NEW YORK — The key characters in Donald Trump’s hush money case — including Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, Michael Cohen, David Pecker, and Allen Weisselberg — all have interesting stories to tell about their roles in the infamous scheme.

Prosecutors allege the notorious hush money plan started with an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower between Trump, Cohen, and David Pecker, where they arranged to bury negative stories about Trump to secure his win in the 2016 election that ultimately included paying off porn star Daniels, Playboy model Karen McDougal, and a Trump Tower doorman.

The hush money recipients didn’t stay silent for long, and Trump is the only participant prosecutors have placed at the initial meeting who still denies wrongdoing. He hasn’t denied the payments to Cohen that serve as the basis for the charges but claims he wasn’t in the loop about the hush money.

Michael Cohen

Cohen is expected to feature as the DA’s star witness at trial and walk jurors through how he covertly carried out the hush money scheme.

After he was sentenced to three years for violating campaign finance laws, lying to Congress, and tax evasion, he began voluntarily cooperating against Trump in the Manhattan district attorney’s probe, meeting more than a dozen times with investigators over several years.

When the feds raided Cohen’s residences in April 2018, Trump tried to stop him from flipping, telling his fixer on a phone call to “stay strong,” according to court records. Around a week later, Trump publicly encouraged Cohen on Twitter not to “flip,” writing, “Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if . . . it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see [Cohen] doing that . . . .”

In August 2018, Cohen admitted in Manhattan Federal Court that in 2016 “in coordination with, and at the direction of” Trump and David Pecker, chairman of American Media, Inc., the former owner of The National Enquirer, he worked to silence women who claimed they’d had extramarital liaisons with Trump “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”

Cohen, 57, says he paid the porn star’s lawyer through a shell corporation and received reimbursement the following year through a series of monthly checks processed by the Trump Organization and signed by Trump — partially doled out by a trust created after he was elected and partly from his personal bank account — that were falsely classified as payment for legal fees.

The former fixer is expected to face a grilling for the ages on cross-examination with Trump’s defense team, who say he’s a liar who can’t be trusted.

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