Key moments
Donald Trump’s lawyers have resumed cross-examining his longtime lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen at the former president’s hush money trial in New York.
During a fiery cross-examination on Tuesday, Cohen admitted that he had said Trump deserved to be locked in a prison “like an animal”.
Prosecutors allege that Trump and Cohen illegally disguised $130,000 in payments to the porn actress Stormy Daniels in return for her silence about an alleged affair with Trump on the eve of the 2016 election. Trump faces 34 charges for falsifying business records, all of which he denies.
Judge calls it a day
Judge Merchan has called a halt to the day’s proceedings and Michael Cohen’s cross-examination will continue into next week.
The judge has excused Trump from court on Friday so he can attend his youngest son Barron’s high school graduation in Florida.
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Trump never signed Daniels agreement
Blanche is returning to questions around the $130,000 payment Cohen made to Stormy Daniels.
He asks if the agreement with the porn star was legally binding.
“In your mind, then and now, this is a perfectly legal contract, correct?” Blanche asks. “Yes sir,” Cohen replies.
Cohen then confirms that Trump never signed the non-disclosure agreement.
Trump savours the moment
The court has just returned from an afternoon recess and Trump appears to be enjoying watching his former lawyer being questioned on the witness stand.
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As the jury heard testimony about how Cohen secretly recorded dozens of phone calls with journalists and media executives, the former president appeared to smirk.
He is alert and paying close attention to this afternoon’s testimony.
Blanche questions Cohen’s recall
Blanche is grilling Cohen over how, given his prolific phone use, he could recall specific details from conversations seven or eight years ago.
Cohen testifies that he was taking about 14,000 calls per year in 2016 and 2017 — 40 or so a day.
He says that he remembers calls with Trump and Keith Schiller, his bodyguard, because he has been talking and thinking about them for years.
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The conversation then turns to a secret recording Cohen made of a conversation with Trump in 2016, which has already been entered into evidence.
Cohen says that the tape was cut off when he received an incoming call from his bank.
Cohen taped nearly 100 conversations with journalists
Cohen is discussing his habit of secretly recording conversations with journalists around the time of the 2016 election.
He says he taped about 95 conversations with media figures including Jeff Zucker, the former president of CNN Worldwide, Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and David Pecker, the former National Enquirer publisher.
Cohen testifies that he had a particularly close relationship with Haberman and the jury is being shown reams of text messages between them.
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He says he stopped recording conversations after the 2016 election. New York is a one-party consent state, which means that one party can legally record a conversation without the other party’s knowledge.
‘He would blow up’ if reports weren’t favourable
After a fiery display just before the lunch break, Blanche has returned to methodically trying to pull apart Cohen’s testimony.
He’s now taking the timeline all the way back to 2011 when Cohen created a website called shouldtrumprun.com to explore Trump’s viability as a presidential candidate.
Cohen is asked about his work building relationships with journalists and trying to generate positive stories about Trump.
As Cohen testifies that Trump would “blow up at him” if he failed to get glowing coverage, Trump shakes his head at the defence table.
Cohen back on the stand
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With the lunch break over, Cohen is being asked whether anyone in the Manhattan district attorney’s office leaked news of the Trump hush money indictment before it was publicly released last April.
Cohen states that he learned about the charges against Trump through media reports last year. He went on CNN the same day to discuss the case.
Todd Blanche, for the defence, spent some time asking Cohen about his links to the district attorney’s office this morning.
While tangential to the case at hand, Blanche is trying to show that Cohen was unusually cosy with some members of the Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.
Trump supporters denounce trial outside court
Republican House members who showed up to support Trump in court gathered outside.
“We are here of our own volition, because there are things that we can say that President Trump is unjustly not allowed to say,” Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman, said during a press conference opposite the courthouse.
He claimed that Trump was on trial for a series of made-up allegations. “It’s like the Mr Potato Head doll of crimes, where they had to stick together a bunch of things that did not belong together.”
Bob Good, a House member from Virginia, accused Democrats of trying to “rig” the election.
Anna Paulina Luna, from Florida, and Lauren Boebert, from Colorado, took turns to criticise the trial.
More than a dozen House members attended the trial today.
