Cohen endures cross-examination under the eyes of Trump’s entourage
NEW YORK — The star witness against Donald Trump took the stand Monday for a fourth and final day at the former president’s criminal trial in Manhattan, fending off a fusillade of attacks from defense lawyers and acknowledging that he once stole from Trump’s company.
The witness — Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime personal lawyer and longtime henchman — capped the case for the prosecution, which rested once he left the stand.
Over his week of testimony, Cohen was the only person to offer firsthand evidence directly linking Trump to the falsified records that underpin the charges against him. Trump, he said, approved a plan to fake the records to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn actor.
During Monday’s cross-examination, Trump’s lead lawyer assailed Cohen’s credibility, painting him as a pathological liar obsessed with taking down the former president. But Cohen maintained his composure, while some jurors seemed to lose focus as they shifted in their chairs and their eyes wandered. When prosecutors received a second opportunity to question Cohen, they sought to blunt much of the impact of the cross-examination.
“Are you charged with any crimes in this case?” a prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, asked him. “No, ma’am,” Cohen replied, explaining that he was there merely as a “subpoenaed witness.”
However, Cohen, the 20th and final person to take the stand for the prosecution, was not just any 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 spectacle, as an eclectic entourage of the former president’s supporters — some with legal troubles of their own — packed the courtroom.
The group of more than a dozen on Monday included Republican lawmakers and Alan Dershowitz, the high-profile lawyer. There was also a legal adviser to Trump who is under indictment in Arizona, Boris Epshteyn. There was Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner whom Trump pardoned for federal felony charges. And then there was Chuck Zito, a former leader of the New York chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, who spent years in prison on drug charges.
They swept into the courtroom to back up Trump as his face-off with his former fixer and current nemesis continued.
Now the prosecution will turn over the trial to the defense. It is unclear whether Trump’s lawyers will mount a case of their own, but they have signaled they may call one of Cohen’s own former legal advisers to the stand to reinforce their attacks on his credibility.
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