Testimony to resume as Trump trial enters its 4th week – CBS News
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The fourth week of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York got underway Monday with the judge in the case finding the defendant in contempt of court for the 10th time.
Judge Juan Merchan imposed another $1,000 fine for the latest violation of his gag order, which limits what Trump can say about witnesses and others involved in the case. He said the fines are not having the intended deterrent effect, and said he could impose stiffer penalties in the future.
“Going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction if it is recommended,” Merchan said from the bench. “Mr. Trump, the last thing I want to do is put you in jail. You are a former president of the United States and possibly the next one as well.”
Merchan found that Trump violated the order in an April 22 interview when he commented on the political makeup of the jury. He said the comments “not only called into question the integrity, and therefore the legitimacy of these proceedings, but again raised the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones.”
The judge’s contempt decision came before prosecutors called their next witness to the stand: Jeffrey McConney, the Trump Organization’s retired controller, who is testifying about the records at the center of the case against Trump.
Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records related to reimbursements to his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence about allegations of a sexual encounter with Trump in the days before the 2016 election. He has pleaded not guilty and denies having sex with Daniels.
As much as this trial is about salacious headlines and tabloid drama, it’s also about general accounting.
McConney explained how Cohen’s $130,000 wire to Daniels’ attorney in October 2016 led to a series of 12 monthly payments to Cohen of $35,000, for a total of $420,000.
McConney recounted a conversation with former Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg in January 2017, around the time that Trump assumed the presidency.
McConney said Weisselberg walked in with a notepad and said he needed to discuss payments to be made to Cohen.
“He kind of threw the pad at me and said, ‘Take this down,'” McConney said, adding that he was also given a copy of a Cohen bank statement showing his $130,000 wire to Daniels’ lawyer. Jurors were shown McConney’s notes from that day, which appeared beneath “Trump” letterhead.
The notes showed a series of scrawled math, with a base pay of $180,000 — for the Daniels wire, plus $50,000 he had paid to a technology services firm — doubled to $360,000.
McConney said the doubling was a practice called “grossing up,” in which the company increased certain payments to executives to offset a potential 50% tax rate.
Added to the $360,000 was a $60,000 bonus. McConney said Cohen had complained about having not received a large enough bonus at the end of 2016, and this was designed to supplement that.
The notes included calculations, mirrored by those written by Weisselberg on Cohen’s statements: $420,000 divided by 12 equals monthly payments of $35,000.
Finally, near the bottom, McConney wrote a note he said meant that the payments were supposed to come from Trump’s personal bank account: “Wire monthly from DJT.”
Despite that instruction, the first few checks were sent from a trust set up to hold Trump’s assets while he was in office. Its trustees were Weisselberg and Trump’s two adult sons.
But in late March of that year, they made the decision to have payments going forward come straight from Trump’s personal account. That meant the only person who could sign for them was the president of the United States, McConney said.
“At some point we had to start getting the checks to the White House for President Trump to sign,” McConney said. “It was a whole new process for us.”
An unusually large group of aides and lawyers is accompanying Trump in court today.
Eric Trump is here for the second time since proceedings began. He’s sitting next to Alina Habba, who previously represented the first witness of the day, Jeffrey McConney, in the civil fraud matter. She has not typically attended this trial.
Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, is also here.
Trump aides Boris Epshteyn and Jason Miller are in court, as well. That’s not unusual.
One person not in attendance: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who often forgoes attendance at these proceedings while doing the work of running one of the country’s largest prosecutor’s offices.
A man who for decades served as one of the Trump Organization’s top executives was called to testify Monday.
Jeffrey McConney, the company’s retired controller, is no stranger to the stand. He testified at the Trump Organization’s 2022 criminal trial, where the company was found guilty of 17 felony counts related to tax fraud. He was both a defendant and a witness called by New York Attorney General Letitia James in the company’s civil fraud trial, in which Trump and others were found liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.
McConney is expected to testify about the mechanics of payments and financial decisions at the company. Prosecutors have indicated he instructed an employee to log payments to Cohen as payments for ongoing legal services, as opposed to reimbursements for Cohen’s wire to Daniels.
Addressing the court, Judge Juan Merchan said he was finding Trump in contempt of court for the 10th time, and imposing another $1,000 fine, for violating the gag order limiting what Trump can say about those involved in the case. The judge warned that the penalty would be harsher if Trump continues to violate the order.
“It appears that the $1,000 fines are not serving as a deterrent, therefore, going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction if it is recommended,” Merchan said.
In his written order, Merchan said Trump violated the order in an interview he gave on April 22. “That jury was picked so fast — 95% Democrats. The area’s mostly all Democrat,” Trump said on Real America’s Voice. “It’s a very unfair situation, that I can tell you.”
Trump, Merchan wrote, “not only called into question the integrity, and therefore the legitimacy of these proceedings, but again raised the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones.”
Merchan said three other instances raised by prosecutors, including two about Cohen, didn’t violate the order.
“Mr. Trump, the last thing I want to do is put you in jail. You are a former president of the United States and possibly the next one as well,” Merchan said on the bench, acknowledging that “to take that step would be disruptive to the proceedings.”
He said he worries about court officers and Secret Service agents tasked with protecting the former president.
“I worry about them, and about what would go into executing such a sanction,” Merchan said. “The magnitude of such a decision is not lost on me.”
“At the end of the day I have a job to do, and part of that job is protecting the dignity of” the proceedings and the criminal justice system, Merchan said, adding that the gag order violations “constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. I cannot allow that to continue.”
In 2018, Hicks was serving in the White House as director of strategic communications. Her desk was just outside the Oval Office.
On Jan. 12, 2018, the Journal revealed the $130,000 payment that Cohen made to Daniels for the first time. Sometime in the aftermath, Hicks said she spoke to Cohen, who told her the story wasn’t true.
She said she spoke to Trump about the allegations the next month.
“[Trump] said he spoke to Michael and Michael had paid this woman to protect him from a false allegation,” Hicks recalled. “Michael felt like it was his job to protect him and that’s what he was doing. It was out of the kindness of his own heart.”
Hicks said this would have been “out of character” for Cohen.
“I didn’t know Michael to be an especially charitable person, or a selfless person,” she said. “He’s the kind of person who seeks credit.”
Hicks said the president “thought it was a generous thing to do” and was “appreciative of the loyalty.”
“He wanted to know how it was playing, and just my thoughts and opinion about this story versus having a different kind of story before the election had Mr. Cohen not made that payment,” she remembered. “I think Mr. Trump’s opinion was it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election.”
Hicks appeared to begin crying as the prosecutor turned things over to the defense team for cross-examination. The judge ordered a five-minute break so Hicks could collect herself.
Graham Kates is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice, privacy issues and information security for CBS News Digital. Contact Graham at KatesG@cbsnews.com or grahamkates@protonmail.com
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