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Donald Trump’s lawyers sought to paint the star witness in the Manhattan “hush money” trial as an embittered former employee hell-bent on “revenge”, while a dozen of the former president’s Republican acolytes packed the courtroom in the latest show of political support.
In his third day on the stand, Michael Cohen, a former fixer and personal attorney to Trump who has since turned on his erstwhile boss, was confronted with quotes from his books and podcasts in which he had celebrated the criminal indictment brought against the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
During Thursday’s session, which was attended by prominent hardline House Republicans including Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, the court heard a recording of Cohen saying the charges against Trump filled him with “delight” and a clip in which he said: “I truly fucking hope that this man goes to prison” and that “revenge is a dish best served cold”.
The reliability of Cohen is one of the key assessments jurors will have to make as they decide whether to find Trump guilty of falsifying business records of payments to buy the silence of porn actor Stormy Daniels, who had threatened to go public with allegations of an extramarital encounter in the days leading up to the 2016 vote.
Prosecutors have alleged that Trump engaged in election interference by getting Cohen to pay $130,000 of his own money to Daniels, and disguising a series of reimbursements as legal fees, so as to hide them from regulators and authorities in any future investigation.
Earlier in the week, Cohen testified that he had paid Daniels so that her tale “would not affect Mr Trump’s chances of becoming President of the United States”. He went on to express regret for lying and bullying people on behalf of his former mentor, with whom he fell out in 2018.
Under cross-examination by Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche, Cohen was asked to confirm that he had repeatedly lied under oath in testimony to Congress, and that he had called federal prosecutors and a senior judge “fucking animals”, after pleading guilty to a suite of charges including tax evasion, campaign finance violations and lying to banks.
Trump, 77, appeared to be dozing throughout the interrogation, his eyes tightly shut. The rows behind him were packed with members of the House Freedom Caucus, including Anna Paulina Luna, Andy Biggs and Bob Good.
Several other Trump allies and potential running mates, including senators JD Vance and Tommy Tuberville and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have travelled to New York to support the defendant in recent days.
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