Defence presses over critical call
Todd Blanche, for the defence, became animated as he asked whether Cohen really had enough time to brief Trump on the Stormy Daniels situation and discuss security arrangements with his bodyguard during the fateful October 24 call.
Cohen maintains that he called Keith Schiller, who then passed the phone to Trump.
“That was a lie!” Blanche says. “You did not talk to President Trump that night. You talked to Keith Schiller about what we just went through.”
This is the liveliest that Blanche has been throughout the cross-examination.
And just as he is getting into his stride, Judge Juan Merchan adjourns for lunch.
Defence casts doubt on hush money phone call
Jurors were shown text messages between Cohen and Schiller as the defence tries to challenge his account of the October 24 phone call.
Trump’s team is trying to suggest that Cohen was actually calling Schiller about harassing phone calls he had been receiving — rather than to speak to Trump — and wanted the campaign to deal with them
Any doubt cast on Cohen’s account of the conversations will be a winner for the defence, as Cohen is the only witness with direct knowledge of these conversations.
Testimony finally turns to $130,000 payment
Cohen was asked about the $130,000 he paid Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election.
It took five hours of cross-examination to get to this point.
Todd Blanche asked Cohen about the logistics of how he placed a phone call to Keith Schiller, Trump’s former head of security, on October 24, 2016.
Cohen has previously testified that he confirmed to Trump during the call that the Stormy Daniels matter had been resolved.
Cohen maintains this was done with Trump’s authorisation.
‘They’re walking all over you’
Cohen is being shown text messages between him and his daughter where they discuss his chances of getting a position in the White House.
“Your daughter said that President Trump and his new people were walking all over you,” Blanche says.
Cohen confirms that’s what the texts said and that he agreed with his daughter at the time.
He continues to insist that he only wanted to be considered for White House chief of staff, which Trump eventually gave to Reince Priebus, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
The chief of staff is the most senior political appointee in the White House and is sometimes viewed as the second-most powerful job in Washington DC.
Cohen was eventually appointed personal attorney to the president.
Cohen angered by White House rejection, defence implies
Cohen is being asked about whether he wanted to work in Trump’s White House, as the defence tries to establish that he had an axe to grind after being rejected for a job in the new administration in 2017.
Cohen tells Todd Blanche that he wanted to be considered as Trump’s chief of staff “for ego purposes” but didn’t really want the job — echoing his statement during direct testimony.
Blanche continues, asking Cohen whether he had told others about his desire to work in the White House. He says: “Did you tell Keith Davidson [Stormy Daniels’ lawyer] you wanted to be, and might be, attorney-general?”
“Yes,” Cohen replies.
Courtroom spectacle is hurting the Democrats
Allowing Donald Trump to get caught in a web of prosecutions was supposed to be a surefire way of preventing him from ever becoming president again (Gerard Baker writes).
If convicted, swing voters who were already unsure would probably not plump for a verified criminal. And if not, the trial would have left him sufficiently exposed and bad-mouthed to still leave those voters unconvinced.
But with less than six months to go, the White House is looking more likely than the Big House.
• Read in full: Trump trial looking shakier by the day
Gaetz echoes Trump’s call to ‘stand back and stand by’
Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman, posted a picture of himself in court today on Twitter/X with the caption: “Standing back and standing by, Mr President.”
It appeared to echo an infamous comment made by Trump during a 2020 presidential debate with Biden, when he called on members of the hard-right militia, Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by”.
Biden had asked Trump if he was willing to “condemn white supremacists and militia groups”.
The Proud Boys were formed by Gavin McInnes, co-founder of Vice Media, during the 2016 presidential elections. The group describes itself as “Western chauvinists”.
Gaetz is part of a large contingent of members of Congress attending the trial today.
Cohen ‘caught in a lie’ over hoping for a pardon
Before the morning break, Cohen admitted he had been angling for a presidential pardon from Trump for the fraud and perjury offences for which he was jailed in 2018.
Cohen conceded his lawyer had explored the possibility of a pardon, but said he did not ask for one himself. He had previously told Congress he was not seeking one.
Todd Blanche, Trump’s lawyer, cited it as another example of Cohen getting caught in a lie.
