Donald Trump's Hush Money Trial, Week 4: Live Updates

The prosecution's case is moving along ahead of schedule, Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass told Judge Merchan on Monday afternoon.

Steinglass estimated their side would be finished calling witnesses two weeks from Tuesday. Once they are finished, Trump's lawyers can call their own witnesses, the AP reported.

With that scheduling note concluded, the judge calls it a day. Trump leaves the courtroom with Eric not far behind, both of them swiveling their heads casually around the room. Longstreet, the witness to be recalled, briefly chats and laughs with a colleague in the district attorney’s office, Rebecca Mangold, one of the prosecutors working this case.

In a discussion between attorneys after the jury left the room, Steinglass says the prosecution will need “about two more weeks” to make its case: “This week, next week, possibly the week after.” This came after a debate on whether it was appropriate to recall an earlier witness, the district attorney's office paralegal Georgia Longstreet. Prosecutors say a logistical matter interfered with what would have been the evidence introduced through her on Friday.

Blanche, for the defense, was quite upset at this, saying it was prejudicial to have to cross-examine Longstreet again after the defense assumed prosecutors had introduced all the evidence through her that they intended to introduce.

After prosecutors tell the judge they intended to introduce just three more exhibits through Longstreet, and said they expected to recall her on Thursday or Friday, Merchan says he’ll allow it, but asks the prosecution to give the defense 24 hours notice to prepare for exhibits she’ll be introducing.

Referring to a dispute this morning, Steinglass is running through all of the various times prosecutors have shared exhibit and witness lists with the defense. They’ve kept the specific witness order private until the day of a given witness' testimony, he says, because the “defendant has been violating the order” against extrajudicial speech. He’s now discussing an earlier witness, Georgia Longstreet, a paralegal with the district attorney's office. It appears they want to bring Longstreet back in order to discuss social media posts from Trump as well as text messages.

That material, Steinglass says, is "relevant to a subsequent witness's testimony."

Blanche counters that “We did not know which exhibits [prosecutors] would be trying to offer through that witness” and that, though he could be wrong, Longstreet was not on the witness list.

The judge is giving his typical end-of-day instructions to the jury, telling them we're stopping a bit early.

Blanche just walked Tasaroff through the checks and accounting process that we’ve been talking about all day. She confirms that, aside from processing checks through FedEx to Trump, she didn’t know much about the route those checks took. And she confirms that she didn’t get accounting approvals from Trump directly. After a few short questions, Blanche concludes his questioning and Tarasoff was dismissed as a witness. Now, attorneys from both sides are approaching the bench for a conference with the judge.

Blanche has begun his cross-examination of Tasaroff, getting her to confirm the description of the Trump Organization as a “family business.”

Trump has fully turned in his seat, right arm draped over the back of the chair, to observe Blanche directly.

I want to echo what I’ve read today in a couple other outlets including The New York Times and CNN: McConney and Tasaroff’s testimony emphasizes just how small the Trump Organization’s accounting department is — really just a few people. With the help of some decades-old software, the pair of witnesses today worked with top legal and financial executives – and often with Trump’s personal signature approval – to process the Trump Organization’s bills, including checks from Trump’s own personal account.

“I think as we were walking through those exhibits I missed one,” Conroy begins before identifying the record, eliciting at least a couple resigned smiles from jurors, who have at this point listened to hours of accounting details regarding these checks.

The jury is back in the courtroom, and Tarasoff has returned to the witness stand. Walking into the courtroom, she appeared to briefly give Eric Trump a friendly tap as she passed him.

Mercifully, Merchan just called an afternoon recess in the middle of the dry recitation of Trump organization accounting practices. Trump and his crew, with Eric Trump in the middle, sauntered out of the courtroom shortly after Tarasoff made her way through the side door for witnesses.

Starting in April 2017, the source of payments to Cohen switched from Trump’s trust to Trump’s personal account. And so for this April payment, Trump’s signature was required. It was quite a striking moment when the prosecution pulled the image up: Trump’s signature, among the most recognizable in American history, and at the time belonging to the president of the United States, on a check that prosecutors allege was used to reimburse Cohen for hush money given to cover up an affair.

