Trump Trial, Day 18: Cohen Crushed on Cross
Thursday, May 16, was a very good day for Donald Trump. If he’s acquitted (unlikely) or skates with a hung jury (quite possible but not probable), a 14-year-old prankster will enter American history.
It’ll be my fault, of course. On Day 18, I slightly altered my daily ritual, breaking critically important superstitions. For the first 17 days of the trial, I wore the exact same blue blazer (half of a suit, actually). It has nice purple patches that cover the inside breast pockets. Each day, I would put my precious green or white paper pass—my ticket to the show—inside the right pocket of this jacket.
When court is in session, my alarm rings at 5:00 a.m. At about 5:40 a.m., rushing to catch the train from Montclair, New Jersey, to Penn Station, I reached into the closet and pulled out a different dark blue jacket. As if breaking one superstition was not enough, I proceeded to pack a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of my normal cheese sandwich, and I put cherry tomatoes in a baggie instead of blueberries and raspberries, figuring from experience that the latter were messier.
Talk about a mess. On Monday, prosecutors will have to clean up the mess they—and I—made. I think they can do it on re-direct of Michael Cohen, but we’ll see.
Thursday started propitiously. Recalling that all of the sycophantic wannabe VPs on Tuesday had worn the same white shirt, red tie, and blue suit as their Dear Leader, I made a point of checking out who Trump took with him to court today and how they were dressed. Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz were in the courtroom, on their best behavior, if that concept has any meaning for them. They were not wearing red ties, signaling that they were not running for vice president.
Unfortunately, reporters have no way to interact with guests of the Orange Menace. They enter and exit down the center aisle with their monarch while the rest of us must cool our heels in” lockdown” inside the courtroom. During lunch and breaks, Trump and his entourage retreat to private but still dingy rooms, where 1970s-era fluorescent lights illuminate Gaetz’s Eddie Munster widow’s peak.
I had no interest in talking to Gaetz or Boebert, but I wanted to have a word with Jeffrey Clark, the Trump Justice Department official who sat inconspicuously as a spectator in the last row on the right. But my terrific afternoon seat in the second row, just behind the courtroom artists, hindered this quest. As we began exiting after court, I yelled, “Mr. Clark!” He looked at me for a second with his sad half-smile, then fled.
Beyond sitting with a pleasant representative of Steve Bannon’s website one day, the closest I’ve come to reaching across the divide—like British and German troops exchanging small gifts in no-man’s land between trenches at Christmas in Belgium in 1914—was when I ran into Laura Ingraham in the line for the 15th-floor metal detector.
I didn’t know if Laura was headed for the overflow room or to the courtroom to “big foot” (bump) the Fox reporter assigned to cover the trial, as most cable show anchors have done, usually for half a day, so they can tell their viewers they were here.
Laura and I met in the early 1990s when we debated on stage, and later, we appeared several times together as “friends” on MSNBC. In 1996, MSNBC’s first year on the air (also the first year of Fox News), the cable network’s founder, Andy Lack, created a short-lived discussion format for a dozen young opinionated journalists inspired by the hit NBC show Friends. I was no Ross or Chandler, and Laura was no Rachel or Phoebe, but it was fun for a while.
Laura and I are most definitely not real friends, and we haven’t spoken in at least 15 years. But we now amiably recalled those days and when I would later go on her radio show. We agreed that on the radio, at least, it was possible to have a civil 20-minute argument with someone from the other side instead of six minutes reinforcing the views of like-minded guests. We talked about both being cancer survivors and my respect for her being the single mother of three adopted children. But the 1914 Christmas Truce couldn’t last forever. As we parted, I reminded myself that last week Laura called Stormy Daniels a “shrew” on her show. MAGA projection takes many forms.
I took my seat in the courtroom at about 8:45. Right around that time, Gaetz, proud to be a Proud Boy congressman, posted on social media: “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.”
