Brendan McDermid/Reuters
- Michael Cohen finished testifying Wednesday, his second day on the stand at Trump's NY fraud trial.
- He threw one good punch and remained calm under cross-examination by Trump lawyer Alina Habba.
- But Trump's gag-order antics upstaged Cohen's testimony and commandeered Wednesday's headlines.
A sometimes fiery, sometimes funny cross-examination of Donald Trump's OG fraud witness, Michael Cohen, ended in Manhattan on Wednesday, after a defense lawyer spent the day nettling him with questions about betrayal and perjury.
Cohen remained unrattled through his second and final day of testimony in Trump's ongoing civil fraud trial, despite getting grilled about his previous lies and about how, after decades in Trump's inner circle, he never got a job in the Trump White House and now makes a living writing anti-Trump books and hosting a podcast attacking the former president.
"You thought you were going to be named chief of staff" in the Trump White House, firebrand defense lawyer Alina Habba told Cohen at one point, her voice accusatory and loud.
"No I did not," Cohen protested from the witness stand, in one of the rare moments that his voice rose to meet Habba's volume. "It was a joke," he said, despite a 2017 text chain in which he bragged he'd get the position.
"You have made a career out of publically attacking President Trump haven't you?" Habba asked at another point. Cohen paused before evenly responding, "Yes."
Cohen's life as Trump's nemesis-in-chief is a far cry from that of the young man who once so admired Trump he read "The Art of the Deal" twice. "In college," Cohen testified.
"You once stated that you would take a bullet for President Trump," Habba reminded him.
"Vanity Fair," Cohen answered with a smile, referring to the magazine where his "take a bullet" quote was first printed, also back in 2017. "Emily Fox," he added, sounding almost wistful as he named the story's author, Emily Jane Fox.
On both days he testified, Cohen sat some 20 feet from the defense table and Trump, who watched the testimony of his fixer-turned-foe on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Cohen's time in the trial spotlight started with a bombshell. Early in direct examination Tuesday, Cohen testified that for years, he inflated Trump's net worth for official banking documents to hit a number Trump had "arbitrarily" picked.
It was a remarkable piece of testimony. And it fed directly into the fraud narrative of New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose lawsuit prompted the ongoing trial, now in its fourth week.
James has accused Trump of routinely and fraudulently inflating his net worth by billions of dollars a year to mislead lenders and insurers. She is seeking to permanently ban Trump and four longtime Trump Organization executives, including his two eldest sons, Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump, from ever doing business in New York again.
It was Cohen's 2019 testimony before Congress that first exposed what the trial judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, has already ruled was rampant net-worth fraud.
But Cohen's two days on the stand, through no fault of his own, went from fireworks to fizzle.
At day's end on Wednesday, Trump's attorneys unsuccessfully demanded an immediate verdict, claiming that Habba had trapped Cohen into contradicting himself by admitting, during cross, that Trump never directly ordered his net worth be fudged.
"The state's key witness, who they base their entire case on, has now testified that Mr. Trump and Mr. Weisselberg did not direct him to inflate the numbers," complained Clifford Robert, an attorney for Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., who are both defendants in the attorney general's case.
"The government's key witnesses has fallen flat on his face," Robert said.
But Trump didn't have to specifically order anything, Cohen explained during re-direct examination.
"Donald Trump speaks like a mob boss," Cohen explained on re-direct testimony by an assistant district attorney, Colleen Faherty. "And what he does is, he tells you what he wants without specifically telling you.
"So when he said to me, 'I'm worth more than five million. I'm actually worth maybe six, maybe seven, could be eight,' we understood what he wanted."
"Denied," the judge said of the defense's "immediate verdict" bid. Soon afterward, Trump rose from his seat and left the courtroom, trailed by nearly a dozen Secret Service agents.
In rejecting the defense request for an early verdict in their favor, the judge explained that he "has evidence, credible or not, all over the place."
There's "enough evidence in this case to fill this courtroom," he added, noting that the fraud lawsuit that led to the trial is alone more than 200 pages long.
"No way, no how this case is being dismissed because of an equivocal – arguably equivocal – statement by one witness who I don't consider the key witness," the judge said.
Ultimately, Cohen's testimony, already maligned as less than key, was overshadowed Wednesday by a far flashier story.
Just after the lunch break, Trump was suddenly summoned to take the witness stand by the judge. Trump was asked whether he'd just called the judge's law clerk "partisan" in front of reporters, thereby violating a partial gag order banning attacks on the judge's court staff.
Engoron found Trump's testimony – in which he swore under oath that he'd meant Cohen, not the clerk, was "partisan" – was "not credible."
Trump had stepped down from the witness stand, and the judge had fined him $10,o00 for violating the gag, before Cohen was even called back to the courtroom to finish testifying.
And Trump's testimony, not Cohen's, wound up the big story of the day.