Of note, Trump signed the April check for Cohen in June because, the evidence shows, an earlier check was apparently lost and canceled

As with McConney, Tarasoff is now confirming details about the monthly payments to Cohen, including classifications of the payments as legal expenses and as part of Cohen’s “retainer.” The prosecution is being careful to note that accounting numbers handwritten by Tarasoff on Cohen’s emailed invoices match those in the Trump Organization’s accounting system, and also that there are checks and check stubs corresponding to these payments. Reviewing one such check, Tarasoff identifies the signatures on it as belonging to Donald Trump, Jr. and Alan Weisselberg.

On an April invoice, Tarasoff confirms that the source of the payments is different than months past, changing from Trump’s trust to Trump’s personal account.

Conroy, for the prosecution, is walking Tarasoff through a single check stub showing two $35,000 payments marked “retainer” for January and February of 2017. After that, the prosecution brings up the image of the check itself – complete with the printed note, “two signatures needed on amounts over $10,000” – for $70,000 to Michael Cohen. Tarasoff identifies the two signatures on the check as belonging to Eric Trump and Alan Weisselberg. The check includes three computer-printed “VOID” stamps that Tarasoff explains were added when photocopying the check.

(Eric, sitting next to attorney Alina Habba and behind his father, is following the trial and watching the exhibits as they appear on screen.)

We just took a look at the email thread that came up earlier today, in which Cohen describes his “retainer” payments with the Trump Organization accounting department. The prosecution walks Tarasoff through a stamp on one such document containing various indicators – including “DJTREV,” a reference to the Trump Revocable Trust, and various voucher numbers. After that, Tarasoff explains a separate document, a print-out of an accounting software record, showing corresponding voucher numbers. The prosecution is showing, basically, how Cohen’s emailed invoices were processed through the Trump Organization’s accounting system.

Re-emphasizing a detail from McConney’s testimony, the prosecution is drilling down on checks to be sent from Trump’s personal account: “We would send them to the White House for him to sign,” Tarasoff says of the checks from Trump’s personal account.

The Trump Organization used FedEx to send the checks to Washington, D.C., and they would come back signed by Trump, she testifies.

Re-hashing some of the same ground they covered with McConney, the controller, the prosecution – this time Christopher Conroy – is asking Tarasoff about the accounting structure of the Trump Organization. So far this includes talking about accounting software, general ledgers, invoices and the fact that checks over $10,000 needed the approval of Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., or Donald Trump himself.

For Trump’s personal account, the former president's own signature was needed for all checks, no matter the amount, Tarasoff testifies. And if he didn’t want to sign a check, he would write “VOID” on it – in black sharpie, the Trump choice.

Trump signed checks for his personal account even after he became president, Tarasoff testifies.

“I get approved bills, I enter them into the system, and I cut checks,” explained Tarasoff just now during a series of questions about her work. She works on the 26th floor of the Trump Organization, along with the legal department and Trump’s office – and along with Michael Cohen, when was working for Trump, Tarasoff confirmed.

Describing Alan Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s former CFO, Tarasoff said he “had his hands in everything.”

Tarasoff, with short gray hair and a slow gait, just made her way to the witness stand holding a plastic water bottle. She says she’s currently employed in the organization’s accounts payable department, that she’s worked for the Trump Organization for around 24 years, and that the Trump Organization is paying for her attorney. Her highest education is high school, after which she worked at Liberty Mutual, then worked for an attorney paying bills. After 17 years in that job, she stopped working to take care of her children, then started working again after her husband passed away. She eventually began working for the Trump Organization.

“There’s a bunch” of organizations in the Trump Organization, she explained, near the start of a series of questions about the company.

Referring to certain canceled check records, Bove says – this is before the jury has entered – that information on them could be considered hearsay, given the information might have been generated by Capitol One rather than Tarasoff herself.

“There’s all kinds of information stamped on this check, all kinds of information [presumably from] Capitol One,” Bove says. “There’s a lot of information on this check that I don’t think the witness can explain.”

The judge sides with the prosecution, that Tarasoff will be able to say that she generated the check and delivered it to the bank.

