Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll review Michael Cohen’s testimony at Donald Trump’s hush-money trial — and look at whether it was historically significant. We’ll also get details on the first day of the corruption trial of Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
In a trial that has already had some never-before days, Monday was another: Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer-turned-archenemy, described a $130,000 hush-money payment to the porn actress Stormy Daniels.
“Just take care of it,” Cohen said Trump told him.
Cohen told the jury that Daniels’s story of a tryst in a Nevada hotel room posed a “catastrophic” threat to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Cohen paid Daniels himself, and he testified that Trump had approved a plan to reimburse him after the election. That repayment is the basis of the 34 felony counts against Trump, which charge that he falsified business records by putting the reimbursement in the category of ordinary business expenses.
The jury heard from Daniels last week as prosecutors laid the groundwork for Cohen’s appearance in the first criminal trial of an American president. His testimony prompted the question of how big a moment Cohen’s appearance was.
“Is it a moment that matters is the question,” Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, said.
“If this trial leads to a conviction and somehow that conviction changes the politics of 2024 and he does not win re-election, it will matter more,” he said. But if it does not have a dramatic effect and Trump is re-elected, whether convicted or not, Zelizer said he doubted that Cohen’s testimony “will be of that much interest, other than a few lines in the history books.”
“It is a wait-and-see situation,” he said.
Timothy Naftali, who teaches about the presidency at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, likened Cohen to John Dean, the White House counsel in the Nixon administration whose testimony before a congressional committee helped to bring down Richard Nixon.
“This is not the same as Watergate — the issues are different — but the central questions of conspiracy and cover-up, they’re the same,” Naftali said. “The challenge for the prosecutors is to make this closer to Watergate. Watergate was a breaking and entering, but it was clearly always designed to affect an election. Here we have hush money and illegal accounting, but the effort alleged by the prosecutors was the same — the desire to influence an American election.”
On Monday Cohen tied Trump directly to the hush-money payment, recounting a five-minute telephone call with Trump 11 days before the election in 2016. He said he told Trump that the Daniels “matter is completely under control and locked down.”
Cohen’s effort to keep Trump posted echoed testimony from two earlier witnesses, Keith Davidson, Daniels’s lawyer at the time, and Hope Hicks, a former Trump spokeswoman. They both indicated that Cohen would not have acted on his own — he would have gotten clearance from Trump.
Cohen apparently relished doing whatever Trump wanted — my colleague Maggie Haberman wrote that “Cohen was something of a Trump fanboy.” “The only thing that was on my mind was to accomplish the task, to make him happy,” Cohen testified on Monday.
But there was something else on his mind: He wanted to hear Trump say what a good job he had done. Cohen testified that when Trump did, he felt that “I was on top of the world.”
He said he reported only to Trump when he worked at the Trump Organization. “It was whatever he wanted,” Cohen said.
The prosecution replayed a recording that jurors had heard earlier in the trial, of a conversation he had with Trump about another deal, to silence Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who said she had had a 10-month affair with Trump.
Cohen said that he made the recording to show David Pecker of The National Enquirer, who struck the deal to pay McDougal $150,000, that Trump planned to pay him back — something that Trump never did.
Senator J.D. Vance, a Republican of Ohio who is in contention to be Trump’s running mate, joined Trump’s entourage in court. Also on hand were Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, and Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York.
Vance attacked Cohen and other participants in the trial in social media posts and at a news conference.
That was several hours after three men in Trump hats had gathered for a demonstration in the same park where Vance had spoken. One, Dion Cini, from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, had brought 14 large Trump flags.
He said the turnout was “definitely depressing, because Trump has asked people to come multiple times.”
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Meanwhile, at the Menendez trial
Jury selection began, but by the end of the day, no jurors had been selected.
My colleagues Tracey Tully and Maia Coleman write that Menendez has represented New Jersey in Congress for three decades, but prosecutors in the Southern District of New York brought the case. The jurors — who will be asked to consider the evidence against him and two New Jersey businessmen — will come from Manhattan, the Bronx or several counties north of New York City.
All three men have pleaded not guilty. Menendez, who has said that he expects to be exonerated, has left open the possibility of running for re-election in November.
His wife, Nadine Menendez, will be tried separately this summer.
St. Patrick’s Day, ’78
Dear Diary:
It was St. Patrick’s Day in 1978. After returning from a party in Brooklyn thoroughly inebriated, I had settled into a deep sleep in the duplex condo on West 10th Street where I was living at the time.
I was awakened by a phone call. The woman on the other end explained that my roommate, Joe, had arranged for her to stay overnight at our apartment. Her name was Matilda.
Fifteen minutes later she rang our bell. When she climbed the four flights to the condo’s first floor, I couldn’t open the door from the inside. I directed her to the upstairs entrance and then to an empty bedroom on the apartment’s second floor.
“You can sleep there,” I told her.
The next day, I returned home after working a rare Saturday and spent the day with her. We watched “Saturday Night Live” together that night.
On Sunday, I took her on the Circle Line and to the Statue of Liberty. Later, we had dinner near Columbus Circle, where she had a hotel room for one night paid for by the company she was to interview at Monday morning.
It was love at first sight for me, and we began a long-distance romance, going back and forth between New York City and her home in St. Louis.
