Historic Trial Transcripts

OPENING STATEMENT BY THE PEOPLE

MR. COLANGELO: Good morning, your Honor, counsel, members of the jury.

This case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up.

The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election; then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.

In June of 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president in the 2016 election; a few months later this conspiracy began.

He invited his friend, David Pecker, to a meeting at Trump Tower here in Manhattan.

Mr. Pecker was the CEO of a media company that, among other things, owned and published the National Enquirer tabloid.

Michael Cohen was also at that meeting. He worked for the defendant as the defendant’s special counsel at his company, the Trump Organization.

And those three men formed a conspiracy at that meeting to influence the presidential election by concealing negative information about Mr. Trump in order to help him get elected.

As one part of that agreement, Michael Cohen paid $130,000 to an adult film actress named Stormy Daniels just a couple of weeks before the 2016 election to silence her and to make sure the public did not learn of the sexual encounter with the defendant.

Cohen made that payment at the defendant’s direction, and he did it to influence the presidential election.

After the election, the defendant then reimbursed Cohen for that payment through a series of monthly checks, all of which were processed through the defendant’s company, the Trump Organization, and they disguised what the payments were for.

The defendant said in his business records that he was paying Cohen for legal services pursuant to a retainer agreement.

But, those were lies. There was no retainer agreement.

Cohen was not being paid for legal services. The defendant was paying him back for an illegal payment to Stormy Daniels on the eve of the election.

The defendant falsified those business records because he wanted to conceal his and others’ criminal conduct.

In total, the defendant falsified 34 business records to cover up that criminal conspiracy.

As a result of his conduct, the defendant was indicted by a Grand Jury in Manhattan on 34 counts of falsifying business records.

And the first count of that indictment reads:

The Grand Jury of the County of New York, by this indictment, accuses the defendant of the crime of Falsifying Business Records in the First Degree in violation of Penal Law Section 175.10, committed as follows:

The defendant, in the County of New York and elsewhere, on or about February 14th, 2017, with intent to defraud and intent to commit or conceal another crime and to aid and conceal the commission thereof, made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise, to wit: An invoice from Michael Cohen, dated February 14th, 2017, marked as a record of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and kept and maintained by the Trump Organization.

Now, the remaining 33 counts in this indictment detail the rest of the false business records charges for each monthly payment.

The fraudulent cover-up scheme involved falsifying three different types of business records: An invoice, falsely describing a request for payment for legal services rendered in a given month; a voucher entry in the Trump Organization’s general ledger system falsely describing the payment as one for legal services; and payment checks with check stubs that also falsely describe the nature and payments.

All in all, the defendant disguised his payments to Michael Cohen through 11 falsified invoices, 12 falsified ledger entries and 11 falsified checks for a total of 34 false business records in the books and records of his company, the Trump Organization.

But, as Judge Merchan told you, the indictment is not evidence.

So, let’s talk about what the evidence will be.

It starts with that August 2015 meeting in Trump Tower.

The defendant had just announced that he was running for president.

And he asked David Pecker to come to Trump Tower to talk.

At the time, David Pecker was the chairman and CEO of a major media company called American Media, Incorporated or AMI.

AMI owned and published celebrity magazines, health and fitness magazines, and supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer.

As the man in charge of AMI, Pecker had the ultimate say over publication decisions. He had the say over what stories to publish or not publish in any of AMI’s magazines or tabloids.

And Trump and Pecker were joined at that meeting by Michael Cohen, who, as I mentioned, worked for the defendant at the Trump Organization and served as special counsel to the defendant.

Now, Cohen’s job, really, was to take care of problems for the defendant.

You will hear evidence at trial that he was even referred to as Trump’s “fixer”.

So, those three men, Donald Trump, David Pecker and Michael Cohen, struck an agreement at that meeting; together, they conspired to influence the 2016 presidential election in three different ways.

First, they agreed that Pecker would help the defendant’s campaign by acting as eyes and ears for the campaign. Pecker would use AMI’s network of sources through all of its magazines and publications to gather information that might be harmful to Trump’s candidacy, report that information to Cohen, so Donald Trump would then prevent the information from becoming public.

