|
Post by Webster on Apr 26, 2024 12:33:11 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Bove then asked whether “it was standard operating procedure” for the National Enquirer to repackage news in the public domain. He pointed to the tabloid’s coverage of medical malpractice suits against Ben Carson, a rival Republican presidential candidate in 2016. “In May 2015, long before any articles on this [National Enquirer] page, the Guardian had covered this issue?” Bove noted that the Guardian’s article referenced seven malpractice claims against Carson before the National Enquirer published content on Carson’s scorecard as a physician. The point of Bove’s questioning here might be to show that Pecker wasn’t going out of his way to publish content that helped Trump’s presidential aspiration, but rather that it was just a good business practice. By discussing the regurgitative process of using others’ content for the scandal sheet, Bove is trying to undermine the strength of any alleged conspiracy.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 26, 2024 12:34:26 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Biden makes surprise visit to Manhattan as Trump sits in courtJoe Biden just made an unscheduled stop in midtown Manhattan, about four miles from the courthouse where his rival Donald Trump is on trial. Biden’s motorcade pulled into Sirius XM’s studios for a live interview with Howard Stern, a former shock jock who has in recent years adopted a more sober style. Biden arrived in the city yesterday after attending a campaign event in the suburbs. He’s scheduled to return to the White House this afternoon. The president has said little about Trump’s four criminal cases, including the charges related to falsifying business documents brought against him by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. Biden does not do very many interviews or press conferences compared with his predecessors. He is also locked in what is expected to be a tight re-election race against Trump, who regularly interacts with the press. The two candidates will face off at ballot boxes nationwide in November.
Back in the courtroom, Bove tried to undermine the notion that McDougal represented a threat to Trump’s reputation. If she didn’t constitute an actual problem, then giving her money wasn’t meant to influence the election, Bove seems to suggest. “President Trump did not pay you any money related to Karen McDougal?” Bove asked. “No,” replied Pecker. -“When you first heard about this story, you understood that Ms McDougal did not want to publish it?” -“Yes.” -“She did not want to?” Bove asked. -“She did not want to,” Pecker replied.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 26, 2024 12:35:24 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Bove also tried to undermine any idea that Trump had reason to be concerned about McDougal. He asked Pecker about Trump’s call to his office sometime after word of McDougal’s story. Pecker told Trump he didn’t think it was true that a Mexican media group had offered to buy the account of an alleged affair for $8m. -“As you sit here today, do you remember during that conversation, you said to President Trump: ‘It is my understanding that she doesn’t want her story published’?” -“Yes, I did, I remember saying that,” Pecker said.
Bove has been asking about Keith Davidson, McDougal’s and adult film actor Stormy Daniels’ former attorney, and his relationship with Dylan Howard, the National Enquirer’s editor-in-chief at the time of the alleged scheme. Pecker confirmed to Bove that Davidson was a “major source” for Howard. “He was also friends with Cohen, correct?” Bove asked. Pecker again said yes. But “you didn’t learn about the Cohen-Davidson connection” until AMI brokered a non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors in September 2018 – about one month after Cohen pleaded guilty to various crimes, including charges related to campaign contributions. Pecker said that was correct. “And you don’t know what Cohen and Davidson were doing on the side, do you?” Pecker said he did not. It seems that Bove is trying to downplay to jurors Pecker’s role in any purported conspiracy. By suggesting that Cohen and Davidson engaged in backroom dealing, this seems to sap Pecker of his power to control the narrative by controlling people’s stories. And if Pecker didn’t hold the cards because of any surreptitious discussions, his potential to influence the election seems less likely.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 26, 2024 12:36:22 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Trump lawyer trying to create distance between Pecker and Stormy Daniels payoffThe court is now taking a short break. But before it did, Bove cross-examined Pecker about Stormy Daniels, the adult film actor who is a prominent player in this case. Bove is trying to create distance between Pecker and the Daniels payoff, which would again potentially undermine a conspiracy. Pecker confirmed that he’d had a phone call from Howard in which he learned about Daniels’ account. -“You told Mr Howard that you wanted no involvement with the story, is that correct?” Bove asked. -“That’s correct,” Pecker replied. -“You did not consider Stormy Daniels’ story to be part of any agreement you had in August 2015?” was Bove’s next question. “That’s right,” Pecker replied. Bove then hammered his point: ”You wanted nothing to do with it.” -“That’s right,” Pecker said.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 26, 2024 12:37:39 GMT -5
(The Guardian) The trial has now resumed.
Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker remains on the witness stand, and is being cross-examined by Emil Bove, who represents Donald Trump. Once Bove wraps up, prosecutors from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s team will get another chance at questioning Pecker.
