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Cohen: Trump "Expressed To Me, 'Just Do It,'" On Hush Money Payment; Phone Records Show Two Calls Between Cohen And Trump On Oct. 26, 2016, Just Before Hush Money Payment Was Made. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired May 13, 2024 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[14:30:19]

LAURA COATES, CNN HOST: Welcome back as soon as he shall cover Donald Trump's hush money trial.

We're learning right now that Cohen -- that Trump agreed to pay for Daniels' story, saying, "He expressed to me, 'Just do it.' Meet up with Allen Weisselberg and figure this whole thing out."

This is really dramatic testimony. And Cohen said he spoke to Allen Weisselberg at the time, telling him that he had the ability to do so and asked if AMI could then pay Daniels. This is really the core of the entire issue here.

He's made a series of damning statements about Trump, saying that he was concerned only about the affair allegations hurting his 2016 campaign, not his family or his marriage.

At one point, allegedly asking Cohen how long he'd be on the market if Melania Trump let him go.

We're joining -- joined now by David Schoen. He was former President Trump's attorney during the second impeachment trial.

David, welcome.

I wonder what you make of the fact that Michael Cohen is testifying today. He has landed some punches. Of course, this is direct testimony, not the cross. And that's obviously going to be ahead.

What has struck you from what you've learned today?

DAVID SCHOEN, TRUMP ATTORNEY DURING SECOND IMPEACHMENT TRIAL: Well, first of all, I think you're reporting on it is absolutely on the mark, and not surprisingly, I think that --

COATES: Thank you.

SCHOEN: It's all to have been expected. You know, Michael Cohen knew Donald Trump very well. Was around him a lot. And the prosecution recognizes that he can make or break their case with Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen, on the other hand, also -- not on the other hand, the

same end -- is a savvy guy. He has a real agenda. He hates Donald Trump for a number of reasons. And you can be sure that he really prepared for this.

As you said, it's direct testimony. Cross-examination by any halfway decent lawyer would be absolutely devastating.

But I'm not sure it's enough just to make Michael Cohen a bad guy. Because he's coming in with a lot of details.

The problem for witnesses like Michael Cohen -- one of the problems I think, besides other prior inconsistent statements and other credibility -- credibility attacks, is he goes a little too far.

I don't know that the jury is going to believe when he says Melania Trump finding out about this wasn't a concern to Donald Trump.

Now, if they've already heard witnesses about how close the relationship was. Stand in the window and wave to her and that sort of thing.

So the problem is witnesses like this go a little too far, try to make the case.

And I'll wrap it up one second. I think that the prosecution feels in this case, given what's going on so far, that they really need Michael Cohen to make out the number of elements -- elements of their case.

And so I think he's going to address all of those things.

COATES: It is a really important point you've raised, the idea of not being hyperbolic, to suggests that a wife would not have any concern. It was no concern of a husband whether or not his wife was bothered by any of the allegations.

Again, there's also a political angle today, is there not, that unhappy wife or one that might be vocal about her unhappiness about the allegations, could pose a political problem.

Let me just focus one thing you said. I think people often are hearing about the animus and the bias and the hate. Is it useful to the prosecution to try to compartmentalize and say, look, yes, he hates him now. Yes, there's the animus now.

But at the time, when this was done, to where we're actually looking at, here is the point they want the jury to look at. And this is the time when he was the ultimate people pleaser.

Can a jury separate those two things?

SCHOEN: You're a lawyer asking lawyer-like questions. It's -- I think -- I don't know if this jury can or not. But that's got to be a prosecution agenda. And they can do with a witness like this because of the details and his commitment to Trump at the time. The problem for them is the cross-examination, if it's skillful at

all, they'll also focus on those details. So even if he's a bad guy with animus, and that's not enough, they will deal with him specifically on the statements he's making now.

Which, as you well know, are contradictory to the statements on these exact subjects that he made, including the overall message about whether Donald Trump was even involved with this.

But another point I think has to be made here is -- and this is, again, the job of the lawyer -- is to keep the jury's eye on the ball. Is anything that Michael Cohen is going to say really -- does it really make out the elements, even of a misdemeanor?

Because they've already heard before about how the -- how the item was booked. And we know now that part of it was for a bonus, so-called, for Michael Cohen. So does it look like a crime if called legal expenses or legal fees?

The lawyer is going to have to keep the jury's eyes on the technical parts of it.