Second, they agreed that AMI would use its tabloids and magazines to publish flattering stories about the defendant.

And, third, they agreed that AMI would use those same publications to attack Mr. Trump’s political opponents.

After the meeting, David Pecker told the National Enquirer’s Editor-in-Chief, a man named Dylan Howard, to report directly to Pecker about this Trump Organization conspiracy and he enlisted his help in carrying it out.

And, together, those coconspirators then followed through on every aspect of this scheme I just described.

So, for example, the National Enquirer ran headline after headline that extolled the defendant’s virtues, headlines that Mr. Pecker specifically directed his publication to make because of the conspiracy he reached at the Trump Organization agreement.

Many of those headlines and the stories behind them were even shown to Cohen and the defendant in advance before they were published so the defendant could review them, request changes, accept or reject publication stories, even cover art.

The National Enquirer also ran stories attacking Mr. Trump’s political opponents.

You will see evidence of those stories at trial. They include tabloid headlines and stories attacking one of his political opponents, Dr. Ben Carson, accusing him of medical malpractice.

They ran other stories attacking a then-candidate named Senator Ted Cruz, accusing him of sexual infidelity, accusing him of having some family connection to the JFK assassination.

The National Enquirer ran these stories as a part of that conspiracy that was launched at the Trump Tower meeting, and they did it to help the defendant’s campaign.

And after some of these stories came out, the defendant even followed up with his contacts at AMI to thank them for their stories and to praise them for their attacks in their publications on his political opponents.

So, you had three parts of this conspiracy:

You had the agreement to run positive coverage; you had the agreement to attack his opponents; and then the core of the conspiracy was David Pecker’s agreement to act as eyes and ears for the campaign in an effort to locate damaging information about the defendant and then take steps to try to bury it to help Trump get elected.

It was a core part of this conspiracy that the coconspirators then executed through three different transactions over the course of the next year.

They used a practice called catch-and-kill.

Catch-and-kill is when the tabloid buys up damaging information about someone, demands that the source sign a non-disclosure agreement to prevent them from taking that information or that story anywhere else, and then the tabloid declines to publish the story to prevent it from ever seeing the light of day.

So it’s a way of buying damaging information not to publish it, but to hide it, make it go away.

And in this case, to help the candidate.

Now, Trump and Pecker and Cohen carried out three different catch-and-kill deals to help him get elected.

First, just a few months after the Trump Tower meeting, David Pecker learned that a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin was trying to sell information about an alleged out-of-wedlock child that Trump had fathered with one of his former housekeepers.

So, as they agreed at the Trump Tower meeting, Pecker immediately contacted Cohen with that information.

Cohen then told the defendant, Donald Trump, who told Cohen to take care of it.

After consulting with Cohen, Pecker directed Howard, his Editor-in-Chief at the National Enquirer, to negotiate an agreement to pay $30,000 to Sajudin to buy the exclusive rights of that story.

And the evidence will show that Pecker was not acting as a publisher; he was acting as a coconspirator.

The evidence will show that this was a highly unusual deal. Even for tabloid journalism, it was a lot more money than they would usually pay to a source.

They bought Sajudin’s story without even fully investigating it.

And it was the first time that David Pecker had ever paid anyone for information about Donald Trump.

But, Pecker directed that the deal take place because of the agreement he had reached and because he had promised Donald Trump at the Trump Tower meeting in August of 2015 that he would use his media empire to help the defendant’s campaign.

And they knew that public disclosure of Sajudin’s information would hurt that campaign.

Michael Cohen even coordinated with AMI throughout the whole process and insisted that AMI amend the agreement with Mr. Sajudin after it was signed, to add a $1 million damages penalty fee if Sajudin violated the confidential agreement.

So you have the candidate’s fixer actively colluding with a catch-and-kill deal with the media enterprise by adding deal terms to lock up the negative information even tighter to keep it from coming out before the election.

