended up going. Instead, she testified, Trump pressured her into sex after dangling an opportunity to appear on The Apprentice, his reality show.
In the days before Daniels took the stand, Keith Davidson, her former attorney, testified about how interest in the rights to her story spiked in early October 2016, when The Washington Post published the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Hope Hicks, who was Trump’s 2016 campaign spokesperson, testified about the deep concern that ran through his staff after the tape’s release. Several of Trump’s various denials were shown in court and heard by the jury.
Cohen then spent hours testifying about how he handled the situation for Trump, affirming repeatedly that his actions were intended to benefit his boss and that his boss always knew what Cohen was doing. A trickier task was proving that Cohen informed Trump every step of the way while making the payment and organising the reimbursement scheme, as Trump is famously email-averse and sometimes spoke to people using his bodyguard’s phone.
But Cohen also told the jury that he was used to making this kind of short call to update Trump on business matters, and he did not need much time to do so.“Always ran everything by the boss immediately,” Cohen testified, adding that it could be a short message, like “everything’s taken care of.” Trump personally signed the majority of the checks in the Oval Office — the documents bearing his signature were displayed one after the other for jurors. The trial seemed to drag the most during the hours prosecutors spent recounting the checks’ journey from New York’s Trump Tower to the White House and then out for delivery; several former Trump Organisation and White House staffers took the stand to fill in these gaps.
Cohen testified that he felt there was a “pressure campaign” coming from the Trump White House to dissuade him from cooperating with federal investigators, even if that was in his best interests.“My wife, my daughter, my son all said to me: ‘Why are you holding on to this loyalty? What are you doing? We’re supposed to be first loyalty,’” Cohen testified. “It was about time to listen to them.”
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