Donald Trump’s estranged former lawyer Michael Cohen has begun testifying at the Republican presidential candidate’s criminal trial, where he described his role as Trump’s long-time fixer and was expected to tell jurors that he helped Trump illegally hide a hush money payment to a porn star.
Once one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, Cohen is the prosecution’s star witness as the trial enters its fifth week in New York state criminal court in Manhattan.
He started his testimony on Monday by explaining that he went to law school at his grandmother’s urging, even though he “really didn’t want to be a lawyer.”
In 2007, he left his job at a law firm to join Trump’s New York-based family real estate company. Trump offered him a job, Cohen said, after Cohen presented Trump with a $US100,000 ($A151 trillion) bill for work his firm had done for one of Trump’s companies.
“I was honoured. I was taken by surprise, and I agreed,” Cohen said, adding that Trump never paid the bill.
For nearly a decade, Cohen, 57, worked as an executive and lawyer for Trump’s company and once said he would take a bullet for Trump, a Republican former president trying to take back the White House from Democratic President Joe Biden in this year’s November 5 US election.
Cohen’s $US130,000 ($A196,493) hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election, intended to keep her from speaking publicly about a 2006 sexual encounter she says she had with Trump, is at the centre of the trial.
Cohen said it was fair to describe his role as a fixer for Trump, testifying that he took care of “whatever he wanted.” Rather than work as a traditional corporate lawyer, Cohen reported directly to Trump and was never part of the Trump Organization’s general counsel’s office.
Among his duties was renegotiating bills from business partners, threatening to sue people and planting positive stories in the press, he said.
Trump, he said, communicated primarily by phone or in person and never set up an email address.
“He would comment that emails are like written papers, that he knows too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case,” Cohen said.
Cohen, who served as Trump’s personal lawyer after his presidential term began in 2017, broke with him when federal prosecutors probing Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign focused on Cohen. He has become one of Trump’s most outspoken critics, frequently disparaging him on social media and on podcasts.
While the jurors saw Cohen in person for the first time, his presence has loomed over the trial. Witnesses have spoken about him dozens of times, while Trump’s defence lawyers attacked his credibility from the trial’s outset, calling him an untrustworthy liar in their opening statement.
Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to violating federal campaign finance law by paying off Daniels and testified that Trump directed him to make the payment. Federal prosecutors did not charge Trump with any crime.
Trump’s defence lawyers have told the 12 jurors and six alternates that Cohen acted on his own when paying Daniels, seeking to distance Trump from the payments at the heart of the case.
Cohen has admitted to lying under oath multiple times, providing substantial fodder for the defence to undermine his credibility.
He has acknowledged lying to the US Congress in 2017 about a Trump Organization real estate project in Moscow, but has since said he did so to protect Trump.
He also pleaded guilty to violating tax law in 2018, but now claims he did not commit that crime.
Cohen has been on the receiving end of Trump’s vitriolic social media attacks, some of which the judge has said violated a gag order restricting Trump from making statements about witnesses, jurors and families of the judge and prosecutors if meant to interfere with the case.
Trump has called the gag order a violation of his right to free speech and has said it is unfair to bar him from responding to attacks by witnesses such as Cohen and Daniels.