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Francisco 2.0

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Posts posted by Francisco 2.0

  1. David Pecker tells the courtroom that he asked Dylan Howard, the former editor of The National Enquirer, to investigate Karen McDougal’s story and that he told Cohen he had done so. He seems to indicate his conversations with Cohen soon increased in frequency and the two men began to talk multiple times daily. Cohen said they should communicate over Signal, an encrypted app, which is often used for conversations that a person wants to keep private.


    The jury is quite alert for this portion of Pecker’s testimony.

     

    Trump’s body language changed when Pecker started testifying about the catch-and-kill deal involving McDougal. He started moving his head, squinting and pursing his lips, and then crossed his arms over his chest.

     

    Pecker says he advised Trump to purchase McDougal’s story directly. “I think you should buy it,” he recalls having said to Trump, who was then a candidate for president. He says Trump said he’d think about it and have Cohen call Pecker back.

     

    McDougal, by the way, was selling a story of having had an affair with Trump. Pecker concluded the day’s testimony by saying that Michael Cohen was becoming increasingly agitated as The National Enquirer editor, Dylan Howard, traveled to hear McDougal’s story. “It looked like he was getting a lot of pressure to get the answer, like, right away,” Pecker says of Cohen at the time.

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  2. We are fifteen minutes — at most — away from the end of the day. Steinglass, the prosecutor, appears to be putting a bow on the story of the doorman who sought to sell Trump’s story. But he moves on immediately to the second catch-and-kill deal, which involved the former Playboy model Karen McDougal. She, too, had story about Trump to sell.

     

    Prosecutors like to end the day with the most intriguing question-and-answer series they can. I’d expected Steinglass to finish with the doorman, and perhaps allow the jurors to leave early. But by moving onto this next deal, he could be setting up a nice cliffhanger to leave jurors with, that he'll pick back up when we return Thursday morning.

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  3. Steinglass, the prosecutor, is asking Pecker why he paid so much for this story. “I made the decision to buy the story because of the potential embarrassment it would have to the campaign and Mr. Trump,” Pecker responds. This is catch-and-kill in a nutshell and Pecker just said several times in different ways that he was acting on Trump’s behalf.

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  4. Regardless of whether the allegation about Trump fathering the child was true or not, the jury is now being shown a contract the National Enquirer reached with Dino Sajudin, the doorman, in which the words “Donald Trump’s illegitimate child” feature prominently. Things like that can leave a mark.

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  5. And we are back after a break

     

    Pecker says Cohen called him furiously denying that the child in question was Trump's, saying that he offered to take a DNA test and that because he was German-Irish and the woman was Hispanic, it was impossible for the child to be his.

    To be clear, Pecker appeared to be saying that Cohen indicated that a child with a Hispanic mother couldn’t be Trump’s.


    Trump has often talked about “good genes” and blood lines. While running for president, he has denigrated immigrants from Latin American countries and said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

     

    Pecker is now being asked about Dino Sajudin, a doorman who worked at a Trump building and looked to sell a story — which was apparently false — about Trump fathering a child out of wedlock. This is the first of three catch-and-kill deals that Pecker is expected to describe and we will likely get a fair amount of detail on each of them.


    This story clearly bothers Trump. Just like yesterday when it came up during opening statements, he frowned and shook his head.


    Pecker says the love child story would have been a big story, and he believed it was important to have it “removed from the market.” Cohen told him “the boss would be very pleased.”

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  6. So, we are 2 hours or so into some testimony, from one witness.  And it's not going well for Trump.   Cross will be interesting, of course, but really, I don't think they will be able to refute much, if anything that Pecker has testifed to already.

    Is there any wonder why his counsel kept stalling and delaying as much as possible?  Imagine, if we ever get a chance, what a federal trial will be like for Trump.

     

     

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  7. Trump’s lawyers have objected all along to prosecutors couching Trump’s relationship with Pecker and Michael Cohen as a conspiracy — after all, Trump is not facing a conspiracy charge. But Joshua Steinglass, one of the prosecutors, just noted for the first time in court that one of the election statutes the case is based on does in fact have a conspiracy provision. That could prove important later when the jury is instructed on the laws they must consider in reaching a verdict.