Bove has grilled Pecker about the non-prosecution agreement between AMI and federal prosecutors reached in September 2018. Before that month, Pecker was trying to sell the National Enquirer to Hudson News. “In addition to the unpleasantness of sitting with the FBI, that put some pressure on the negotiations,” Bove intimated of Pecker’s discussions with federal authorities. “It would add on to the stress of the transaction?” Bove also asked: would the federal investigation have to wrap before the National Enquirer could be sold? The implication, of course, is that Pecker might have been a little bit hasty in ascribing so much responsibility to Cohen and Trump in his chats with the feds. Bove’s line of questioning is implying that AMI entered into a non-prosecution agreement under duress – undermining Pecker’s statements to authorities that the company was involved with the payoff scheme.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 26, 2024 12:38:34 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Bove has been drilling down into the non-prosecution agreement, which was brokered after Pecker met with federal authorities and told them about the August 2015 meeting with Donald Trump and his attorney Michael Cohen, and the scheme’s machinations. Bove asked Pecker whether, during a meeting with the Manhattan district attorney, his lawyers took issue with the accuracy of the agreement. Pecker pushed back and said that concern over accuracy was insignificant, involving the use of the word purchase and sell which, in his view, were interchangeable. Pecker explained that in this context, sell and purchase both referred to snatching stories off the market. The defense also tried to ask Pecker more about Cohen. Was there a time that Cohen claimed, falsely, that Trump had then-US attorney general Jeff Sessions “in his pocket”? “Based on your experience, Michael Cohen was prone to exaggeration?” Bove asked. Pecker said that was the case. Bove appears to be using Pecker’s testimony to pick apart the credibility of Cohen, a former consigliere to Trump who is expected to testify at some point in the trial.
Donald Trump’s attorney Emil Bove has wrapped up his cross-examination of David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid. Bove’s questions appeared intended to undermine the prosecution’s allegation of a conspiracy by Trump, and to undermine the credibility of its witnesses. Now Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s team gets a second chance to question its witness Pecker. Attorney Joshua Steinglass is representing the prosecution in this round of questioning, which is known as “recross”.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 26, 2024 12:39:50 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Steinglass grilled Pecker about the federal non-prosecution agreement, where he had outlined the conspiracy while meeting with prosecutors. Steinglass asked about the fifth paragraph of this non-prosecution agreement, which said that the “principle purpose” of the deal between Pecker’s company AMI and Karen McDougal, who alleged an affair with Trump, was to prevent her account from surfacing as he ran for president. Steinglass asked Pecker: Was his purpose in locking down rights to McDougal’s story to influence the election? Pecker said yes. Were other perks in McDougal’s agreement – such as promises to put her on the tabloid’s cover – actual benefits, or to hide the true purpose of the payments? “It was included in the contract, basically as a disguise,” Pecker said.
On redirect, Steinglass is working doggedly to show that Pecker’s work to publish stories on Trump’s opponents was not business as usual, as Bove might suggest. Pecker, under questioning, admitted that the payouts to women who had accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of misconduct around his California gubernatorial campaign were paid anywhere from $500 to $20,000. Steinglass’s point of eliciting this testimony was to show that payouts were rarely, if ever, the more-than-$100,000 sums paid to McDougal and Daniels. Steinglass asked whether Pecker had ever let a candidate drive and edit coverage. “Uh, no,” he said.
