Cohen’s Testimony Hints At a Strategic Move From the Prosecution in the Hush Money Trial

Read our ongoing coverage of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial here.

On Monday, former Trump fixer Michael Cohen began testifying against his former boss in the New York hush money trial. Although the testimony was not expected to be nearly as explosive as last week’s remarkable Stormy Daniels testimony, there were still some early afternoon fireworks, with Cohen spilling the details of his alleged conversations with Trump about Daniels.

Cohen described a conversation he says he had with Trump in 2011, when Trump was considering an earlier run for the presidency that he never went through with and a version of Daniels’ story of their alleged sexual encounter leaked on a gossip site called the Dirty.

“He told me that he was playing golf with Big Ben Roethlisberger, the football player, and they had met Stormy Daniels and others there, but she liked Mr. Trump and that women prefer Trump even over someone like Big Ben,” Cohen relayed. (The NFL star has also repeatedly been accused of sexual assault, though he has not been convicted of a crime).

When Cohen asked if the sexual encounter had actually taken place, all Trump said was, “She was a beautiful woman.” Cohen said that that also happened to be how Trump responded when Cohen asked him, on a separate occasion, whether an alleged affair with Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal had taken place.

Aside from the absurdity of Trump’s boast, the story seemed to bolster earlier witnesses’ accounts—including that of Daniels and Hope Hicks—since they also mentioned Roethlisberger meeting Trump and Daniels.

More damning from the prosecution’s perspective, though, was Cohen’s account of his conversations with Trump in the days after the Access Hollywood tape was released and while Cohen was working feverishly to keep Daniels’ story from coming out.

Cohen said that around Oct. 10, a few days after the Access Hollywood tape had been released, Trump raged at him for failing to have definitively resolved the issue in 2011. According to Cohen, Trump told him to “just take care of it,” and he fretted what it would mean for him in the polls if Daniels’ story came out.

“This is really a disaster—women will hate me,” Cohen quoted Trump as saying. “Guys may think it’s cool, but this is gonna be a disaster for the campaign.”

Again, the absurdity of Trump’s thinking that his tryst with an adult film performer would be perceived as “cool” among the “guys” aside, this is a damning piece of evidence for the prosecution, which is trying to prove that everything Cohen, Trump, and the National Enquirer did to cover up these stories was done as an illegal campaign contribution in furtherance of Trump’s election bid, rather than for the benefit of his family, as Trump’s lawyers have argued.

According to Cohen, in fact, Trump couldn’t care less about what it meant for his family. Trump instructed Cohen to try to delay any deal to Daniels past the election so that she would never have to be paid. “Just push it out as long as you can, because if I win, it’ll have no relevance, I’ll be president, and if I lose, I don’t really care,” Trump told Cohen, according to the former lawyer’s testimony.

Cohen asked Trump how it was going to go “upstairs,” as in: What was Melania going to think? Trump then allegedly told Cohen not to worry: “How long do you think that I’ll be on the market for? Not long.”

Although this was not on the same level as the full-blown Category 4 testimony Daniels brought to the stand last week, it was at least a series of Category 2–level revelations. You could tell it was going to be a big day just by who showed up: Trump had his largest entourage in court yet, including Eric Trump, Sens. Tommy Tuberville and J.D. Vance, the attorneys general of Iowa and Alabama, and Staten Island Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. (Both Malliotakis and Trump were coming off morning appearances on the Joe Piscopo Show.)

Except for Eric, though, Trump’s special entourage all left after an incredibly dry morning session in which Cohen basically went over the entirety of the previous weeks’ testimony as presented by other witnesses, just confirming his own parts in them. Vance defended Trump’s decision to close his eyes throughout the proceedings, tweeting that the media was using Trump’s boredom or sleep to imply that he’s old, noting, “I’m 39 years old and I’ve been here for 26 minutes and I’m about to fall asleep.”

Vance, of course, missed the late-morning/early-afternoon fireworks, which all took place after he and the rest of the congressional delegation left. (Most of them, including Vance, came back for the afternoon testimony, however.)

The boring early morning recitation of the previous three weeks of testimony seemed strategic on the part of District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team. Cohen simply filled in a story of meetings with National Enquirer honcho David Pecker and Trump, as well as conversations involving Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard and Daniels and McDougal attorney Keith Davidson, which the jury had all heard before. All of it was backed up by taped conversations, phone records, texts, and emails. In this way, Michael Cohen served as the corroborating witness for a story that Pecker and other witnesses had already told, not the other way around. This is the opposite of the reality, of course. But by turning the star witness into the corroborating witness, prosecutors may lessen the damage of the fact that their star, Cohen, is a deeply flawed witness with a series of criminal convictions in his past, including for perjury, and with an enormous ax to grind against Trump.

Bragg’s team also seems to have played its hand well by having Cohen go second-to-last, rather than last. He is going to be absolutely beat up during cross-examination and has struggled in previous trials to maintain consistency on certain points, like whether he was telling the truth to federal prosecutors in 2018, when he confessed to tax crimes. By having him bat ahead of the final witness, prosecutors will be able to try to clean up whatever mess Cohen’s testimony may cause for them or simply leave the jurors with someone cleaner than Cohen. All the big witnesses who were due to testify have gone, though, with Karen McDougal and former Trump Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg having been removed as possibilities last week. It’s still unclear who that cleanup hitter will be—and how big of a mess they’re going to have to clean up.