And when AMI later determined that Mr. Sajudin’s allegations weren’t even true, Cohen told Pecker not to release Sajudin, not to release him from his NDA until after the presidential election.

And because of the agreement they he had reached, Pecker did what Cohen said.

Pecker deliberately delayed releasing Sajudin from his non-disclosure agreement with AMI until after the November 2016 election, when it could no longer hurt Trump’s candidacy.

So that was just the first of the three catch-and-kill deals that I mentioned that came out of the Trump Tower conspiracy.

The second involved a woman named Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate.

About five months before the presidential election, in June of 2016, Dylan Howard of the National Enquirer heard from one of his frequent sources, a lawyer named Keith Davidson.

Davidson was representing Ms. McDougal, and she was shopping around her account of her affair with Mr. Trump.

Davidson told Howard that he had, quote, a blockbuster Trump story.

Karen McDougal said that she had had a romantic and sexual relationship with the defendant while he was married that lasted nearly a year.

So, as David Pecker had tasked him at the Trump Tower meeting, Howard got in touch with Cohen, the Trump Organization right away and told him what he had learned; Cohen then told the defendant; and the evidence will show that the defendant desperately did not want this information about Karen McDougal to become public because he was concerned about its effect on the election.

And at David Pecker’s direction, Howard flew to California, he met with Karen McDougal and her lawyer, Keith Davidson, in person.

Before the meeting, during the meeting, after the meeting, Howard and Pecker were in frequent and urgent contact with Michael Cohen, who wanted updates on the progress of their discussions.

You are going to see the flurry of text messages, the barrage of phone calls around those conversations and around that meeting.

And when Howard called Cohen after the meeting with Karen McDougal, Howard said he thought the allegations were true.

So, Cohen asked AMI to make arrangements to buy McDougal’s information quickly so they could prevent anyone else from publishing it.

Trump and Pecker and Cohen, all, they had a series of conversations and discussions about who would put up the money for that payoff deal.

Pecker ultimately agreed that he would have AMI make a $150,000 payment to McDougal in exchange for the limited life rights to the story of her affair.

To provide some cover for that payoff, AMI added other terms to the deal.

Ms. McDougal would appear on magazine covers; with the help of a ghost writer, they would run lifestyle articles under her name in other AMI magazines.

But the real reason Pecker directed AMI to make this payment to McDougal was to make sure she didn’t publicize her accounts of her affair with Trump before the 2016 election.

David Pecker will also testify that $150,000 was way more than AMI would ordinarily pay for this type of story.

But he discussed it directly with Donald Trump and he discussed it with Michael Cohen, and he agreed to the deal on the understanding that Trump was going to find a way to pay AMI back.

You will hear David Pecker testify about his conversations with Donald Trump about the McDougal payoff.

And three months before Election Day, AMI and McDougal signed that deal.

But as the weeks dragged on and the defendant hadn’t yet made good on his agreement to pay AMI back, Pecker started getting antsy, and he was frustrated, and he said so to Michael Cohen.

So to show Pecker that Trump really did plan to pay AMI back for the McDougal payoff, Cohen used his cell phone to record a conversation with Donald Trump in September of 2016.

You will get a chance to hear that recording during this trial.

On that tape, Cohen tells the defendant that he will create a company to buy up McDougal’s story from AMI.

Cohen tells the defendant that he spoke to Allen Weisselberg, who is the Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer, about how to set the whole thing up.

And on that recording, you will hear the defendant in his own voice.

You will hear him ask Cohen: So what do we got to the pay for this? One-fifty?

You will even hear Mr. Trump suggest in his own voice, you will hear him suggest paying in cash.

After that conversation, Cohen then proceeded to set up a shell company for the transfer.

It was less than six weeks to Election Day, and Cohen then worked out a deal with David Pecker for AMI to sell its rights to the McDougal story to Cohen’s shell company. That way AMI could get paid back and Trump would then own the rights to the McDougal story.

Just as Cohen was doing, Pecker also used a middleman to hide the true nature of the transaction.

