Donald Trump's attorneys started grilling prosecutors' star witness in his hush money trial Tuesday, portraying former attorney Michael Cohen as a media-obsessed liar who's determined to see the former president behind bars.
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Cohen endured intense questioning by defense attorney Todd Blanche after providing pivotal testimony tying the presumptive Republican presidential nominee directly to the hush money scheme at the heart of the case.
Trump's former fixer will return to the witness stand Thursday for more cross-examination before prosecutors rest their case alleging a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by silencing women who alleged sexual encounters with him. Trump denies that he had sex with the women and denies wrongdoing in the case.
Prosecutors confronted Cohen's history of falsehoods head-on in an attempt to get ahead of an issue Trump lawyers are seizing on to attack the now-disbarred lawyer's credibility. Prosecutors also sought to paint Cohen as a devoted Trump loyalist, whose crimes were committed on the former president's behalf.
Under questioning from prosecutor Susan Hoffinger, Cohen admitted that he lied to Congress during an investigation into potential ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. Cohen pleaded guilty as part of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, admitting that he lied, among other things, about the number of times he spoke with Trump about a real estate project in Moscow.
Hoffinger also asked Cohen about concerns that he may have lied on the witness stand at the former president's civil fraud trial last year. In that trial, Cohen insisted he did not commit tax evasion, and said he had lied to the judge who accepted his guilty plea on the charge in 2018.
Cohen told Hoffinger he did not dispute the facts of his guilty plea, but that he didn't think he should've been charged with a crime "as a first-time offender who always paid his taxes on the due date."
Cohen also told jurors he lied repeatedly for Trump, including after Cohen paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her from going public right before the 2016 election with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump.