Courtroom revelations from Michael Cohen’s secretly recorded conversations with Donald Trump appear to have just blown his former boss’s legal defense out of the water.
“I need to open up a company for the transfer about our friend David,” Cohen said in part of the tape, according to reporters who attended Trump’s hush-money trial on Thursday. Cohen was referring to Trump in the third person by his documented pseudonym in the agreement, David Dennison.
That shell company would become Essential Consultants LLC, which Cohen used to pass along the $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, whom Trump allegedly began an affair with in 2008.
In another section of the tape, Cohen informs Trump that he had “spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up,” referring to the former Trump Organization CFO. Trump responded that he’d like to be kept in the loop.
“Let me know what’s happening, OK?” Trump was heard saying.
In a separate recording, Cohen told Keith Davidson, who was Daniels’s attorney at the time, that Trump would continually say, “I hate the fact that we did it.” Davidson said he interpreted “it” to mean the deal with Daniels.
The recordings reveal precisely what the former reality TV star’s attorneys have attempted to disprove: that he was involved with the hush-money payments, and that the payments didn’t start and end in Cohen’s pockets, but rather in Trump’s.
Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.