Cohen served 13 months of a three-year prison term for a variety of offences, including falsifying business records in relation to the $130,000 payment to Daniels.
Trump happy with lawyer’s performance
The court is on a short break and Trump gave a thumbs-up when asked by reporters outside court how his lawyer Todd Blanche was doing.
Unlike Tuesday, when Trump lounged back in his chair with his eyes closed for much of Cohen’s testimony, he has been paying closer attention today.
Playing the blame game
Blanche, for the defence, is hammering away at Cohen’s credibility by asking him about his changing statements and failure to take responsibility for his crimes.
Cohen admits that he blames his accountant, his bank, federal prosecutors and Trump for his downfall from high-powered lawyer to convicted felon.
“You blame a lot of people over the years for the conduct that you were convicted of,” Blanche says.
“I blame people, yes,” Cohen replies.
Cohen agrees that the outcome of the trial will have a direct impact on him personally.
Cohen is keeping his cool
Cohen has for the most part been a calm and measured presence on the witness stand today.
After Tuesday’s lengthy back-and-forth with Todd Blanche about what constitutes a lie, he has been more willing to concede ground on his past crimes and dishonesty.
He is being asked about one of the crimes he went to prison for, failure to pay taxes on profits from his taxi medallion business.
Taxi medallions are effectively licences that allow taxi drivers in New York City to operate. They were for a long time scarce and valuable, but have since plummeted in value due to the emergence of ride-hailing companies such as Lyft and Uber.
He lied to Congress about Russian visit
Blanche pivots from asking Cohen about his podcasts and Trump insults to his criminal history.
He gets Cohen to concede that he lied under oath to two congressional investigations into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He told them that he had never travelled to Russia to hold meetings about a planned Trump Tower Moscow.
Trump secretly pursued plans to build a 100-storey skyscraper in the Russian capital while running for president in 2016, but the project was scrapped. Cohen testifies that his statement to Congress was crafted “in order to stay on message, a message that we all knew Mr Trump wanted”.
‘David and Goliath’
Cohen is asked about a CNN interview after Trump was indicted last year, during which he compared himself and Trump to David and Goliath.
The court then heard a clip from Cohen’s podcast Mea Culpa, where he delights in the prospect of Trump being booked into jail. Cohen also confirms that prosecutors repeatedly asked him to refrain from giving interviews or talking about the case publicly.
Unlike the direct testimony, where prosecutors set out a chronological narrative, the cross-examination’s timeline is likely to jump around.
Defence picks over Cohen’s ties to detective
Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche is asking Cohen about his ties to Jeremy Rosenberg, a former detective with the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Blanche implies that Cohen’s phones may have been tampered with, returning to a theme from Tuesday’s testimony.
Blanche tried to enter texts messages between Cohen and Rosenberg into evidence, but the judge refuses. Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, suspended Rosenberg in June last year over his contacts with Cohen.
Cohen resumes testimony
Blanche, for the defence, begins questioning Cohen about the FBI seizure of his mobile phones in April 2018.
Cohen confirms that he voluntarily handed them over to the Manhattan district attorney, who is prosecuting.
We heard earlier in the trial that Cohen’s phones contained 35,000 contacts — an unusually high figure, according to the district attorney’s analyst. Call records, text messages and emails taken from Cohen’s phones have formed a key part of the prosecution case.
Meanwhile, a court officer has instructed the members of Congress in the courtroom to refrain from using their phones.
Lawyers in extended sidebar
The trial is back in session but there’s a slight delay before Cohen’s cross-examination resumes as lawyers for the defence and prosecution are having an extended sidebar discussion away from the jury.
Eleven members of Congress have turned out to support Trump in court today, including nine members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.
Where Cohen fits into the charges
Trump silent on whether he will testify
Trump refused to say whether he would testify at the trial in comments outside of the courtroom.
Instead he repeated complaints that the trial amounted to election interference, and that security outside the courthouse was preventing his supporters from turning out.
Lauren Boebert, a congresswoman from Colorado, is another ally to join him in court today.
Matt Gaetz joins Trump’s entourage
In the past week, a procession of Republicans have shown up at the trial to support the former president.
