NEW YORK – On a crucial day in the first criminal trial of an American president, the courtroom threatened to get out of hand.
The prosecution’s star witness, Michael D. Cohen, admitted on the stand that he stole from the former president Donald Trump‘s company. Trump’s courtroom entourage included three supporters charged with their own crimes. And the defense’s one and only witness was so defiant that the judge, after berating him, cleared the courtroom.
The first five weeks of the trial featured dramatic descriptions of sex and scandal, and the final phase of testimony on Monday showed no signs of slowing down as the courtroom played host to a non-stop spectacle.
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The tension came to a head after the prosecution dropped its case and the defense called its witness, Robert J. Costello, a lawyer who had once advised Cohen. The defense saw Costello as an enemy of Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer and longtime accomplice.
But the strategy may not have paid off: The judge promptly lost patience with Costello, a prosecutor-turned-lawyer and fixture in the New York legal community. When Costello mocked one of the judge’s statements — “jeez,” he said, before muttering a retraction — the judge became irate.
In apology to the jury, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, lectured Costello: “If you don’t like my statement, don’t say ‘jeez,’ and don’t say ‘save,’ because I’m the only one who can testify in court,” he said, adding, “Are you staring at me?”
He ordered the courtroom to be cleared, briefly turning away reporters and other spectators, while allowing Trump’s supporters to remain. When those ordered to leave did so, according to a transcript, he told Costello his behavior was “contemptuous” and said, “If you try to stare at me again, I will remove you from the witness stand,” adding : Defense attorneys: “I will suppress his testimony, do you hear me?”
The explosion overshadowed the performance of Cohen, who fended off a series of defense attacks on his fourth and final day in the stands.
He was the only witness to offer firsthand evidence directly linking Trump to the documents supporting the charges against him. Trump, he said, approved a plan to falsify records to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn actor.
During Monday’s cross-examination, Trump’s lead lawyer attacked Cohen’s credibility by portraying him as a pathological liar obsessed with bringing down the former president. But Cohen maintained his composure as some of the judges appeared to lose focus as they shifted in their seats.
And when prosecutors were given a second opportunity to question Cohen, they tried to blunt much of the cross-examination’s impact.
“Have you been charged with crimes in this case?” a prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, asked him. “No, ma’am,” Cohen responded, explaining that he was only there as a “subpoenaed witness.”
Yet Cohen, the twentieth and final person to take the prosecution stand, was no mere witness. He illustrated much of the prosecution’s case as no one else could, harmonizing disparate facts to portray Trump as a criminal.
Cohen took the stand Monday amid a uniquely Trumpian display, as an eclectic entourage of the former president’s supporters — some with legal troubles of their own — filled the courtroom.
The group of more than a dozen included not only Republican lawmakers and Alan Dershowitz, the high-profile lawyer, but also a legal adviser to Trump who is under indictment in Arizona, Boris Epshteyn, and Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who defeated Trump. pardoned federal charges. And then there was Chuck Zito, a former leader of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, a man with jet-black hair in an Elvis-like style who had spent years in prison for drug abuse.
They stormed into the courtroom to support Trump as his confrontation with his former fixer and current nemesis continued.
But that wasn’t the end of the fireworks. When Costello took the stand, he tried to convince the jury that Cohen was a bad liar.
He recalled their first meeting in the spring of 2018, after the FBI searched Cohen’s home and office during an investigation into the hush-money deal. While Cohen had testified that Costello was part of a “pressure campaign” by Trump’s allies, Costello said Monday that Cohen was desperate for help.
“My life is ruined,” Costello recalled the former fixer telling him before asking, “What is my escape route?”
Costello testified that he told him he could work with the government, but Cohen said he had nothing incriminating to offer.
Costello recalled Cohen saying at the spring 2018 meeting, “I swear to God, Bob, I have nothing on Donald Trump.”
Amid a chorus of objections from Hoffinger — most of which the judge supported — Costello and Trump both shook their heads in apparent frustration.
As he left the court, Trump praised Costello but called Merchan a “tyrant” and the trial a “disaster.”
Costello, who will continue his testimony on Tuesday, was preceded by Cohen himself, who endured another round of fierce questioning from the defense.
Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche, ventured to the heart of the matter: Trump’s repayment of Cohen for his hush money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels. Cohen’s $130,000 payment on the eve of the 2016 presidential election silenced her account of a sexual encounter with Trump that threatened to derail his campaign.
In return, Cohen was paid $420,000 – an amount he said included hush money, a bonus, taxpayer money and $50,000 to reimburse a technology company in an unrelated matter. But when pressed by Blanche, Cohen acknowledged that he had pocketed more than half of the money earmarked for the tech company RedFinch.
“You stole from the Trump Organization, is that correct?” Blanche asked.
“Yes, sir,” Cohen replied.
Blanche also highlighted how much money Cohen has reaped from his attacks on his former boss and mentor, Trump, and suggested his testimony was motivated by greed and not truth-telling. Cohen has written two books and is considering a third, and has profited handsomely from a podcast. He has even said he would run for Congress.
But when Blanche suggested that a conviction would complete Cohen’s revenge plan, Cohen corrected him, at least on an economic level.
He said it would be better if Trump escaped unscathed because “it gives me more to talk about in the future.”
Blanche tried to wrap up the crucial exchange on a flourish, last week walking back his claim that Cohen had lied on the stand about a conversation with Trump in late October 2016 about the hush money deal. But Cohen forced him to end with a whimper, not a bang.
“Doubtless?” Blanche asked Cohen about his memory of a conversation with Trump.
“No doubt,” Cohen replied, concluding his cross-examination.
There’s no way to know what the jury thinks of Cohen, whose lies and past misdeeds were hardly a secret — prosecutors warned the jury to expect an outsize personality with a heavy load of baggage. And their judgment is not imminent. Merchan scheduled closing arguments for May 28, after which jurors could begin deliberating.
On Monday, when prosecutor Hoffinger had a chance to re-examine Cohen, she tried to smooth over some of the rougher edges of his testimony.
To underscore the idea that Trump condoned Cohen’s behavior, she produced a text message from one of Trump’s lawyers expressing appreciation that Cohen had told the media — he now says falsely — that he had killed Daniels paid off on his own initiative.
“Customer says thank you for what you do,” read the text message, which appeared to refer to Trump.
She also asked Cohen whether he had been wrong to steal from the Trump Organization when he asked for reimbursement for the tech company’s work. Cohen agreed that he had been.
Finally, Hoffinger returned to the archives that prosecutors say showed Trump’s failure to conceal the hush money deal. Trump, who faces probation or up to four years in prison, is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents, one for each document related to his 2017 reimbursement from Cohen: 11 checks to Cohen (most of which were signed by Trump) , 11 invoices filed by Cohen and twelve entries in Trump’s ledger.
The documents all referred to a “retainer agreement,” implying that Cohen received the money for ordinary expenses. While Blanche emphasized a variety of legal assignments that Cohen completed for the Trump family around this time, Hoffinger focused intently on specific amounts and documents.
“Did the €420,000 you received in 2017 have anything to do with the legal services you provided in 2017?” she asked Cohen. He replied bluntly, “No.”
“When you submitted each of your eleven invoices,” she then asked, “was that true or false?”
“False,” he confirmed.
And the checks that reflected a supposed deposit?
“Not true,” he told the jury.
Hoffinger also asked Cohen to assess the impact of his feud with Trump, who had been the center of his existence for years.
“My whole life has been turned upside down,” he said.
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