Trump trial: Details revealed by former lawyer Michael Cohen, the key witness in the trial against the former president

Standing just hundreds of feet away from his decade-old boss, lawyer Michael Cohen recounted in a Manhattan courtroom an account of his work for Donald Trump, a man for whom he was once willing to take a bullet.,

“The only thing on my mind was to get the job done, to make (Trump) happy,” Cohen said Monday during the former president’s trial in New York.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges of falsifying business records related to Cohen’s claim he paid Stormy Daniels to keep the adult film star quiet about an alleged sexual encounter with the former president.

Days before Cohen’s testimony, Trump and his former lawyer traded insults on social media, but for several hours on Monday, the former friends didn’t even look at each other, as Cohen remained calm and composed as he told the court about his turbulent story. Told about the past.

It was one of the few times the two had been in the same room recently, since Cohen, 57, came to work for Trump, 77, decades ago.

The son of a Long Island Holocaust survivor, Cohen never wanted to be a lawyer and said his grandmother pressured him to become a lawyer.

But after studying law in college, Cohen found himself working at a personal injury firm, where he did some “legal” and “non-legal” work for Trump, he testified.

In 2007, Cohen decided to take a job as Trump’s special prosecutor, a position with a base salary of $375,000 annually.

It was a prestigious job for Cohen, who would remain there for 10 years.

Trump sent employees to gut his old office and gave them his daughter Ivanka’s office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, not far from the boss, Cohen said.

He eventually moved to an office even closer to Trump, whom he called “Owner”,

“It was an incredible experience in many ways,” said Cohen, who calls the Trump Organization a “big family.”

“He told Trump directly about everything that concerned him, what he wanted,” she explained to Cohen, who described his former employer as a controlling boss.

“Everything required Mr. Trump’s approval.”Pure.

At the same time, Trump was careful not to leave any paper trail, Cohen said.

The Trump Organization founder never had an email address and told Cohen that “emails are like written documents.”

Cohen said Trump once told him, “There are a lot of people who have gone down as a direct result of emails that prosecutors can use in a case.”

He testified, at first, that Cohen’s work involved negotiating invoices from suppliers that Trump did not consider fair.

When they performed well, Trump told them. This, he admitted in court, made Cohen feel as if he was “on top of the world”.

But working for Trump sometimes required unethical conduct, Cohen said. When prosecutors asked him if he was capable of lying on Trump’s behalf, Cohen said yes.

Sometimes this was necessary to “solve the task”, he said.

After Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, Cohen’s role expanded to include other reprehensible practices: facilitating strategies. catch and kill (“Catch and kill”, a technique meant to prevent the press from publishing certain stories that might be harmful to a third person).

In this case, it meant buying women’s stories about alleged sexual encounters with Trump to ensure they were never published.

It was a deal designed to increase Trump’s chances of winning the election, Cohen testified.

the issue was “Do everything in your power to protect Mr. Trump”Cohen revealed. But this scheme, and his lies to cover up for Trump, will ultimately put Cohen behind bars.

The former Trump fixer pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2018 to lying to Congress about his involvement in Trump’s foreign real estate interests and violating campaign finance rules related to giving money to Stormy Daniels on behalf of the former president.

He emerged from three years in prison and house arrest as a staunch critic of Trump and one of the key witnesses against him.

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