“We believe this is the business record of a bank, and that’s our objection,” Bove concludes.

“Okay, noted, overruled,” Merchan says before bringing in the jury.

Bove, for the defense, says they will have the same objection to exhibits discussed by this coming witness – Deborah Tarasoff, from the Trump Organization’s accounts payable office – as they had for the previous witness, namely that certain records aren’t business records and therefore shouldn’t be admitted. The defense brought up this objection with regard to Cohen’s invoices, but the judge overruled them. For Tarasoff, the defense grants that a given stamp on certain documents might be considered a business record, but the documents themselves should not be. At issue specifically appear to be canceled checks from Capitol One.

The former president walked in quickly followed by his morning crew. The prosecution had arrived a few minutes prior. The judge and jury have yet to return.

On redirect, Colangelo confirms with McConney that there were certain things that “Weisselberg kept you in the dark about?” that “this was all happening above your head?” and that, “you were told do do something and you did it?” After a couple more brief questions from Bove, we’re breaking for lunch.

Continuing his effort to poke holes in the prosecution’s evidence, Bove confirms with McConney that “retainer agreements can be verbal” and that the various invoices from Cohen don’t describe the financial condition of the Trump organization. Turning to the checks to Cohen, Bove establishes with McConney that, initially, it wasn’t clear how Trump would personally pay the Cohen payments, so the president’s trust was initially used instead. “And when you learned Trump could pay, all the payments after that were out of trump’s personal account, right?” he asks. McConney confirms as much. He also focuses on the tax forms, stressing there’s no place to break out “legal services” versus expenses incurred by a lawyer during the course of those services. Turning “very briefly” to the Office of Government Ethics disclosure form, Bove stresses it includes not only Trump’s signature but also signatures from the ethics office itself signing off on the form – which included, as the prosecution laid out earlier, a footnote regarding the reimbursement to Cohen.

With that, the defense has nothing further.

Going back over the prosecution’s exhibits, Bove is trying to poke holes in each one, asking McConney to confirm (which he does) that the accounting software’s “legal expenses” category was a general label that came from a “dropdown menu,” that the software was a “bit antiquated,” that the discussions between McConney and Weisselberg concerning Cohen in 2017 were “very short” – perhaps less than five minutes each – and that McConney didn’t know specifically anything about what Cohen was being reimbursed for. Regarding the “times two for taxes” that went into accounting for the $420,000 sent to Cohen over 2017, McConney confirms that Weisselberg was not a tax accountant, and that he had no idea how Cohen treated the payments for tax purposes.

The Trump organization’s then-controller has “no idea” about whether the trust Trump established as president was accompanied by “detailed conflict of interest procedures,” or even if it was intended to avoid conflicts of interest, he told Bove.

McConney says he only saw a chart and one paragraph describing the trust. But he does know that there were over 500 entities in the trust from all corners of the Trump Organization.

Asked by Bove whether there was a “very real commercial risk to adverse publicity” for the Trump Organization, McConney responds, “I’m not a marketing person.” Prodded further, he says he understood the Trump Organization employed such professionals.

Emil Bove, for the defense, is getting McConney to confirm in rapid-fire succession that Trump had no knowledge of the accounting software his organization used, nor any specific knowledge of the events that McConney just discussed with the prosecution.

“Alan never told me” Trump had any knowledge of the payments, McConney confirms. McConney also confirms he didn’t speak to Cohen about “these issues,” in Bove’s words.

Bove stresses that during 2017, Cohen was using “Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump” in his signature block – not “fixer” or even a Trump organization email domain. For accounting purposes, Cohen was "akin to a vendor," Bove asks, and McConney confirms.

Bove began by asking McConney to confirm that McConney had never met him before, which McConney did.

Asked if Michael Cohen was a lawyer at the time under discussion, McConney says "okay," drawing a laugh from the room.

After yet another overruled objection, the result of a brief sidebar, Colangelo is asking McConney about Trump’s 2017 Office of Government Ethics conflict of interest form. It’s signed and dated May 15, 2018, in thick sharpie, by Donald J. Trump.

