Donald Trump's hush money case resumed in a New York courtroom with testimony from Keith Davidson. Earlier in the day, a judge ruled Trump violated a gag order and fined him $9,000.
AP is live from a courthouse in New York as banker Gary Farro testifies in Donald Trump’s hush money trial.found that the former president violated a gag order 9 times, fining him $9,000 and warning he could be jailed for further offenses. As testimony resumed, jurors have heard from Trump’s former executive assistant, the executive director of C-SPAN’s archives and a banker.As he did so, the former president pressed in to view the message on a monitor in front of him on the defense table.
During one of the interruptions, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche turned to Eric Trump in the gallery and chuckled before going up to the bench.Asked if Cohen ever told him whom he was representing in the Daniels negotiations, Davidson said the ex-lawyer may not have explicitly stated he was working on Trump’s behalf — but the implication was clear.
“I just felt like there was going to be more than a flurry of activity. I felt like it was going to be a tornado,” Davidson explained in court.Before the break, Davidson testified that though both parties had reached a deal, the payment to Daniels didn’t materialize by the agreed upon date. The alliterative code names were picked, in part, because Daniels was the plaintiff and Trump was the defendant, the lawyer testified.
“In essence, Michael Cohen stepped into AMI’s shoes,” Davidson said, referring to the name of the Enquirer’s parent company at the time, American Media Inc. After the blog post was published, Davidson said, Daniels’ agent, Gina Rodriguez, called him and said “some jerk” had called “and was very, very aggressive” and threatened to sue.Davidson testified that when he called Cohen, the ex-Trump lawyer greeted him “with a hostile barrage of insults and insinuations that went on for quite a while.”
Davidson testified that once the deal was done, he called Cohen as a professional courtesy because the agreement involved his client, Donald Trump. But even as they reached a basic framework for the deal, Davidson described his “growing frustration with the process.” At one point, Davidson said he was pushed to call former Trump attorney Michael Cohen directly, something he said he had been trying to avoid.
Links to the old Truth Social posts redirected to a “Not found” message, while those to Trump’s website redirected to a 404 error page. Davidson said he was playing the Enquirer and ABC News against each other to get the best deal for McDougal. The former Playboy model didn’t want to tell her story publicly, which would’ve been required if she went to ABC, he said.Shortly after Davidson began representing McDougal, he reached out to Dylan Howard, the editor in chief of the National Enquirer, promising a “blockbuster Trump story.
The former longtime Elle magazine advice columnist alleges Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s and then defamed her after she came forward publicly in 2019. He says nothing happened between them and has accused her of engineering a “hoax” to sell a book. After two federal trials last year and this winter, juries awarded Carroll over $88 million. Trump is appealing.
After confirming the veracity of the clips, Browning, who manages C-SPAN’s video collection, was dismissed from the witness stand. Trump’s attorneys declined to question him.Court won’t be in session on Friday, May 24 to accommodate a juror who has a flight that morning, Judge Merchan said. “He was a challenging client because of his desire to get things done so quickly,” Farro said. “Ninety percent of the time it was an urgent matter.”Within a day after opening the Essential Consultants LLC account on Oct. 26, 2016, and funding it with about $130,000 from his own home equity loan, Cohen wired out $130,000 to Keith Davidson, then a lawyer for Stormy Daniels, documents showed.
The additional scrutiny would have delayed or even nixed opening the account, which Cohen had wanted to open right away. In particular, the adult film world “is an industry we don’t work with,” he said.Judge Merchan wrote that he was finding Trump “in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying a lawful mandate” of the court on nine separate occasions for posts made on Truth Social and his campaign website.
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