He agreed to have another company put together a fake invoice billing Cohen’s shell company for so-called advisory services.

Trump would become the new owner of Ms. McDougal’s story, but to any observer looking at those records neither Pecker nor Trump would even appear as parties to the transaction.

After the agreement was signed, but before any money changed hands, David Pecker consulted with AMI’s general counsel.

And based on that conversation, Pecker got cold feet.

He told Cohen that the deal was off, the deal to transfer the rights to Cohen’s shell company was off and AMI would instead eat the cost of paying off McDougal.

So that’s the second catch-and-kill deal that came out of the Trump Tower agreement.

You will see all of that evidence.

You will see AMI learned about a blockbuster Trump story about a Playboy playmate’s extramarital affair with Donald Trump.

The company coordinated directly with the candidate to pay her off, to help the campaign by keeping her quiet just months before the election.

You will see the company not only made that corporate contribution, but that falsified other corporate records to hide the details of the deal.

And you will hear the defendant’s own voice on tape, in a recorded conversation, working out the intention for payment.

Next, about a month before the election, the Washington Post published a news story on video, which the evidence will show turned the rest of the presidential campaign entirely upside-down.

On October 7th, 2016, The Post published a video of Donald Trump, caught on a hot mic on the set of a television show called Access Hollywood.

He didn’t know he was being taped.

And you will see an email that the Washington Post reporter emailed to the campaign’s press secretary, Hope Hicks, a few hours before the story ran.

And they sent her a transcript of the Access Hollywood tape.

And the transcript depicts Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault.

It shows, it depicts, and I’m quoting the defendant’s words from the transcript that you will see in this trial: “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women, I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet, just kiss, I don’t even wait, when you are a star they let you do it, you can do anything, grab them by the pussy, you can do anything.” End quote.

Those were Donald Trump’s words on a video that was released one month before Election Day.

And the impact of that tape on the campaign was immediate and explosive.

Prominent allies withdrew their endorsements; they condemned Donald Trump’s language.

You will hear testimony that the Republican National Committee even considered whether it was too late to replace their own nominee and find another candidate for the election a month before Election Day.

The defendant and his campaign staff were deeply concerned that the tape would irreparably damage his viability as a candidate and reduce his standing with female voters in particular.

And they knew it was damaging not only because Trump bragged about sexual assault, they knew it was damaging not only because the language on the tape was crude and vulgar, the campaign was also worried about the damage the tape would cause precisely because it was on video seeing and hearing a candidate in his own words, in his own voice, in his own body language, his own gestures has a much greater impact on voters than words on paper.

So the campaign went into immediate damage control mode to blunt the impact of the tape.

Now, the defendant’s initial public response to the Access Hollywood tape was to call it locker room talk.

He told voters it was just words, not behavior, and that’s the context to what happened next.

One day after the Access Hollywood tape was released, Dylan Howard, he’s the National Enquirer’s Editor-in-Chief, told David Pecker that another woman had come forward with the claim of a sexual encounter that she had had with the defendant while he was married.

That woman was an adult film actress, a porn star named Stormy Daniels.

As Pecker had promised and as they had done for the last year, Howard got in touch with Michael Cohen at the Trump Organization immediately.

Howard told Cohen about the story.

He connected him with Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, Keith Davidson, the same lawyer who had represented Karen McDougal.

And Cohen then discussed the situation with Trump, who was adamant that he did not want the story to come out. Another story about sexual infidelity, especially with a porn star, on the heels of the Access Hollywood tape could have been devastating to his campaign.

So at Trump’s direction, Cohen negotiated a deal to buy Ms. Daniels’ story in order to prevent American voters from learning that information before Election Day.

Under that deal, another non-disclosure agreement, Daniels agreed that she would not disclose the sexual encounter in exchange for a payment of $130,000.

But Trump directed Cohen to try to delay finalizing the deal, to delay making any payment as long as possible; while also at the same time preventing Daniels from publicizing the story.

His hope was to delay it until after the election and then not pay at all.

