The Prosecution Actually Wants the Jury to Think Michael Cohen Is a Pathetic Scumbag

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

As Michael Cohen wrapped up more than 10 hours of direct examination on Tuesday, the prosecution tried to frame the former Trump fixer’s biggest weakness—his credibility issues—as a strength.

Prosecutors confronted him again and again with his past lies—which he now says he told “in order to protect” his former boss, Donald Trump. They preemptively pointed to testimony he had given in Trump’s recent civil trial, which seemed to renounce his previous guilty pleas for tax fraud and false bank statements. Cohen’s testimony resumes Tuesday afternoon with the start of cross-examination, when Trump’s defense team is sure to hammer him for that apparent reversal.

“I have constantly maintained that I do not dispute the fact that there was an error in the taxable amount and the tax that was due,” Cohen says about his previous testimony. He just believed, as “a first-time offender [who] consistently paid taxes on its due date and never having been audited,” that he should have not been prosecuted and imprisoned for breaking those laws. Trump’s defense team has alleged that he committed perjury when he previously, on the stand, called his guilty plea a “lie,” and this is his explanation for what he meant when he said that.

Prosecutors portrayed Cohen as a man who had committed many sins, mostly for Donald Trump, but had served and continues to serve his penalty. He has spent more than a year in a federal penitentiary—including significant time spent in solitary confinement that he alleges was part of Trump’s retaliation against him—and remains on supervised release.

Knowing that Cohen is their most problematic witness, prosecutors spent not just Monday and Tuesday, but most of the trial, trying to inoculate him against the defense’s attacks by leaning into his scumbag reputation.

Indeed, by the time Cohen reached the stand, prosecutors had already heard the former lawyer mocked by nearly every witness who knew him. During direct examination, he actually cut a pitiful rather than a conniving or bullying figure. He seemed to barely look at Trump, who he has fashioned as an archnemesis and the source of all his personal woes, only glancing him over fully when explicitly directed by prosecutors to identify the defendant in the courtroom. He didn’t even seem to acknowledge his rival and former boss when he entered and exited the witness stand. (Trump, similarly, seemed to ignore him, chatting with his new lawyer, Todd Blanche, every time Cohen passed by.)

Cohen wore a black suit, white shirt, pink tie, and reading glasses that tilted on and off the top of his head in the manner of an accountant more than a Roy Cohn. He testified about his longtime admiration of Trump, bordering on reverence, and how he felt “like I was on top of the world” after receiving the slightest amount of praise from the man he called “boss.” He sheepishly shook his head, removed his glasses, eyed the jury, and took a sip of water when presented with a copy of the transcript of his surreptitious recording of his boss speaking about their plot to silence Karen McDougal—another woman who alleges she had an affair with Trump—as if to express shame or remorse. (Cohen claims he made this recording for Trump’s own benefit.)

Remorse is Cohen’s brand these days—he even hosts a podcast titled Mea Culpa—and this seemed to resonate with the jury, with Cohen and several jurors making consistent eye contact.

Cohen described how he had previously apologized in congressional testimony for his work, allegedly on Trump’s behalf, to illegally influence the 2016 election. “I apologized to Congress, I apologized to the country, I apologized to my family,” he said, “for lying to them, for acting in a way to suppress information that the citizenry had the right to know in order to make a determination on the individual who was seeking the highest office in the land.”

This sad-sack version of Cohen—who also is telling a story directly in line with what prosecutors are alleging—did not appear to be an act to persuade jurors. Before the jury entered for Monday’s afternoon session, he sat on the stand with a glum look on his face before suddenly becoming alert and bobbing his head for no apparent reason. After the jury entered and prosecutor Susan Hoffinger greeted him, he stuttered out a “good afternoon.”

The only time Cohen appeared animated throughout Monday and Tuesday’s hours of direct questioning was when prosecutors brought up the time that President-elect Trump shortchanged him on his bonus in the winter of 2016, after Cohen had paid off Daniels with $130,000 out of pocket that had not yet been reimbursed, in order to help his boss win the election. “Angry, beyond angry,” Cohen said of his feelings at the time, with the rage apparently returning immediately. “I was truly insulted, personally hurt by it, didn’t understand it, made no sense, after all that I had gone through in terms of the campaign … laying out $130,000 on his behalf to protect him.”

He didn’t come off as a man with an ax to grind, but a small, petty individual who had been taken advantage of by a much more powerful man he all but worshipped.

Contrast this version of Cohen with the one presented for the first few weeks of the trial. The opening witness, David Pecker, testified about Cohen feeding the National Enquirer over-the-top stories about Trump’s Republican primary opponents and trying to strong-arm Pecker into paying off Daniels by angrily screaming at him.

The next witness, Cohen’s former personal banker, Gary Farro, testified about how annoying he found his former client, in particular during the incident when he feverishly deceived Farro into helping him set up a shell company to pay off Daniels. “Every time Michael Cohen spoke to me, he gave a sense of urgency,” Farro noted sarcastically, implying that Cohen’s only mode is frantic.

The jury then listened raptly as former Daniels attorney Keith Davidson described how annoying he found the man from their very first interaction in 2011. It was “not pleasant or constructive and I didn’t particularly like dealing with him,” Davidson testified. “And that’s why I was trying like hell to avoid talking to him.”

Davidson described that encounter in an exchange with prosecutor Joshua Steinglass:

“Before I could barely get my name out, I was just met with a hostile barrage of insults and insinuations and allegations, and that went on for quite a while,” Davidson said, describing his subsequent call with Cohen.

The jury also read mocking text conversations between Davidson and National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard, during which Howard called Cohen “hopeless.”

“I used to say that he liked to call himself ‘the fixer,’ or ‘Mr. Fixit,’ and it was only because he first broke it that he was able to fix it,” Hope Hicks snarked.

Former Trump Organization corporate controller Jeffrey S. McConney expressed incredulity that Cohen ever did any work of any legal kind. “He said he was a lawyer,” he testified dubiously when asked what Cohen’s role in the company had been.

Davidson further dryly testified about the Daniels hush money deal nearly falling apart over Daniels’ side’s reluctance to deal with Cohen directly: “The moral of the story is that nobody wanted to talk to Michael Cohen.”

Davidson remembered Cohen calling him in despair when he learned that his bonus was going to be cut (Cohen says he does not recall the details of this conversation). “He was depressed and despondent,” Davidson recalled. “I thought he was going to kill himself.”

By the time Trump’s defense team stepped up to cross-examine Cohen on Tuesday afternoon, prosecutors had effectively portrayed him as a patsy who had committed many misdeeds, but all for the greater purposes of the actual mastermind, Donald Trump.

“I regret doing things for him that I should not have, lying, bullying people in order to effectuate a goal,” Cohen said of his time working for Trump. “To keep the loyalty and to do the things that he had asked me to do, I violated my moral compass and I suffered the penalty, as [did] my family.”

The critical question now will be whether jurors will still believe him after Trump’s team is through with him.