And as for the target crime, in other words, the misdemeanor, they have to prove falsifying business records with the intent to defraud and that that was done with the intent to commit or conceal another the crime.

Remember, the grand jury never identified that other crime. There's talk now about 17152, promoting and preventing an election, unlawful means.

[14:35:03]

But people I think also recognize candidates don't want bad news --

(CROSSTALK)

COATES: I don't want to stop you but I do --

SCHOEN: I'm sorry.

COATES: But I do want to highlight something that's happening in testimony right now. Allen Weisselberg is being discussed right now. As we know, he is actually in jail. He is serving, I think, until July of this year for really a case separate from this.

But he was talking about who should pay this money. Weisselberg expressed some concern because he had some obligations for his grandchildren and beyond.

And Cohen said that he and Weisselberg told Trump that Cohen was going to front the money for it to which he was appreciative.

And Cohen said, Trump stated to me, "Don't worry, you'll get the money back." So were at the point in time, while were talking about, to your point, the larger issue, not whether there was, in fact, an alleged affair or whether the Daniels allegations were truthful, but whether there was a falsification of the business records.

And before I let you go, on this point I do wonder how you would approach a cross of, say, a Michael Cohen compared to a Stormy Daniels. In both instances, the defense wants to prove them to be liars.

If it comes to Stormy Daniels, her being a liar means a wildcard that might incentivize you to pay her off. For Cohen, they're going to use the line to try to make their case.

How do you approach differently?

SCHOEN: Well, there is a part of Cohen that one would approach about his general animus, not getting the job at the White House, all of those sorts of things. And things that have transpired since, they've colored his testimony today.

But with Cohen, I think the focus really must be on the specifics of the prior inconsistent statements. And not only that, he made those prior inconsistent statements when he had a real incentive to hurt Donald Trump and to help himself, if he could at the time.

And notwithstanding that incentive -- in other words, he was told by his lawyer, if you have anything on Donald Trump, now is the time to do it. You've said you don't want to go to jail for even a day, give them Donald Trump, to the feds, for example, first up. And he just couldn't do it, because he said it wasn't true.

And so I think they would go into that. That's what he said to his lawyer at the time. And then waived privilege.

But I think those kinds of things will be damning and make at least one juror think, what's going on here?

COATES: Similarly to how they tried to unravel testimony of Stormy Daniels. Were you lying then or are you lying now? Which document is true?

David Schoen, thank you so much for joining us.

There's so much more ahead. And we're learning a lot. I keep glancing down at the screen here because we're showing you over -- over here, I guess it would be, the difference over -- wherever -- I'm not a weather person. It's somewhere in this area.

But the idea of what's happening in the courtroom right now, the Trump criminal hush money trial, as a former member of Trump's inner circle, Michael Cohen, continuing to testify against him. We'll follow the story.

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[14:42:17]

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Welcome back to CNN's live coverage of Donald Trump's hush money criminal trial.

Right now, Trump's former attorney is describing how he put together $130,000 to silence Stormy Daniels, saying, and I'm quoting now, "I was doing everything I could and more to protect my boss. I would not lay out $130,000 for an NDA," non-disclosure agreement, "needed by somebody else."

Let's discuss what's going on.

Some of this testimony in the last few minutes has been pretty dramatic.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Yes. This is really important. So Michael Cohen is sort of airdropping us right into the crucial moments where he has realized that we're not going to be able to slow play Stormy Daniels until after the election. Either we're going to pay her or she's going to go public. This is a week or so before the election.

Now, Michael Cohen is talking about how he went about getting the $130,000. He said he did it around his wife's back. He didn't want her to find out.

BLITZER: He didn't want his wife to know so he went to get this home equity loan --

HONIG: Yes.

BLITZER: -- as opposed to writing a check from his personal bank account. She was in charge of those personal bank accounts. She would know if he was writing a check for $130,000. He wasn't about to tell her why.

HONIG: Exactly. He wanted to keep that from his wife.

And a really interesting and important piece of testimony, Michael Cohen testified just a few minutes ago, he said, "Trump said, 'Don't worry, you'll get the money back.'"

Now, that's not specifically corroborated by a text or a phone record, but that's a really important piece of testimony. And that's an example where the jury is going to have to either decide, do we take Michael Cohens word or not?

But if the jury credits that, it's a really important piece of testimony because it's showing that Trump knows what's going on, and Trump has promised Michael Cohen, don't worry, I'm going to get your back for this later.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: And he also says, "Just do it. Just do it."