And Cohen was able to put it off for a time with a series of excuses, but Daniels and her representatives figured out that they were being strung along.

It became clear that the story would become public if the deal wasn’t finalized immediately.

So with pressure mounting and Election Day fast approaching, Donald Trump agreed to the payoff and directed Cohen to proceed.

Cohen tried several times to get Pecker to agree to pay for this catch-and-kill deal, too, but Pecker was unhappy that he had never been paid back for the Karen McDougal deal or the Sajudin deal.

He was still willing to use AMI’s resources to help close the deal so long as someone else put up the money.

So Cohen discussed other payment options with Trump and with Allen Weisselberg, the Chief Financial Officer of the Trump Organization.

And Trump didn’t want to write a check himself to make the $130,000 payment, so he asked Cohen and Weisselberg to figure out some other way to make the payment.

And after discussing different possibilities with Weisselberg, they agreed that Cohen would make the payment through a shell company to make it harder to track.

But before putting up his own money, Cohen confirmed with Trump that Trump would pay him back.

And at Trump’s request, Cohen agreed to lay out his own money for the payment to keep Stormy Daniels quiet.

Two weeks before the presidential election, on the morning of October 26th, 2016, Cohen made two phone calls to the defendant to confirm that he was finalizing the arrangements. You will see the telephone records of those calls.

Then Cohen walked across the street, he opened a bank account in the name of a new shell company called Essential Consultants, LLC, which he had created to carry out the Stormy Daniels payoff.

He then transferred $131,000 from the home equity line of credit on his own home into the shell company’s bank account, and the next day Cohen wired 130 grand to Stormy Daniels’ lawyer to keep her quiet.

And as part of their efforts to try to keep the entire scheme under wraps, Cohen gave false information to the banks about the shell company’s business purpose in the account opening forms he was required to complete and in the wire transfer records that he filled out describing the purpose of the $130,000 payment.

Cohen made that payment at Donald Trump’s direction and for his benefit, and he did it with a specific goal of influencing the outcome of the election.

Now, look, no politician wants bad press, but the evidence at trial will show that this was not spin or communication strategy; this was a planned, coordinated long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected, through illegal expenditures, to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior, using doctored corporate records and bank forms to conceal those payments along the way.

It was election fraud. Pure and simple.

We will never know, and it doesn’t matter, if this conspiracy was the difference-maker in a close election, but you will see evidence in the defendant’s own words from his social media posts, from his speeches at campaign rallies and other events, you will see in his own words, making crystal clear that he was certainly concerned about how all of this could hurt his standing with voters and with female voters in particular.

You will also see evidence that on election night, as news outlets got closer to calling the election for Donald Trump, Keith Davidson, he was the lawyer for both Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, texted Dylan Howard at the National Enquirer and he said, “What have we done?”

And about a month after the election, Pecker then authorized AMI to release both Sajudin and McDougal from their non-disclosure agreements.

So, having paid for the stories in order to keep them from the public before Election Day, Pecker and AMI then told both McDougal and Sajudin a month after the election that they were no longer bound by the non-disclosure agreements.

In January 2017, Pecker met again with Donald Trump. This was before Mr. Trump was inaugurated. He was still working primarily from Trump Tower here in Manhattan, and they met privately in Trump’s office. The defendant thanked Pecker for handling the McDougal and Sajudin stories, and he invited him to the inauguration.

And that summer, the defendant invited Pecker to the White House.

Pecker brought his eyes and ears, Dylan Howard from the National Enquirer, to that dinner.

And the defendant hosted a thank you dinner to thank Pecker and AMI for their contributions to his campaign.

There were a few other loose ends to deal with after the election.

One was figuring out how Michael Cohen was going to get paid back for the Stormy Daniels payoff.

In January 2017, before the defendant moved down to Washington to begin his presidency, Cohen met with Allen Weisselberg to talk about how Cohen was going to get reimbursed for the payoff for Ms. Daniels.

Weisselberg, you will remember, was the Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer, and he was one of the defendant’s longest serving and most trusted employee.