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  8. Pecker is asked about the nature of Cohen’s relationship to the Trump campaign. Pecker says Cohen always said he didn’t work for the campaign, and that he was instead “Mr. Trump’s personal attorney.” But jurors just heard that Cohen was central to feeding the tabloid negative information about campaign opponents.


    “Michael was physically in every aspect of whatever the campaign was working on,” Pecker says. He adds that because Cohen wasn’t officially employed by the campaign, he may have heard things “informally” or “injected himself into it.”


    Pecker finally says something mildly helpful to the defense. He says he doesn’t know who Cohen spoke to, and adds that Cohen may have essentially been freelancing, acting of his own volition as he tried to get more involved with the campaign.

     

    Now, we are discussing negative headlines attacking three of Trump's Republican opponents in 2016, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, which prosecutors argue illustrate the outcome of the agreement reached during the Trump Tower meeting. Pecker says that Cohen would feed him negative information and that The National Enquirer would “embellish” and add onto it.


    Trump jumped on the negative coverage of Ted Cruz, especially about his father, in 2016. The campaign promoted it like it had come about organically and Trump was simply responding to it.

     

    Trump just leaned in toward the monitor in front of him and squinted to look closer at a collection of headlines from The National Enquirer that praised him. They included: “Donald Trump — Cruzin to victory! Ted endorses Donald” and “Obama’s Half Brother — Cheering on Donald at Debate.”

     

     

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  9. Pecker is describing a symbiotic relationship between Trump and The National Enquirer centered in part around “The Apprentice.” Pecker says that Trump would tip him off first as to who was going to be fired — “or eliminated,” as Pecker puts it — from the show, and The Enquirer would write about it.


    Trump’s history of tipping off the New York City tabloids about his own life was legendary well before The Apprentice.

     

    Prosecutors are working to situate Pecker in Trump’s orbit before the jury. He’s not coming across as a combative witness, but, on the contrary, as a longtime fan, friend and ally of Trump. If he testifies, as we expect, about a series of hush money deals they arranged together, this gentle impression will help make him all the more credible.


    If anything, Pecker is appearing like the kind of person who the Trump campaign, in another context, would ask to serve a validator for Trump’s past successes.

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  10. Steinglass is now asking about “The Apprentice,” which Pecker calls “an instant success.”

     

    Pecker says that he’s had “a great relationship with Mr. Trump over the years,” and that he launched a magazine with him called Trump Style. When he proposed the magazine, Pecker says, Trump’s biggest question was, “Who’s going to pay for it?”

    Pecker never did say who paid for it.

     

    Pecker is being asked to point to and identify Trump, who he says he’s known since the late 1980s. They met at Mar-a-Lago, he says.


    Pecker specifically says he was introduced to him through Nick Ribis, then a casinos executive for Trump and, until the early 2000s, one of his long-serving lawyers.


    As Pecker identified the former president, Trump lifted his head and smiled tightly.

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  11. It does not appear as if we will get a ruling from the judge right now on whether or not Trump will be held in contempt and fined. David Pecker has entered the courtroom in a dark grey suit and made his way to the witness stand. Trumps shifted in his chair as Pecker passed.

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  12. Justice Merchan has repeatedly pushed Todd Blanche to clarify his arguments, only to have Blanche deny that he is saying what he seems to be saying. Trump is very lucky that the jurors are not here for this. Merchan is really dressing down Blanche right now.


    “You’ve presented nothing,” Merchan just said to Blanche, who has been presenting his argument for some 20 minutes. It's devastating for Blanche.


    Trump is growing more animated as Justice Merchan pushes back on Blanche. On several occasions while the judge was speaking, the former president sharply turned to his other lawyers at the defense table and whispered to them.

     

    Justice Merchan is now pushing Todd Blanche to do a forensic accounting of how reposts happen in Trump’s world. “It’s not passive,” the judge finally says.


    What’s interesting here is the throughline between Blanche’s argument that there is distance between Trump and his own reposts and the prosecution's argument against Trump, which is that he repeatedly used others — Michael Cohen, The National Enquirer — to do his dirty work.


