Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former confidant, returned to the Manhattan court on Tuesday to be questioned by the former Republican president’s lawyers in his increasingly politicized trial over covert payments to former porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Cohen, who worked for Trump from 2006 to 2018 as a personal lawyer and jack-of-all-trades, told prosecutors on Monday that he had acted at the request of his then-boss.
“I did everything I could and even more to protect my boss and I had been doing it for a long time.”, he admitted.
Cohen paid $130,000 out of pocket to Daniels in the final stretch of the 2016 elections to buy her silence over an alleged sexual relationship with Trump that occurred ten years earlier, in order to quell a possible scandal that could have been fatal for her. aspirations of reaching the White House.
Trump returned $420,000, which included taxes and services provided, in 11 checks, most signed in his own handwriting, after Cohen presented invoices for legal expenses.
The last payment was made on December 1, 2017, when he was president, according to documents shown in court.
The Stormy Daniels case was one of several scandals that the real estate mogul tried to quell on the eve of the election he won against former first lady and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The current Republican candidate to return to the White House in the November elections would have then expressed his fear about the effect “catastrophic” that those revelations would provoke and the “hate” from the female electorate.
His former lawyer, who was called “pitbull“For his zeal to protect his boss, he already pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison – he only served 13 months and a year and a half under house arrest – for lying to Congress and for financial and electoral crimes, in addition to lose his law license.
“Instrumentalized”
“This is not a trial of Donald Trump. It’s a case of the Democratic Party against the United States.“said the Republican Party candidate for the November elections, in front of the current tenant of the White House, Joe Biden.
“It is the largest effort to interfere and steal a federal election in American political history.“, he stated upon his arrival at the court, which was also attended by the president of the House of Representatives of Congress, Republican Mike Johnson, in support of his leader.
In line with Trump, Johnson declared that the justice system is being “instrumentalized” against the first former president to sit on the criminal justice bench, who repeats that he is the victim of a witch hunt and electoral interference.
Manhattan prosecutors accuse Trump of 34 counts of accounting falsification. If found guilty by the jury that will seal his fate, he could face a prison sentence.
But even if he is sentenced to prison, the 77-year-old former president will be able to compete for the presidency in the November 5 elections, and if elected, return to the White House on January 20, 2025.
In addition to the New York case, Trump has been accused in Washington and Georgia of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and of taking classified documents when leaving the White House in 2021, although this trial has been postponed indefinitely.
Source: Gestion
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