Neither Trump nor the Trump Organization could just write a check to Cohen for $130,000 with a memo line that said, reimbursement for porn star payoff.

They had to disguise the nature of the repayment, so they agreed to cook the books and make it look like the repayment was actually income, payments for services rendered instead of a reimbursement.

Weisselberg asked Cohen to bring a copy of a bank statement for the Essential Consultants’ account showing the $130,000 payment that Cohen had made to keep Daniels quiet before the election.

Weisselberg and Cohen agreed to a total repayment amount of $420,000.

And here is how they got to that number.

They started with the $130,000 that Trump owed Cohen for the Stormy Daniels payoff.

Then they added $50,000 for a separate reimbursement Cohen was claiming which had to do with Tech Services he paid for during the campaign.

That adds up to 180.

Then they agreed to double that amount to $360,000 to account for taxes.

Now, of course, if Trump was just reimbursing Cohen, there was no need to gross it up for taxes.

They doubled it because their plan was to call it income instead of a reimbursement.

And if Cohen was getting money they were calling income, he would have to pay taxes on it.

Cohen was close to a 50 percent tax bracket when you consider federal and state and city tax, so to make him whole on the $180,000 that the defendant owed him, they had to double the amount to 360.

Then he had added another $60,000 as a year-end bonus.

And all of that comes to a total of $420,000.

And Allen Weisselberg wrote all of that down.

The bank statement that I told you about that he asked Cohen to bring to their meeting, the bank statement from the Essential Consultants LLC account, which showed the $130,000 wire that Cohen had made to Keith Davidson to keep Stormy Daniels quiet, you will see in this trial, Allen Weisselberg’s handwriting down the side of that bank statement laying out every one of the steps that I just described, showing how they converted the $130,000 payoff amount to the 420 grand that Cohen was going to get paid back, as a grossed up way to disguise it, not as a reimbursement, but as income.

Cohen and Weisselberg then met with Trump, who approved that repayment amount of 420 grand on the $130,000 Stormy Daniels payment and a few others expenses.

Now, you will see evidence at trial that Donald Trump was a very frugal businessman. He believed in pinching pennies. He believed in watching every dollar. He believed in negotiating every bill.

It’s all over all of the books he has written.

He ran the Trump Organization with total control.

You will hear testimony about his relentless focus on the bottom line.

But when it came time to pay Michael Cohen back for the catch-and-kill deal, you will see that he didn’t negotiate the price down; he doubled it.

And he doubled it so they could disguise it as income.

And you will hear evidence that the Trump Organization was not in the practice of paying people twice what they owed for anything.

This might be the only time that ever happened.

And Donald Trump’s willingness to do so here shows just how important it was to him to hide the true nature of Cohen’s illegal payment to Ms. Daniels and the overall election conspiracy that they had launched in August of 2015.

When Cohen and Weisselberg met with the defendant to agree on the doubled-up reimbursement amount, they decided they would pay it back in a series of monthly payments over the course of the entire year in 2017.

Now, $420,000 spread over 12 payments comes out to $35,000 a month.

You will see that calculation in Allen Weisselberg’s handwritten notes, too.

So the defendant and Cohen and Weisselberg agreed that every month Cohen would send a bogus invoice to the defendant through the Trump Organization, falsely requesting payments of $35,000 for legal services rendered in a given month of 2017 pursuant to a retainer agreement.

That was a double lie. There was no retainer agreement.

Cohen was not getting paid for legal services rendered in 2017. It was instead what they thought was a clever way to pay Cohen back without being too obvious about it.

And in early February of 2017, Cohen went down to Washington, and he met with the defendant at the White House, and they confirmed that repayment arrangement.

We are going to show you at trial a photo of Cohen at the White House for that meeting.

And a few days later, after they met and confirmed the whole plan, Cohen sent the first of his fake invoices to the Trump Organization.

And a few days after that, Cohen got his first reimbursement check.

In total, Cohen submitted 11 phony invoices by email to the Trump Organization here in Manhattan so the defendant could pay him back.