    This line of questioning is highlighting a longtime Twitter catchphrase -- that "retweets do not equal endorsements." When you are a former president sitting on trial, it would seem your reposts do carry more weight, particularly in light of this court’s gag order.

     

    Todd Blanche says Trump is entitled to complain about “two systems of justice.” “There’s two systems of justice in this courtroom? That’s what you’re saying?” Justice Merchan says.

     

    There’s a real similarity between the opening statements we saw yesterday and the arguments about the alleged gag order violations today: Again, prosecutors have an overarching narrative, saying that Trump willfully violated their order. Blanche is responding to the allegations one by one, and the judge, for now, isn’t having it.

     

    Justice Merchan is basically taking on, one by one, Trump's favored social media strategies. One is constantly claiming something was “just found.” In this particular case, the subject was Stormy Daniels’ early 2018 statement denying having had a sexual encounter with Trump, which she has since disavowed. “LOOK WHAT WAS JUST FOUND!” Trump said in an April 10 Truth Social post. “I need to know what is true,” Justice Merchan says.

     

    The judge loses patience with Todd Blanche, Trump's lawyer. “I’m asking the questions, OK,” he says. “Im going to decide whether your client is in contempt or not, so please don’t turn it around.” Blanche says in a higher-pitched voice that the prosecutors got as much time as they want. Justice Merchan makes a distinction, saying the prosecutors were answering his questions.


    During the scold, Trump turned to another one of his lawyers, Emil Bove, and whispered a comment.

     

    We’ll try to decode Todd Blanche’s attacks further, though they are confusing even in the room. He says that a post from Michael Avenatti, which caused Trump to launch into an attack on Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, was a political argument, about speech not in the case but on social media and in interviews. Thus, Blanche is saying, Trump’s response is not in fact an attack on witnesses but a continuation of that political discussion. This is a hard pill for Justice Merchan to swallow, clearly.


    The legal and political strategies by the Trump team have been intertwined since the first indictment. And Blanche’s argument brings that into stark relief.


    It’s fascinating to see a lawyer for Trump try to separate out politics from legal proceedings. The Trump era, of course, has been marked by the opposite sort of context collapse: With Trump, everything is politics. That’s why this argument may not work.

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  13. Blanche is trying to get his client out of hot water by seeking to reframe Trump’s statements about Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels as responses to “a barrage of political attacks.”


    Merchan says that he doesn’t want to get into “interpreting and reading between the lines” of Trump’s posts as Blanche continues to push the point that Trump’s attacks are political, and not specifically related to the case, despite being about likely witnesses.

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  14. Todd Blanche, one of Trump's lawyers, is responding for the defense. He says Trump knows what the gag order allows him to do, and there was “no willful violation” of it. He again argues, as he did in his opening statement, that there's nothing to see here.


    Blanche is arguing that nothing can be seen devoid of political context when it comes to Trump.

     

    Conroy says prosecutors will not seek jail for now, even though Trump seems to be “angling” for that.


    While Trump has made a show of daring prosecutors to jail him, there are few Trump advisers who think Trump actually wants to or would welcome the reality of being put in a prison cell.


    New York state’s criminal contempt law permits a $1,000 fine and jail time of up to 30 days for each violation of the gag order. And Conroy is asking the judge to warn Trump that he could face custody.

     

    Conroy now focuses on Trump’s defense that “reposts” aren’t his own words. Trump has used a version of this defense politically as well since 2016.


    Conroy says that Trump “is doing nothing less than knowingly and willingly, that is intentionally, breaching the crystal clear, unequivocal lines set by this court.”

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  15. Throwing a "MAGA" into a post doesn’t make it political, Conroy says, dismissing the idea that Trump's comments fall under the category of protected political speech. It may make it more ominous, Conroy adds.

     

    Conroy is talking about Trump’s seeking to use politics as a defense, saying it “makes no sense,” eviscerating the clear language and meaning of the gag order. “There’s no indication that his claim that he’s responding to attacks is anything more than an after-the-fact justification,” Conroy says.

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