What happened during Michael Cohen’s 3rd day of testimony in the Trump hush money trial

Read the Full Transcript

• Amna Nawaz:

  Welcome to the "NewsHour."

  Former President Donald Trump's one-time lawyer Michael Cohen spent his third day on the stand today in a Manhattan courthouse.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Cohen is now the key witness in the case against his former boss, and he again faced hours of scrutiny over many lies and misstatements he's made.

  William Brangham was again in court today and joins us now.

  So, William, Mr. Trump's legal team had Michael Cohen on the stand the entire day. What were they trying to accomplish with their time with him?

• William Brangham:

  Trump's lead lawyer, Todd Blanche, in a somewhat circuitous and occasionally zigzagging line of questions, tried to keep up the attack that they started earlier this week, which is to elicit testimony that proves their point that Michael Cohen cannot be trusted, that he is a fundamentally untruthful, dishonest and unscrupulous witness on this case.

  And Blanche went through multiple examples today in the past where Michael Cohen was talking to Congress or talking to federal agents or testifying in other courts of law and he raised his hand to say, I swear to tell the truth, and he did not.

  We heard multiple scrutinized examples of that. Blanche also elicited some testimony about some other dubious practices of Michael Cohen's, like surreptitiously recording other people's phone calls. Blanche also tried to poke holes in Cohen's earlier testimony where he testified to very specific recollections of phone calls that happened six or seven or eight years ago.

  And he elicited testimony saying, Michael Cohen, you get dozens of phone calls a day, thousands over the course of the year. How is it possible that you could remember the details of a phone call from seven years ago?

  And so he went at him quite a bit on those points.

  The whole point here, obviously, is that if you undercut Michael Cohen, you undercut the fundamentals of this case, because Cohen is the one who most directly says that Donald Trump orchestrated and was central to this scheme to cover up the hush money payments and the falsification of these business records.

• Geoff Bennett:

  So how did Michael Cohen then respond to the scrutiny?

• William Brangham:

  A lot of times, Geoff, he admitted to these lies, simply because he has no other option, sometimes because he went to prison for them. Other times, there's just clear evidence that he said one thing one day and another thing the very next day.

  But there were some other cases where he pushed back on this. Like, there was a lot of talk today about whether or not he has specifically asked for a pardon from then-President Trump. And, sometimes, Cohen would try to parse word games and have a semantic debate over what the — whether it was — whether he meant something in the past tense or the present tense.

  But on the whole, Cohen was a pretty firm, soft-spoken, steady witness today.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Well, that's interesting because there were some question as to whether or not Mr. Trump's defense team could provoke Michael Cohen into losing his cool or even lashing out.

  It sounds like that didn't happen.

• William Brangham:

  No, that's exactly right, Geoff.

  There was no — there were clearly sometimes where Todd Blanche tried to do that. He several times raised his voice today and said, that was a lie, what you were just saying, wasn't it? And Cohen, for the most part, did not take the bait.

  There were other times where Blanche brought up testimony about some very personal and humiliating times in Michael Cohen's life,like, for instance, when he was very frustrated about not getting a job in the White House, and there were texts back and forth with his daughter, where his daughter was saying, dad, it seems like you're clearly getting walked all over by the Trump administration.

  But even then, Michael Cohen did not seem to sort of give up the ghost in this case.

  There was one interesting example that happened today, though. It's hard to know on some level how much this jury knows about who Michael Cohen really is, this famously profane, belligerent lawyer. And Todd Blanche played a clip of one of Michael Cohen's podcasts in court today.

  And in that clip he played, all of a sudden, you hear Michael Cohen on these loud speakers screaming, saying, you better believe I want Trump to go to jail. I want him to rot in hell for all of the things he did for my family.

  And it was just this incredibly jarring moment where, for the first time, the jury heard what this Michael Cohen sort of figure had always been characterized as, but thus far had not shown himself to be that on the stand so far.

• Geoff Bennett:

  OK, that is William Brangham in New York for us tonight.

  William, thank you.

• William Brangham:

  Thanks, Geoff.