Former US President Donald Trump sits in the courtroom of the Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, USA, on Friday, April 26, 2024.
Jeenah Moon | Via Reuters
This is a developing story and will be updated throughout the day.
Prosecutors called two new witnesses in the New York hush money trial of former President Donald Trump on Friday afternoon.
The first was Trump’s longtime personal secretary, Rhona Graff. Considered by many to be the former president’s most influential guardian during his years at the Trump Organization, Graff said Friday that she no longer works for Trump but that her lawyers are paid by the Trump Organization.
Graff confirmed that Trump had saved contact information for two women at the center of the hush money case: former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, an adult film star.
After Graff, prosecutors called a banker, Gary Farro, who was a senior executive at First Republic Bank in 2016 when the hush-money payment that is crucial to the Trump indictment was made.
Farro described how former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen worked with him to transfer $130,000 to a First Republic bank account, money that Cohen later paid to Daniels through her lawyer to buy her silence.
Graff and Farro’s statements came after defense attorneys spent the morning cross-examining former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker. The cross came after three days in which Pecker gave damning testimony for the prosecution.
Pecker’s cross-examination
Among Trump lawyer Emil Bove’s questions to Pecker was whether it was standard practice for the National Enquirer, the tabloid magazine Pecker once edited, to have relationships with outside sources such as Trump and his then-lawyer Michael Cohen. Pecker said it was.
Pecker also appeared to confirm that for years the National Enquirer often only rebroadcast old critical news, including top stories about former President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton, who ran for president against Trump in 2016.
Pecker was later pressed about his relationship with Cohen, apparently in an attempt to suggest to Boves that the two were closer than previously known.
Bove said Cohen wanted Pecker to try to get him a job at a company called iPayments in 2016 and that he also sought help getting a job with businessman Mark Cuban.
Pecker confirmed that Cohen asked him to send paparazzi to a meeting between the Trump lawyer and the Cuban. He did not say whether he actually sent the photographers.
The hush money agreement between Pecker’s publishing company, American Media, and McDougal also came into focus during testimony on Friday. Bove tried to portray the financial agreement as being designed primarily to boost McDougal’s media career.
Prosecutors and Pecker have described it all week as an attempt to bury McDougal’s story about her alleged affair with Trump because the story could have damaged Trump’s presidential campaign.
Pecker admitted that American Media published dozens of articles under McDougal’s name, and he told her that the value of the services portion of their agreement was worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Pecker’s statement was also the latest example showing how close the media executive was to Trump throughout the campaign and in the early days of his presidency.
Pecker discussed a meeting between Trump and Cohen in August 2015 at Trump Tower in New York. The statement later led to another meeting on January 6, 2017, which Pecker attended at Trump Tower, where he saw Reince Priebus and Mike Pompeo sitting with Trump. Priebus and Pompeo later became White House chief of staff and secretary of state, respectively, in the Trump administration.
As Trump entered the courtroom Friday morning, he said he thought Thursday’s trial went “very well.”
He also complained about the coldness of the courtroom, claiming it was due to conflicts of interest on the part of the judge. He called the proceedings “a rigged process.” Trump has repeatedly made the same accusations on social media.
Pecker’s earlier statement
Pecker testified earlier this week about the “catch and kill” plan he devised with Trump and Cohen to buy the rights to negative tabloid stories about Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and not publish them, essentially killed.
Pecker described how his publisher paid a former Trump Tower bouncer $30,000 for a story he didn’t believe was true, and another $150,000 to McDougal for the rights to her story about an alleged affair Pecker reported said it was true.
Pecker also explained that after purchasing the first two stories and receiving no refund from Trump for them, he was unwilling to pay another $130,000 to buy the silence of Daniels, who claimed she had a decade had a sexual encounter with Trump before he ran for president.
Pecker sat just a few feet from Trump as he spoke, and the two men occasionally glanced at each other. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of a plan to cover up restitution payments he eventually made to Cohen after his lawyer and personal fixer paid the $130,000 to buy Daniels’ silence.
Pecker also testified that he suspected the company’s payments for the bouncer’s silence and McDougal’s story could constitute campaign finance violations because they were essentially undeclared donations to support Trump’s presidential campaign.
He consulted a campaign finance attorney about the matter, but publisher AMI, the parent company of the National Enquirer, later received a Federal Election Commission inquiry about the payments.
The company eventually admitted to a campaign finance violation and paid a fine of more than $180,000 in an arbitration agreement with the FEC in 2021 to resolve the matter.
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2024-04-26 21:15:06
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