ELLIOT WILLIAMS, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Just do it, yes. Bring in Weisselberg just --

BORGER: Yes.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

BORGER: Just do it.

HONIG: Right. Exactly. Get it done.

BLITZER: You know, it's interesting how much longer -- before I let you go, Elie, do you think the prosecution is going to keep Michael Cohen on the witness stand?

HONIG: This is moving really crisply so far here. He's been on the stand for about five hours. If I have to guess, about four hours taking out the lunch break. And they're already into the heart of the Stormy Daniels testimony.

I think what remains ahead is they're going to finish the Stormy Daniels testimony, which will take another hour or so. Then they're going to have to get into Michael Cohen's change of heart.

Michael Cohen getting charged by the Southern District of New York, his guilty plea. And all that's happened since then.

So my sense is, to their credit, prosecutors are moving this along pretty efficiently. I get the sense there'll be done with the direct exam of him sometime tomorrow, maybe midday or morning, is my best estimate.

BLITZER: What do you think, Elliot?

WILLIAMS: I think that's accurate. I mean, something they probably have to get on the record is some of the bad information about him, the convictions and so on, just to deprive the defense of the opportunity.

BLITZER: Of Michael Cohen.

WILLIAMS: Of Michael Cohen, pardon me. Deprive the defensive of the opportunity to put that information out there.

[14:45:00]

But again, if were four, five or six hours in and they are already on the bulk of the story that they called him to testify about, it's hard to see what else substantively he could really do over hours and hours and hours of testimony.

BLITZER: Cohen said he checked in with Davidson to ensure the deal was in order. Well, we just moved.

WILLIAMS: So he could tell Trump the matter is under control.

BLITZER: Yes. And jurors are being shown a call record right now between Allen Weisselberg, the CFO of the Trump Organization, and Michael Cohen that evening, October 23rd.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: And you can just see the activity has picked up so much in the days leading up to October 23rd, 24th, 25th. So many calls back and forth. This is getting dire. This is getting urgent.

As Gloria said, the story was getting away from them. They would have gone somewhere else with it. So that's why this is important.

But I think, interestingly, for the first time, they're tying the former president directly to it. And Michael Cohen said, "I had to get this done. This would be catastrophic to the campaign."

BLITZER: Two days before the election.

ZELENY: It is. It's just a couple of weeks. And hundreds of thousands of people had already voted in key states and other states across the country. That's why it was urgent.

He was already sort of a beleaguered candidate. And again, at the time, he was still a private citizen. He was not the president of the United States. He was working out of Trump Tower.

So there were very few guardrails, if any, at all, to the extent there were later. But at that time, there weren't any at all. So that's why this is all so interesting at that point.

The reaction of the former president sitting in the courtroom, I'll be interested to hear what our colleagues are saying who are in the room. But he has been sleeping and not paying attention. But during this period, this was so critical to him.

BORGER: You know, and he also made one last effort to get the "National Enquirer" to pay and Pecker said not a chance. We're not -- or was it -- I'm not sure who -- yes, I think it was Pecker who said not a chance.

So he knew that he had to do it. He didn't want to do it out of his own pocket. But he knew that they couldn't tie it to Donald Trump directly.

So he and Weisselberg came up with this idea of how to do it. And they had to do it very quickly. And they had to lie about why he needed the home equity loan.

BLITZER: Cohen had two phone calls with Trump around 8:30 a.m. on October 26th, before Cohen went across the street to the bank to make the payment to Davidson.

BORGER: Right. You see how quickly -- you know, as Jeff was saying, how quickly this was happening.

BLITZER: And that's what he said. Cohen just testified, "I wanted to ensure that, once again, he approved what I was doing because I require approval from him on all of this." Referring to Trump.

HONIG: So this is a good example of corroboration.

BORGER: Yes.

HONIG: Because they have the records showing that there was that phone call at 8:00, whatever it was, 8:30, something in the morning.

Now it doesn't say what was said, but it helps Michael Cohen's testimony. He says, look, they did a conversation right before Michael Cohen goes into the bank to get this thing done.

WILLIAMS: It's virtually impossible for Trump or the defense to argue that Trump had no knowledge of the payments.

BORGER: No.

WILLIAMS: It's really just -- the open question is, what was the purpose of the payment?

ZELENY: Of course. Of course. Once he was president in 2018, on Air Force One, as President Trump was flying, he said he knew nothing about this. He said --

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: -- my lawyer.

ZELENY: Said to the Associated Press, "Ask Michael Cohen." So that's the first time that he lied in that case.