Forty-five minutes later, Todd Blanche, Trump’s lead attorney, resumed his cross-examination of Cohen. At first, it seemed to be the same meandering and ineffective mishmash we had seen the previous afternoon. Blanche tried to smear Detective Jeremy Rosenberg, who obtained Cohen’s phones for the D.A.’s Office, accusing him of tipping off Cohen last year that Trump would be indicted.
I remembered that a few months ago, defense lawyers had subpoenaed the wrong Jeremy Rosenberg; they served a superrich guy with the same name living in an $8 million home in Brooklyn, just a tad more than Detective Rosenberg could afford. Trump’s crack legal team finally found the right Jeremy Rosenberg but decided not to call him as a hostile witness. Now we understand why. Rosenberg may have been too friendly with one of his office’s witnesses, which is not a good look. But despite loads of innuendo, there was no evidence that Rosenberg tipped off Cohen on anything confidential or that either tampered with Cohen’s phone, which is what the defense desperately wants the jury to believe.
Blanche was a little more effective when he introduced an exhibit that brought Cohen’s loud, obnoxious voice into the courtroom—a voice (on his podcast) much at odds with the quiet one we’re hearing from the witness stand.
Blanche is trying to build a case that Cohen simply has a vendetta against Trump. To do so, he once again read vicious Cohen quotes about his client, who must sit quietly and listen, doze, or read his packet of clips by bootlicking columnists.
We hear Cohen on his podcast say, “Picturing Donald Trump having his mug shot taken fills me with delight.” On TikTok, he says he had “mental excitement” about Trump’s impending trial. He admitted that he wanted Trump to go through things he went through (his home raided, jail); he called him “Dumbass Donald;” and said on a podcast from Otisville prison, “Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.” This reminded me of Trump’s tit-for-tat with Stormy Daniels. It was hard to see any of it moving the jury beyond amusement and/or disgust.
Blanche scored better by focusing on how often Cohen lied under oath. After cataloging that Cohen had testified seven times under oath before Congress, which led to two guilty pleas, he walked him through a dizzying series of lies he had told in federal court. It was haphazard and lacked the rhythm of a good cross, but proved effective nonetheless.
Blanche leaned in: “And each time you met with the Federal agents, you were told that if you made a false statement, that that was a felony, that was a Federal crime. Correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
Cohen had testified on direct that he lied to Congress in small ways to protect his boss on the Trump Tower Moscow Project, so the added scrutiny today didn’t hurt much. Nor did it seem to hurt when he admitted to lying for Trump as part of a “Joint Defense Agreement” crafted by Trump’s lawyers. Any lies he may have told on seeking (though not receiving) leniency got lost in the often-confusing back-and-forth.
But the lies were now piling up. Blanche drilled in on the Home Equity Line of Credit [HELOC], which Cohen testified he had tapped to pay for the hush money without his wife noticing. In eliciting testimony about how Cohen’s partner in his New York taxi medallion business had flipped on him, Blanche forced Cohen to walk through the specifics of his guilty plea on federal tax evasion and on making a false statement to a financial institution when applying for a HELOC. It was sketchy testimony about a famously sketchy New York industry, now—with Uber and Lyft—in steep decline. Jurors learned that lying about hush money wasn’t the first time he lied on a HELOC application.
Cohen repeated his story on his criminal case: He was told he had 48-hours to decide to plead guilty or federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York [SDNY] would “file an 80-page indictment that included my wife, [so] I elected to protect my family.” He said he didn’t dispute the underlying facts but thought that, like other taxpayers in arrears, this should have been a civil matter where he was sent a letter from the IRS, not criminally charged.
This went over OK, but when Blanche pressed him on his response to the late federal Judge William H. Pauley, who sentenced Cohen in both the perjury and tax fraud cases, he wounded the witness.
Blanche scored heavily by focusing on Cohen’s past claims that the guilty plea had been “induced.”
“I asked whether you said, ‘No,’ under oath to Judge Pauley, that nobody had threatened or induced you to plead guilty?” Blanche asked.