“I’ve seen it many times,” McConney confirms of Trump’s signature. Colangelo zoomed in on one line on the form that announces, “in the interest of transparency,” an un-itemized expense incurred by Cohen and reimbursed by Trump,, which the form states is valued somewhere in the range of $100,001-250,000. Colangelo asks if that range is consistent with the $180,000 figure discussed earlier, to which McConney affirms that it is. With that, the prosecution has no further questions.

Two 1099 forms from Trump’s revocable trust and Trump’s personal account show $105,000 and $315,000 payments, respectively, to Michael Cohen in 2017. McConney just described the documents, which categorized the Cohen payments as “non-employee compensation.”

Running through a document showing 2018 expenses paid from both Trump’s trust and Trump’s personal account, McConney confirms that neither shows a payment for legal fees to Michael Cohen. Prosecutors contrasted this with the documents for 2017, which do show supposed legal expense payments to Cohen – but which prosecutors allege were really mischaracterized reimbursements for hush money payments.

McConney is going through a prosecution exhibit he describes as a “query voucher,” or a list of payments. This document lists the payments to Michael Cohen.

McConney confirms the document shows all payments to Cohen in 2017. Handwriting on the side of the document includes two numbers – $105,000 and $315,000 – indicating the totals for the columns representing the payments to Cohen in the first three months of the agreement from Trump's trust, for the former, and from Trump's personal account, for the latter. The trust payments are written as “DJT Rev” – Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust.

The total of the payments is $420,000, echoing the testimony we just heard about the monthly payments of $35,000 to Cohen.

Editor's note: This post has been updated to correct the accounts each payment came from.

McConney, the former Trump Organization controller, is back on the stand.

After painstakingly going through all 12 monthly $35,000 payments to Michael Cohen, we're taking our morning recess.

Trump grinned politely at someone in the audience — it's unclear who — but otherwise appeared nonchalant.

Looking at a new email exhibit — after another overruled objection — McConney describes an April email from Michael Cohen to Allen Weisselberg, forwarded from Weisselberg to McConney. McConney forwarded the note to Tarasoff in accounts payable with the note, “Please pay.”

Responding to a question from Colangelo — ”Did you understand from Weisselberg’s email to you that the invoice was approved to pay?” — McConney confirmed as much.

The witness is now describing similar emails from Cohen to Weisselberg, — and then Weisselberg to McConney, and McConney to Tarasoff with the note “please pay” — for the month of May.

With one exception — an email from McConney to Tarasoff, asking her to stop payment on a check that McConney says was lost somewhere — the prosecution is walking McConney through several months' worth of payments to Cohen.

In response to an email from Cohen, asking McConney if he’d seen his invoice for the March 2017 check, McConney responded in an email with, “I’ll check status tomorrow. DJT needs to sign check.” That was a reference to a switch that was made, and acknowledged in court by McConney: The payments were initially made out of Trump’s Trust — for which Eric and Don Jr. could sign off — into Trump’s personal account, which needed Trump’s personal signature, even though Trump was the newly serving president.

Describing that new reality, McConney recalled: “Somehow, we’d have to get a package down to the White House, get it down to the President, get the President to sign the checks, get the checks returned to us, and get the checks out.”

Of note: When prosecutors moved to introduce another new exhibit, the defense objected again, and indicated they would object in the same fashion for other exhibits moving forward. The judge overruled again.

After another objection was lodged and overruled — as before, but without the conference with the judge — Colangelo is walking McConney through another email record, this one starting with Cohen’s request for his March 2017 payment.

Earlier, we saw an email from McConney to Tarasoff in accounts payable, asking that the January and February payments be paid from the Trump trust, under legal expenses, and described as “Retainer for the month of January and February 2017.” For the March payment, McConney instructed Tarasoff to post the expense in the same fashion as the first two, to legal expenses.

In an email chain that started with McConney’s previously discussed reminder to Cohen — “Just a reminder to get me the invoices you spoke to Allen about” — McConney and Cohen go back and forth about the payments, with McConney asking Cohen in February to send an invoice for the first two payments.

Cohen responds with an emailed invoice that describes the payments as part of a “retainer agreement.”