Steinglass also pressed: “What was your understanding about the part of the agreement that involved money?" “My understanding is, those stories that come up, I would speak to Michael Cohen, and tell him that these are the stories that are going to be for sale that if we don’t buy them, somebody else will, and that Michael Cohen would buy them or make sure that they don’t ever get published, that was my understanding from that meeting,” Pecker said.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 26, 2024 20:26:03 GMT -5
(The Guardian) 4:56pm Summary--David Pecker, the former National Enquirer publisher and Trump ally, took to the stand in the Manhattan courtroom for a fourth day of testimony. Trump’s lawyers continued their cross-examination of Pecker, presenting a granular look into a hush-money scheme that prosecutors allege was meant to sway the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. --Trump attorney Emil Bove’s questions prompted Pecker to effectively say that coverage beneficial to Trump had been business as usual, as the defense team tried to chip away at the prosecution’s claim that there had been an illicit conspiracy to sway the 2016 election. --Pecker testified that the Enquirer had run negative stories about the Clintons as part of the effort to help the Trump campaign, agreed to in a meeting in August 2015, as the defense attempted to show that Pecker helped run positive stories about Trump and negative stories about other politicians even before the alleged catch-and-kill scheme. --Trump’s legal team also appeared to try driving wedges into the notion that Trump’s 2006 affair with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, had been any real threat to Trump’s reputation. Pecker admitted Trump had not paid him any money directly related to McDougal. --Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime executive assistant, was called to the stand on Friday afternoon as the prosecution’s second witness. --Pecker testified earlier in the week that Graff had often been the conduit for his communications with Trump, routing his calls and summoning him to a January 2017 meeting at Trump Tower in which he and Trump discussed some of the hush-money arrangements at issue in the case. --Graff testified that contact information for Daniels and McDougal had been in Trump’s contacts. She said Daniels had once been at Trump’s offices in Trump Tower, and that she had assumed Daniels was there to discuss potentially being a contestant on The Apprentice. --Gary Farro was called as the prosecution’s third witness. Farro works at Flagstar Bank as a private client adviser and was previously at First Republic, which was used by Cohen. --Prosecutors accused Trump of violating a court-imposed gag order – which bars him from speaking publicly about witnesses, prosecutors, jurors, court staff and their relatives – four more times over the course of the week, bringing the total violations to 14, prosecutors allege. --Prosecutors said judge Juan Merchan should hold Trump in contempt of court and fine him $1,000 for each violation. Merchan has yet to rule on the alleged violations. --Nevertheless, in a post written, unusually, in the third person on his Truth Social account, the former president has once again demanded Judge Juan Merchan lift a gag order in his trial on charges of falsifying business documents. “We request that Judge Merchan immediately LIFT THE GAG ORDER, so that President Trump is able to freely state his views, feelings, and policies,” the post said.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 29, 2024 12:27:37 GMT -5
(The Guardian) One big story about which we do not expect any news today is Donald Trump’s trial on charges of falsifying business records in New York, which is taking Monday off. But as the Guardian’s David Smith reports, for the former president’s supporters, the trial may as well not be happening at all: In one America, he cuts a diminished, humbled figure during coverage that runs from morn till night. “He seems considerably older and he seems annoyed, resigned, maybe angry,” said broadcaster Rachel Maddow after seeing Donald Trump up close in court. “He seems like a man who is miserable to be here.”
But in the other America – that of Fox News, far-right podcasts and the Make America Great Again (Maga) base – the trial of the former president over a case involving a hush-money payment to an adult film performer is playing out very differently.
Here, anger at what is seen as political persecution meets with another emotion: sublime indifference. Barely a handful of Trump supporters bother to protest each day outside the court in New York, a Democratic stronghold. The trial receives less prominence in conservative media, which prefers to devote airtime to other national news including protests on university campuses against the war in Gaza.
The divergence ensures that, with TV cameras not permitted in court, two rival narratives are forming around the first criminal trial of an ex-US president. In one telling, Trump is a philander who falsified business records to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election. In the other, he is the victim of a justice department conspiracy designed to rob the Republican nominee of victory in 2024.
The first week of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York centered on the testimony of David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid. He elaborated on the tactic of “catch and kill”, which is when a publication negotiates exclusive rights to stories to prevent their publication, and whether or not Trump was attempting to carry out such a scheme ahead of his 2016 election victory.
|
|
|
Post by Newsman on Apr 30, 2024 12:46:50 GMT -5
...the hush-money trial of former President Donald Trump enters its third week...(The Guardian) Trump hush-money trial enters third week with testimony from banker who worked with Cohen And we’re back: Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial enters its third week today, after a fallow day yesterday. Expected today? A possible ruling on whether Trump owes at least $10,000 for violating his gag order, and more testimony from the private banker Gary Farro about dodgy financial maneuvering to hide Trump’s dirty laundry from American voters. Farro already told the court last week that in 2015 he became the contact for Michael Cohen – then Trump’s attorney – at First Republic Bank, where he says he witnessed Cohen’s financial chicanery to protect Trump. Prosecutors say Trump, Cohen and tabloid honcho David Pecker plotted in the summer of 2015 to bury any negative stories that could harm Trump’s run for president. The next year, with crucially less than a month to go before the election, came the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about groping women. And a day after that – 8 October 2016 – prosecutors say Cohen learned that Stormy Daniels, the pornographic film star, was alleging an affair with Trump. Prosecutors say Trump’s campaign feared that any additional accounts of boorish behavior could sink his chances in the general election – so, they say, Cohen set up LLCs to facilitate hush-money payments without the candidate’s fingerprints. As evidence, they say Cohen sought to open accounts for two new companies in October of 2016. Into one of them – Essential Consultants – he plunked his own money. This was the account that wired $130,000 to Daniels’ lawyer, so she would not go public with her story.
