Michael Cohen Testifies Before Manhattan Grand Jury in Trump’s Case of Paying Stormy Daniels Silence Money

Longtime aide to former President Donald Trump Michael Cohen arrived at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office at noon on Monday to testify before a grand jury hearing about the infamous silence payment to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Cohen began negotiations with the Manhattan prosecutor’s office investigating Trump three years ago, but this is the first time the fallen lawyer has been sworn in.

“It’s about the truth,” Cohen’s lawyer Lanny David told the Daily News. “The documented truth will win.”

The current grand jury hearing was initiated in January. Cohen did not testify before the previous grand jury hearing of evidence against Trump, which expired last spring, or before the session that heard evidence against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg.

Cohen, who has been preparing for weeks to testify in meetings with prosecutors, is expected to discuss his role in paying the infamous $130,000 to Daniels in October 2016 to buy her silence about an alleged sex date with Trump at the lake. Tacho. golf tournament in 2006. The fee, which had been in the public domain for years, made Cohen a felon and eventually led to his disqualification from law.

In his 2018 federal conviction for campaign finance violations, bank fraud and tax evasion, Cohen pointed the finger straight at his longtime boss, calling him “Face 1.” The former lawyer said Trump told him to make a hush payment. “for the primary purpose of influencing” the outcome of the election. He said a secondary secret deal with Playboy model Karen McDougal had been negotiated with the pro-Trump tabloid National Enquirer.

Cohen said that Trump and his real estate business paid him back for his silence with restitution checks with interest spread over several months. Sources connected to the Bragg investigation believe that the district attorney is considering charging Trump with falsified business documents for classifying payments as legal costs and hiding those payments to cover up another crime – illegally making payments for political reasons.

It is unclear if prosecutors are exploring other grand jury areas and considering other potential charges. The decades-long investigation launched by Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance has recently escalated, with prosecutors calling in longtime Trump aides like Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway for questioning.

Last week, Trump was invited by the DA’s team to come and testify before a grand jury, a source told The News, signaling that Bragg was close to deciding whether to indict. Speaking on Good Morning America on Monday, one of Trump’s attorneys, Joe Takopina, said the decision had not yet been made, but that Trump had “no plans” to attend the district attorney’s meeting at his invitation.

Takopina called Trump the victim of a money-hushing scheme.

“It was simple extortion, and I don’t know when we decided to start prosecuting the victims of extortion,” Tacopina said in an interview. “He categorically denied this affair. But he had to pay the money because there had to be an accusation that would publicly embarrass him – regardless of the campaign.”

Cohen, who also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in 2018, spent three years in federal custody for his crimes, serving half his sentence at the Otisville Correctional Facility and the remainder in his Trump Park Avenue apartment.

The federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York who filed the case against him considered indicting Trump but ultimately decided not to fear a political hit, according to a recent book written by Eli Honig, a former member of the prosecution team.

Trump has long denounced the district attorney’s investigation as a “witch hunt” and describes his former personal attorney, Cohen, as “the disbarred SleazeBag lawyer.”