Upon questioning from Colangelo, McConney confirms he wasn’t aware of any such agreement. A subsequent email states “Ok to pay as per agreement with Don and Eric,” Trump’s children, who during his presidency were running his business. Another email from McConney to Deborah Tarasoff in accounts payable asks to “pay from the Trust,” which according to McConney indicates it was a personal expense.

Earlier, before the jury entered, the defense indicated they would object to multiple exhibits today. They even attempted to hash out their objections before the trial started.

But Judge Merchan said they could simply raise objections as the exhibits came up, one-by-one, during the trial.

A few minutes ago, the defense objected to one document — I didn’t catch which, but the objection was overruled — and just now, they objected again. After both sides conferred privately with the judge for several minutes, Merchan announced, “The objection is noted and overruled.” Exhibit 37a — a print-out of an email chain — is now being discussed.

McConney is describing $35,000 monthly payments to Michael Cohen, the sum of the reimbursement to Essential Consulting in addition to money for a bonus – because “Michael was complaining that the bonus wasn’t large enough,” McConney recalled – and then divided into monthly payments.

A separate document includes a breakdown of payments: $180,000 for the Essential Consulting payment and tech services payment, “times two for taxes,” plus a $50,000 bonus, divided by 12 for monthly payments. The bonus was increased to $60,000, according to McConney, because “this was a fast conversation, and I just scribbled down notes. So the total is $420,000.

McConney said he wasn't aware of another time in which an expense reimbursement was doubled for taxes.

Colangelo is walking McConney through a payment made to "Essential Consulting" in 2017, with the witness describing a bank statement – of which Weisselberg told him, “keep it in the files.”

Colangelo is confirming both Weisselberg and his own handwriting on the document. The document describes a total amount to be repaid in monthly intervals, and it was kept in a payment book in a locked drawer in his office. The witness, upon questioning, is also describing hand-written notes that he took during his conversation with Weisselberg about the payment in question. The two documents were stapled together in the payment book, McConney said.

“Essential Consultants LLC, care of Michael Cohen”– that’s what the document said, as read by the witness. Essential Consultants is the entity allegedly used to hide the hush money payments at the heart of this trial. An amount of $130,000 was made to the account, the document shows. Lower, in Weisselberg’s handwriting describes a $180,000 figure – the sum of the total owed to Michael Cohen, and $50,000 to Red Finch for tech services.

McConney, seemingly dripping with contempt, is describing his relationship with Michael Cohen, who worked for the Trump organization for a “number of years.”

“I had conversations with him by the... coffee machine," McConney said.

The prosecution asked about Cohen's role within the organization.

“He said he was a lawyer," McConney replied to laughter in the courtroom.

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo – who, to clarify, has been questioning McConney this whole time – is walking the witness through a series of document exhibits on a thumb drive, including financial records, tax forms and emails. Prior to walking through the exhibits, Colangelo asked, “If a lawyer receives payment for legal services, is that taxable income?”

“For an outside attorney, I would assume so, yes,” McConney answered after clarifying.

Testifying at Trump’s civil fraud trial in November, McConney became emotional when he asked why he no longer works for the Trump Organization. He reached for a tissue and said he was proud of the work he did, according to The Associated Press.

“I just wanted to relax and stop being accused of misrepresenting assets for the company that I loved working for. I’m sorry,” he testified last year, the AP reported.

As the Trump Organization’s former corporate controller, prosecutors in the current trial say he was instrumental to arranging the $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels.

The prosecution is walking McConney through the Trump Organization’s various accounts. One of them, the Donald J. Trump personal account, was Donald Trump’s primary operating account.

It turned into the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust after Jan. 20, 2017, when Trump began his time as president.

Before Trump became president, Trump alone had signature authority on money leaving the account, McConney says. Afterward, Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Alan Weisselberg had signature authority. Multiple signatures were required for checks over $10,000, he says.

McConney is recalling one time when Trump literally told him “you’re fired," but he didn’t mean it. Rather, Trump was scolding McConney for some payment that he wished had been negotiated more thoroughly. Deborah Tarasoff was the only person in accounts payable when McConney left, the witness recalls, before describing the various people who had authority to sign off on a payment after Trump became president.