“Correct,” Cohen said.
“That was a lie?” Blanche pressed.
“That was not true; correct,” Cohen said.
Either of Trump’s other more experienced defense counsels, Emil Bove or Susan Necheles, would have borne down hard now on lying to the judge. But Blanche was too inexperienced, and he lost momentum with wordy and vague questions before getting to the right ones:
“You say you want the truth to come out that the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were corrupt and knew it, right?”
“Correct,” Cohen replied, who had said on TikTok in April that his case was “the most corrupt prosecution in at least 100 years.”
After establishing that Judge Pauley was deceased, Blanche asked:
“Do you believe that Judge Pauley was in on it?”
“I do,” Cohen said.
At that exact point, the court reporter’s shift was coincidentally over, and during the transition, I somehow missed the “I do.” But this was a devastating admission—that Cohen believed, as he has said in the past, that the SDNY and the judge were “in on it”—i.e., corruptly conspiring against him.
Again, if Trump had tapped Bove or Necheles for the big cross, either would have gone to town and pounded away on this “in on it” point. Blanche settled for “You called the Southern District of New York prosecutors and Judge Pauley fucking animals.” This sounded tough, and it followed Trump’s instruction never to leave an insult untouched. But it missed Cohen’s true vulnerability—not insults but promoting a far-fetched conspiracy. We will hear more about this on cross, re-direct, and re-cross.
Blanche finally got on track: “You testified under oath at a different trial that you did not commit the crimes that you had pled guilty to before Judge Pauley…And you believe you did lie more than once before Judge Pauley, correct?” Cohen confirmed, “Correct.”
Now Blanche was getting somewhere, confirming that Cohen lied “because the stakes affected you personally.” Having established earlier that everything between Cohen and Trump had become very personal, Blanche was now skillfully implanting in the minds of jurors that if he lied when it got personal with the SDNY and Judge Pauley, he could do so on key events in this case, too.
But once again, Blanche got sidetracked, this time by developing an elaborate and confusing point that rejected Cohen’s view of the difference between “accepting responsibility” and “lying.” Did the jury really care about these semantics? I didn’t think so.
And it gave Cohen, reeling under Blanche’s blows, a chance to fight back. He again explained that he felt coerced because federal prosecutors gave him only 48 hours to plead guilty or his wife would be included in his taxi medallion tax fraud indictment. Blanche pressed the argument that Cohen had also lied when he said he took responsibility for the crimes. Cohen retorted: “No, sir … I take responsibility, but I did not believe that it was … a crime I should have been charged with.”
Blanche scuffed Cohen a little on whether he may have destroyed emails related to his wife and the medallion HELOCs. It reminded jurors that destroying incriminating emails would be right in Cohen’s wheelhouse and that Cohen had admitted days earlier that he falsified his HELOC application as part of the hush-money coverup.
For several minutes, Blanche tried to make Cohen look like a liar on whether he wanted to be pardoned by Trump, who was dangling one. Cohen had discussed it with Robert Costello, the self-described 2018 “backchannel” to Trump who on Friday—in an attempt to bolster Trump without testifying for the defense— appeared before a friendly House subcommittee to accuse Cohen of being a liar. On the stand, Cohen drew a labored distinction between what he asked his attorney to seek and what he sought himself. And he tried to quibble over words and tenses to claim he didn’t actually lie about it under oath. This all sounded implausible but also peripheral to this case—just more proof of how awkward it was for Cohen to leave the Trump fold.
I didn’t think Blanche scored much on the refusal of the feds to offer Cohen a cooperation agreement; the jury might just go: “Duh, the Department of Justice was controlled by Trump.” The same reasoning in the jury room might apply to Blanche’s repetitive claim that Cohen was again lying when he said he never wanted to be White House Chief of Staff. I thought Blanche failed to show that Cohen was lying to his daughter about his job prospects. And he missed the human element: Many people who fail to get a big promotion or job deny afterward that they ever wanted it. No biggie.