The House Speaker, Mike Johnson, rumoured vice-presidential contenders including JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, and Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor, have all made the pilgrimage to the courthouse in lower Manhattan, along with members of Congress and state politicians from across the country.
Trump is back in court today accompanied by Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz, congressmen from Florida and strong Trump loyalists.
• Want to be Trump’s VP? Get to court and be his cheerleader-in-chief
Trump: I don’t care if RFK Jr joins the debate
Donald Trump has weighed in on accusations that he and President Biden “colluded” to exclude Robert F Kennedy Jr from the two presidential debates they agreed to hold on Wednesday.
Trump and Biden agreed to face off in June and September, while to qualify for the debates Kennedy will have to reach 15 per cent in four national polls and gain ballot access in enough states to have a chance at winning the presidency.
On Truth Social, Trump wrote: “I don’t care if [RFK Jr] joins the Debate, but right now his polling numbers are very low, he is not properly qualified in the States, and he seems to be on a downward path. Junior needs more than his name to get on the ‘stage!’”
Kennedy was polling at just over 10 per cent in an average of national polls as of Wednesday, according to the FiveThirtyEight political forecasting site. His campaign says he has achieved ballot access in six states, including Utah, Michigan, California, Delaware, Oklahoma and Texas.
• RFK Jr: A worm ate part of my brain
Stormy Daniels ‘planning to flee US’
Daniels, who testified against Trump last week, is planning to leave the United States if he is acquitted in the hush money trial, according to her husband, Barrett Blade.
Blade, who is also a porn star, told CNN that Daniels was expecting to face an increased threat to her safety regardless of the verdict. “I think if it’s not guilty, we got to decide what to do,” Blade said. “Good chance we’ll probably vacate this country.”
Daniels’ claims that she had an affair with Trump — and was paid $130,000 to remain silent about it — are central to the prosecution’s case against the former president. Her lawyer, Clark Brewster, said this week that she wore a bulletproof vest to court when she testified.
Lawyer fails to dent Cohen’s credibility
Over several hours of cross-examination on Tuesday, Cohen lived up to his reputation as a combative, trash-talking New Yorker.
Confronted with statements that he had called the defence counsel Todd Blanche a “crying little s**t”, and Trump a “dictator douchebag”, he replied: “Sounds like something I would say.”
Blanche tried to pin Cohen down on his history of lying under oath, selling merchandise capitalising on Trump’s legal woes and seeking a reduced prison term from prosecutors in return for his testimony.
Many legal commentators felt that Blanche failed to land any critical blows to Cohen’s credibility. He had a full 24 hours during yesterday’s rest day to hone his approach.
Trump-Biden debate dates decided
On Wednesday, Donald Trump and Joe Biden agreed to hold two televised debates in advance of the 2024 presidential election.
The first debate will be held without an audience in Atlanta on June 27, before the party nominations are finalised. It will be broadcast on CNN. The second, on September 10, will be shown on ABC News.
“Make my day, pal,” Biden said in a video statement. Trump responded by saying Biden was the “worst President in the history of the United States, by far”.
Pardon Trump, Romney tells Biden
Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate and outspoken Trump critic, has said that President Biden should have pardoned Trump and pressured prosecutors in the hush money trial to drop the charges.
Romney told MSNBC that Biden had made an “enormous error” in allowing the prosecutions to go forward, calling them a “win-win” for Trump.
“Had I been President Biden, when the Justice Department brought on indictments I would have immediately pardoned him,” Romney told the cable network. “Why? Well, because it makes me, President Biden, the big guy and the person I pardoned a little guy.”
Barack Obama swept to a comfortable victory over Romney to claim his second presidential term in 2012.
Will Trump testify?
With the prosecution evidence likely to wrap up on Thursday and no court on Friday, defence lawyers have until Monday to decide who, if anyone, they will call to the witness stand.
Trump has no obligation to give evidence in his own defence, and has offered shifting statements on his intentions.
In pre-trial comments last month, Trump said he would “absolutely” testify. But he has since softened that stance, telling Newsmax that he would testify “if necessary” and Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin that he “would like to”.
Daniels tried to goad him into giving evidence after her own testimony, in a post on Twitter/X.