The prosecution is walking McConney through his various relationships at the Trump Organization, including with former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg as well as the organization's accounts payable and receivable supervisors.

McConney is describing accounting practices and software, including MDS, a computer program for recording receipts and bills. McConney also said he's been receiving quarterly payments from the Trump Organization since his retirement, part of a separation agreement.

Two bespectacled jurors in dress shirts are taking notes. Others are nodding along.

Merchan found Trump in contempt for one comment out of four the prosecution had brought to his attention in a hearing last week.

What got him in trouble was saying after court on April 22: “You know [the judge is] rushing the trial like crazy. Nobody’s ever seen a thing go like this. That jury was picked so fast — 95% Democrats. The area’s mostly all Democrat … just a purely Democrat area. It’s a very unfair situation, that I can tell you.”

Merchan found that the attack on jurors violated Trump’s gag order, writing that the "Defendant not only called into question the integrity, and therefore the legitimacy of these proceedings, but again raised the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones.” What didn’t get Trump in trouble was calling Cohen a liar or calling ex-AMI CEO David Pecker “a nice guy,” which could be interpreted as an attempt to sway or intimidate the witnesses.

The judge previously found Trump in contempt for nine other comments, out of 10 the prosecution had asked him to look at. He owes $10,000 in fines so far, and could face jail time for further infractions. Read Merchan's latest order here.

The prosecution is walking McConney through a large flow chart and a written “schedule,” each describing the organization of the Trump Organization. The flow chart, which is dated 2014, is organized under the “The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust.”

McConney earlier described the Trump Organization’s practice of creating entities for ownership of various Trump properties – for example, an individual entity under Trump’s control owns Trump Tower.

Under questioning from the prosecution, McConney says that he is here in response to a subpoena, and that the Trump Organization is paying for his attorney. He’s recalling “36 or 37” years of work for the Trump Organization. He retired last year as senior vice president, controller.

Habba represented Trump during his New York civil fraud trial, which resulted in a massive half-billion-dollar fine against the former president that he is still fighting. Although her performance in court was frequently criticized, she appears to still have an important place in Trump's orbit.

Prosecutors have called their first witness of the week – Jeffrey McConney, the former Trump Organization controller.

The jury is not yet in. Trump’s attorney Emil Bove brought up objections the defense has to several prosecution exhibits, in addition to an unnamed witness; Merchan is peeved the objections haven’t been brought up earlier, and the prosecution says it flagged the potential exhibits a couple weeks ago.

When Merchan says he’s fine with the exhibits coming up at trial, Bove says “it’s very hard for me to do that on the fly.” Regarding the unnamed witness, the judge says “You waited until I came out at 9:30.”

Merchan is calling in the jury.

The president just walked into the courtroom with a phalanx of lawyers and aides, as well as his son, Eric Trump.

Trump aide Boris Epshteyn is also here, sitting behind Eric.

Hello from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg'’s office – but not Bragg himself – just entered the courtroom with a few bankers boxes. A Secret Service agent entered the courtroom soon after.

Trump has repeatedly complained how the trial has prevented him from hitting the campaign trail. But instead of firing up his base in swing states over the weekend, the presumptive GOP nominee opted to attend a Republican National Committee event to fire up deep-pocketed donors.

Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Saturday, Trump didn't hold back, likening the Biden White House to a “Gestapo administration.”

“And it’s the only thing they have,” said Trump, according to audio obtained by The New York Times. “And it’s the only way they’re going to win, in their opinion, and it’s actually killing them. But it doesn’t bother me.”

On the comparison to Nazi Germany's secret police force, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates in a statement: “Instead of echoing the appalling rhetoric of fascists, lunching with Neo Nazis, and fanning debunked conspiracy theories that have cost brave police officer their lives, President Biden is bringing the American people together around our shared democratic values and the rule of law — an approach that has delivered the biggest violent crime reduction in 50 years.”

The Republican retreat was also apparently something of a pageant to help Trump choose his 2024 running mate: Senators Marco Rubio (Fl.), J.D. Vance (Ohio) and Tim Scott (S.C.) were among those flaunting their stuff.