But by this point, Cohen looked dazed. Each time Blanche said, “Well, let me see if I can refresh your recollection,” I knew there was trouble ahead for Cohen. Over the course of three hours, he had admitted to lying under oath—with the oath repeatedly emphasized—to Congress, federal prosecutors, a federal judge, and on bank paperwork, and acknowledged thinking that prosecutors and the judge were in cahoots to get him. Whoa.
And then, just 20 minutes or so before lunch, Day 18 went from very good to terrific for Donald Trump.
Blanche brought up a call Cohen made to Trump on October 24, 2016, two days before Cohen moved the hush money from his home equity line of credit to his shell corporation and wired it to Keith Davidson and Stormy Daniels.
Cohen had testified earlier in the week that at 8:02 p.m. on the 24th, he called Keith Schiller, Trump’s body man, and said he needed to talk to Trump about the Daniels matter.
First, Blanche established that Cohen didn’t remember whether Schiller handed the phone to Trump or put the call on speaker; conversations with Trump could happen both ways, Cohen said. Then, he got Cohen to admit that he had not brought up the October 24th call in his grand jury testimony.
The prosecution asked for a sidebar conference, and I learned later from the transcripts that Susan Hoffinger, who handled the direct examination of Cohen for the D.A.’s office, objected to this line of questioning based on something called “the Bornholdt Rule,” which states that a witness may not be impeached by an omission of a fact or for failing to state a fact more fully. Judge Juan Merchan backed Hoffinger, but it hardly dissuaded Blanche from trying to impeach Cohen—discredit his testimony—on just those grounds.
Blanche asked Cohen if he remembered “a bunch of ongoing and continuing harassment phone calls” on October 22, 23, and 24. Cohen did, but when Blanche asked, “Do you remember that on the 24th, at around 7 o’clock at night, the person who was harassing you forgot to block the number, and you got the number—do you remember that?” Cohen said no. Blanche produced a text to the number from Cohen, who told the person on the other end that his or her number had been given to the Secret Service to investigate.
The return text read: “It wasn’t me, my friend told me to call, I am sorry for this, I won’t do it again.” It was clearly from a kid.
Cohen replied that there had been dozens of harassing calls, that he would continue contacting the Secret Service, and that “If you are a minor, I suggest you notify your parent or guardian.”
The person texted back: “I didn’t do it, I am 14, please don’t do this.” Cohen eventually told the kid to have a parent or guardian contact him. Then he texted Schiller: “Who can I speak to regarding harassing calls to myself and office, the dope forgot to block his call on one of them.” At 8:02, Schiller texted Cohen: “Call me.”
Cohen immediately calls Schiller, and the call lasts for 1 minute and 36 seconds. The length of the call is highly relevant to the outcome of the whole case.
Blanche reminded Cohen that on Tuesday, he had testified that he called Schiller not to talk to him but to candidate Trump about moving forward on the hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels.
At this point, the jurors were looking intently at the witness. Some of the rest of us knew immediately that the D.A.’s office had fucked up big time by not including these texts about the prank caller when prepping Cohen.
Hoffinger knew her witness had been blindsided, and she tried to stall with objections, but it didn’t work.
Blanche had Cohen on the run:
“When you testified on Tuesday that you had a specific recollection that that 1 minute and 36-minute phone call on October 24th was not with Keith Schiller, that you called Keith Schiller and he passed the phone to President Trump, you finalized the deal with Stormy Daniels and you said, ‘We’re going to move forward,’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ because you kept him informed all the time…that was a lie.” Now Blanche was yelling. “You were actually talking to Mr. Schiller about the fact that you were getting harassing phone calls from a 14-year-old, correct?”
Cohen responded feebly: “I always ran everything by The Boss immediately. And in this case, it could have just been saying everything is being taken care of, it’s going to get resolved.” Cohen neglected to point out that the call was long enough for him to talk to both Schiller and Trump, each on different matters.