Each invoice repeated the lie that Cohen and defendant had agreed on in advance, that Cohen was requesting payment for legal services pursuant to a retainer agreement which didn’t exist.

Through these false business records, the defendant intended to make sure that nobody learned about the Stormy Daniels payoff and the illegal election fraud scheme launched at the Trump Tower meeting in 2015.

The defendant’s accounting staff at Trump Tower here in Manhattan then processed every one of those invoices as business records of the Trump Organization and retained them in the Trump Organization’s files.

The accounting staff recorded the reimbursements in their general ledgers, falsely, as legal expenses with a description of a retainer.

The accounting staff then prepared checks that each included the description retainer.

The checks were stapled to the bogus invoices for approval and signature.

The first two checks were paid from a trust the defendant had created called the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which held all of the Trump Organization’s assets after he became president.

The defendant was the beneficiary of that trust.

Each of the remaining checks that were issued over the course of 2017 were paid from the defendant’s own bank accounts.

And the defendant signed those checks, each of them himself, while he was president.

And the Trump Organization maintained all of those records, the false invoices, the vouchers with false entries, the checks with check stubs with false entries at Trump Tower here in Manhattan.

And with the final payment in December of 2017, the defendant had repaid Cohen the full $420,000 they had agreed upon, and the monthly payments stopped.

Now, during this trial you will hear a lot about Michael Cohen.

I suspect the defense will go to great lengths to get you to reject his testimony precisely because it is so damming.

You will learn, and we will be very upfront about it, the fact that Michael Cohen, like other witnesses in this trial, has made mistakes in his past.

For example, Cohen will tell you that when the truth about the payoff to Stormy Daniels first began to come to light in 2018, he lied.

He lied about it to protect his boss.

You will also learn that Michael Cohen has a criminal record.

He will testify that in April 2018, the FBI raided his residences and his office as part of an investigation that included potential violations of federal campaign finance law.

Cohen will also testify in this trial that he ultimately pled guilty and went to jail for causing an unlawful corporate contribution in connection with the Karen McDougal payments and for making an excessive campaign contribution in connection with the Stormy Daniels payoff.

(Whereupon, Senior Court Reporter Lisa Kramsky is relieved by Senior Court Reporter Laurie Eisenberg, and the transcript continues on the following page.)

He also pled guilty to and served time for tax crimes and lying to a bank and lying to Congress.

And you’ll also learn that Cohen has publicly committed to making sure the Defendant is held accountable for his role in this conspiracy.

The evidence will also show why you can credit Michael Cohen’s testimony, despite those past mistakes.

As we discussed in jury selection, you will need to keep an open mind and carefully evaluate all of the evidence that corroborates Michael Cohen’s testimony and the testimony of all of the witnesses.

Cohen’s testimony will be backed up by testimony from other witnesses you will hear from, including David Pecker and Keith Davidson. It will be backed up by an extensive paper trail of bank records, emails, text messages, phone logs, business documents and other records that we will show you, sometimes at length, during this trial. And it will be backed up by Donald Trump’s own words on tape, in social media posts, in his own books, and in video of his own speeches.

Now, as I said when I started, this case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up, an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election, and then the steps that Donald Trump took to conceal that illegal election fraud.

At the end of the case, we are confident that you will have no reasonable doubt that Donald Trump is guilty of falsifying business records with the intent to conceal an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election.

And as you credit all of the evidence the People will present, we ask you to use your common sense, look past any distractions, look past any irrelevant sideshows that may pop up during this trial. Tune out the noise. Focus on the facts. Focus on the logical inferences that follow from those facts. Focus on the evidence. Listen to the testimony. Read the documents, the emails, the text messages, the bank statements, the handwritten notes, all of it.

And, after all of that evidence is in, we’ll have a chance to speak to you again during closing arguments. My colleague, Joshua Steinglass, will go through all of that evidence and explain that it, inescapably, leads to only one conclusion: Donald Trump is guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree.

THE COURT: Thank you, Mr. Colangelo. Counsel.