But if Farro’s testimony is concerning to Trump’s team, it’s little compared to what might come later in the week should the court get to hear from Donald Trump’s former Mr Fixit himself – Michael Cohen. Cohen, a disbarred lawyer who served as Trump’s personal attorney for 12 years until 2018, has turned on his boss and is one of district attorney Alvin Bragg’s key witnesses. The whole case, in fact, could turn on Cohen’s testimony about payments to two women: the adult film star Stormy Daniels and the former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal. It all comes down to how those payments were made, and whether they were disguised – as prosecutors claim – to violate accounting and political campaign laws. Another disbarred lawyer named Michael – Avenatti – will feature in Cohen’s testimony, because he represented Daniels and McDougal in the transactions. (Avenatti himself is serving five years in prison for stealing $297,000 from Daniels.) (Oh, and obstructing the IRS.) (And defrauding Nike of $20m.)
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 30, 2024 12:48:05 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Last week was mainly about testimony from major witness and Trump ally David Pecker. Prosecutors had a few main goals with Pecker, who is the former CEO of American Media Inc (AMI) and CEO and publisher of the National Enquirer. They wanted to: --Show that Pecker and Trump engaged in an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election. --Establish AMI’s “catch-and-kill” pattern of purchasing negative stories about Trump to keep them under wraps. --Show how close the former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was with Trump. --Tee things up for future testimony about the falsified payments scheme that Trump allegedly used to repay Cohen for the hush-money payment to keep adult film star Stormy Daniels from telling the public about her alleged affair with Trump right before the 2016 election. Mission accomplished, for the most part: Pecker gave them pretty much all of the above.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 30, 2024 12:48:58 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Eric Trump joins his father in the courtroomDonald Trump has walked into the courtroom; he’s wearing a dense blue suit, red tie, white shirt and what appears to be an American flag pin on his lapel. Eric Trump is here, in the front row. His father had been standing and chatting with him for a few moments. This is the first time a member of Trump’s family will be attending this trial.
Donald Trump has arrived in the courtroom for his New York criminal trial with his lawyers. Before we get started today, he has a quick word with his campaign chief, Susie Wiles, who is in the front row of seats behind the defense table, standing next to Eric Trump.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 30, 2024 12:50:15 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Judge Juan Merchan has taken the bench and court is now in session.
Judge Juan Merchan says he won’t hold the trial on 17 May so that Donald Trump can attend his son Barron’s high school graduation. “I don’t think the May 17 date is a problem,” Merchan said.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 30, 2024 12:50:58 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Judge finds Trump in contempt for violating his gag order, fines him $9,000Judge Juan Merchan says that Donald Trump is fined $9,000 for violating prohibitions on commenting on witnesses. Prosecutors had accused the former president of violating his gag order multiple times, asking the judge to fine him $1,000 per violation. Under the gag order, Trump cannot make, or direct others to make, public statements about trial witnesses concerning their roles in the investigation and at trial, prosecutors other than the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and members of the court staff or the district attorney’s staff. Trump is free to criticize Merchan himself, though it will probably not help Trump win the favor over the judge, who will decide on Trump’s sentence if the jury finds him guilty. Before the trial, Merchan extended the gag order to cover his family and Bragg’s family after Trump posted about Merchan’s daughter, who worked for a company that helped Democratic candidates with digital campaigns.
|
|
|
Post by Webster on Apr 30, 2024 12:52:48 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Banker Gary Farro returns to the standGary Farro, the prosecution’s third witness, has returned to the stand. Farro works at Flagstar Bank as a private client adviser and was previously at First Republic, which was used by Donald Trump’s former fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen.
Right now, prosecutor Rebecca Mangold is continuing to question banker Gary Farro about documents associated with Michael Cohen’s LLC, Essential Consultants, for which he opened a bank account. Remember: prosecutors said that Cohen used Essential Consultants to funnel money to Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, to bury her account for an extramarital sexual encounter with Donald Trump. Farro, who had been Cohen’s private banker at First Republic bank, is being asked about documents related to the formation of Essential Consultants; this is providing a timeline for jurors about Cohen’s financial maneuvers related to the alleged hush-money payoff.
Gary Farro was asked about Essential Consultants’ incorporation documents in Delaware, which showed that Michael Cohen had set up the LLC on 17 October, 2016. Farro was also shown email correspondence related to creation of a bank account for essential consultants. Cohen reached out on 26 October 2016 wanting to open a bank account for Essential Consultants. Cohen’s demeanor in requesting the account was pressing, Farro testified. “Michael Cohen, everything is urgent with Michael Cohen,” Farro said, prompting laughter in the courtroom.
|
|