Blanche bored in: “That was a lie. You did not talk to President Trump on that night, you talked to Keith Schiller about what we just went through. You can admit it.
“No, sir, I can’t,” Cohen said. “I am not certain that is accurate.” Then he testified, “Based upon the records that I was able to review, in light of everything that was going on, I believe I also spoke to Mr. President Trump [sic] and told him everything regarding the Stormy Daniels matter was being worked on, and it’s going to be resolved.”
Now came the best exchange of the trial for Trump’s defense team. In what many in the courtroom viewed as a Perry Mason moment, Blanche shouted:
“We are not asking for your belief. This jury doesn’t want to hear what you think happened.”
Hoffinger objected, and the objection was sustained, but the damage was done.
Blanche then got Cohen to admit that in preparing him to testify, the prosecution had never shown him the texts with Schiller. He left the impression that Cohen testified to things based more on prompting by the prosecution in prep than on his memory.
When the trial broke for lunch, we emerged from the courtroom a little shell-shocked. In the line to the bathroom, I asked retired Judge George Grasso, my go-to guy on this case because of his many years on the bench, how serious a blow had been landed. “Very serious,” Judge Grasso said. “For the first time, this planted real doubt.”
In the elevator, reporters were talking about the Judge Pauley being “in on it” moment and the 14-year-old prank caller. How would the jury react? Cohen’s other lies were not about the facts of this case. If he was making this up, how about his other renditions of his conversations with Trump? Would jurors believe them?
Norm Eisen had the best take. The prosecution would try to fix this on re-direct. Even if they can’t, jurors rarely decide based on one exchange, no matter how bad.
I worried that maybe I had been suffering from confirmation bias—only absorbing the material that hurt Trump’s case. I resolved to try harder not to let my feelings about Trump color my sense of whether jurors of good faith could have reasonable doubt about his guilt.
After lunch, we learned more about how Cohen operated. He made 96 secret recordings on his phone, many of them of conversations with reporters. Cohen was constantly quoted; Maggie Haberman of The New York Times put his name in 38 stories, usually when seeking a response to something Trump-related in the news. Blanche was trying to show that Cohen operated independently of Trump and lied about it, but the line of attack was boring, and it didn’t really land.
Blanche tried to poke holes in arguably the most important piece of evidence in the case—Cohen’s tape of Trump saying “150” about the $150,000 in hush money that David Pecker wanted reimbursed. The prosecution had put the defense conspiracy theories about the sudden end of the call by producing phone records showing that Cohen hung up—thus ending the tape—to take a call from a banker at Capitol One.
Why did Cohen take the call when he was taping Trump? Cohen testified that he wasn’t certain, but he thought the Capitol One representative was calling him back about his being the target of identity theft.
Cohen being Cohen, I’m not sure I believed that. But there had to be some reason he took the call, so I guess that one is plausible.
Blanche also tried to explain that when Trump used the incriminating word “cash” on the tape, he wasn’t talking about actual green bills, just about financing a project without borrowing. This went nowhere.
At the end of the day, the secret tape of Trump saying “150” and “cash” was very much intact as a critical piece of evidence against the former president.
After the jury was excused, the defense team tried hard to convince Judge Merchan to allow a possible defense witness, Bradley Smith, former chair of the Federal Election Commission, to testify about why campaign finance laws were not applicable in this case. Merchan said Smith could testify but not offer the jury instructions about interpreting the law. That was his job. So, Smith is unlikely to testify. That means, with Trump not taking the stand, the defense won’t likely put on any case at all.
We’ll see what happens Monday on re-direct and re-cross.
There’s a cliche about the man who “lies every which way to Sunday”—Sunday being the day for redemption and forgiveness. Has Michael Cohen reached his Sunday with the jury? Will they accept his confession of past sins and buy his redemption? We’ll find out this week,
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