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Prosecutors in Trump's hush money case unveil potentially damning paper trail

Molly Crane-Newman and Josephine Stratman, New York Daily News on

Published in News & Features

NEW YORK — A potential smoking gun shown to jurors at Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial on Monday appeared to harm his defense that money doled out to Michael Cohen from the White House was for payment for legitimate legal services — and not reimbursement for paying off a porn star.

The document displayed was a bank statement provided to the Trump Organization’s accounting department in early 2017 by Cohen, showing he’d transferred $130,000 to Keith Davidson, the lawyer of Stormy Daniels, who claimed she’d had an extramarital liaison with Trump in 2006.

Prosecutors introduced it during testimony by former Trump Organization controller Jeffrey McConney, who identified rough notes at the bottom as the penmanship of his ex-boss, Trump’s twice-convicted longtime Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg.

“I’ve been looking at his handwriting for 35 years,” McConney told the court when asked how he was sure.

The finance chief’s notes tallied up how much money Cohen was owed in expenses: $180,000, when accounting for the payoff to Davidson plus an additional $50,000 campaign purchase Trump’s fixer paid out of pocket. The CFO then doubled that number to account for taxes and tacked on a $50,000 bonus, bringing the total to $420,000, which Cohen received in monthly checks signed by Trump for $35,000, evidence showed.

The prosecution introduced the First Republic Bank statement as proof that Trump knowingly reimbursed Cohen for hush money to Daniels. Last week, jurors heard of how Cohen set up the bank account in the waning days of the 2016 race to get money to Daniels in a hurry so voters wouldn’t learn her allegations of an extramarital tryst with Trump, wiring it via a shell company, Essential Consultants LLC.

 

Trump’s lawyers have claimed that his former fixer went rogue in paying off the adult film actor, unbeknownst to his boss. They claim he signed checks put in front of him, believing he was simply paying his lawyer for lawyering.

The jury saw the statement among a paper trail of evidence introduced Monday tied to each of the 34 counts of falsification of business records with which the former president is charged — 11 checks issued to Cohen, which all bore Trump’s familiar spiky signature in black Sharpie, 12 corresponding ledger entries and 11 invoices, in which the fixer billed for “a retainer agreement.”

“Did you ever see a retainer agreement?” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo asked McConney.

“I did not,” the ex-controller conceded, later acknowledging those expenses were never filed with the company’s legal department.

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