But back in this moment, again, just days before the election, you can just see the urgency. If only we could hear the urgency in Michael Cohen's voice. Sadly, we can't. So we're relying on these quotes.

"But everything required Mr. Trump's sign-off. On top of that, I wanted the money back."

So again, tying all of this, that it was he was working at the direction of Donald Trump.

BORGER: Did he -- I mean, what this shows is that Michael Cohen was on a short leash. This was not somebody who could freelance, right? I mean --

BLITZER: The district attorney, Susan Hoffinger, asked whether Cohen would have gone forward to the bank without Trump's approval. "No," Cohen says.

BORGER: So he -- he's on a short leash. Even when he's laying out his own money, he wants to make sure that he's going to get it back. But he's not doing anything without Donald Trump's approval.

So to Elliott's point, I think it's going to be very hard to say Donald Trump was somewhere in the clouds and knew nothing about this.

BLITZER: Yes, $130,000 for Cohen was clearly a lot of money that he wanted to be reimbursed by -- by Trump.

For Trump, $30,000 may not necessarily be all that much money, but -- but for Michael Cohen, it was a huge amount of money that he laid out to keep Stormy Daniels quiet.

Everybody standby.

We have much more ahead as these developments are pouring in right now. Stay with us.

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[14:53:53]

COATES: Well, welcome back to CNN's special coverage of Donald Trump's hush money criminal trial.

Just moments ago, Michael Cohen said that he had two separate phone calls with Donald Trump around 8:30 a.m. on October 26th, before he went across the street to the bank to make the payment to Davidson, Stormy's lawyer.

Paula Reid and Kristen Holmes are back with me now.

Paula, that's pretty significant. I think he's been saying all along that he did not go rogue. He is getting the buy-in from the big boss, as he calls him. This seems to support that he, in fact, has had some communication with him before that payment was handed over.

PAULA REID, CNN CHIEF LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Exactly. He's testifying that he needed Trump's approval on this entire plan. Exactly how he was going to set up this LLC, how he was going to get this money delivered to Stormy Daniels.

That this required Trump's sign off. And that he was keeping him in the loop on all the details of his plan.

Now that it goes across the street to the bank and lies to the bank about the purpose of setting up this LLC.

So this is also something prosecutors have to get out of him. Why did you lie? Why didn't you say what this was really for? You said it was for management consulting services.

And Cohen's been pretty honest. He's like, well, a few reasons. One, I didn't want my wife to know, first of all. But also, if I went in there and said it was her hush money payment for an adult film star the bank probably wouldn't have approved it.

[14:55:05]

And his -- his banking contact there has actually testified and said, yes, that would have come under some scrutiny.

COATES: That's an important part here. Because, of course, they're going to try to paint him as the ultimate liar. And that he'll lie to every different entity.

But jurors, you ought to believe him today and when he's testifying. That's going to be what they're going to try to use against him.

But from a political standpoint, again, it goes back to his statement about the campaign. That might read true to jurors that this, of course, would have had an impact on the campaign.

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: That's right. And look, this is all going to come down to what the jury actually believes or doesn't believe. As you said, maybe the answer, what they're saying, you know, I've lived all these other times, but today, believe me.

Maybe that does play with them. Maybe they believe that he's telling the truth.

That's part of why they do so much coaching and prepping to make him seem believable, to make sure that he is presenting himself in a way that is not the Michael Cohen that I would say we knew from 2016, the aggressive yeller, lots of expletives.

I do want to bring one thing up to you guys, as lawyers, which is the idea that so much of what we've read just in recent minutes here has involved Allen Weisselberg, who is not testifying in this trial.

And a lot of it is essentially Michael Cohen saying there were three people who knew about what was going on, me, Donald Trump and Allen Weisselberg, who, as we know, is currently in jail. And we believe the prosecution has no plan of bringing him up as a witness.

And I'm wondering, as a lawyer, how does that end up playing with the jury when there is somebody out there that seems to also possibly be able to answer questions about those.

(CROSSTALK)

REID: Yes --

(CROSSTALK)

COATES: Also I think, when you read it, too, because you have Cohen on why Trump had not been included, to date, saying that it was to protect him, to isolate him.

Which again, to your point, if it's to protect and isolate him, Paula, does it mean that he was so kept out of the loop as not to know?

REID: That contradicts what Cohen was saying. Right? He's saying he kept him in the loop. And then clearly, they're trying to hide something, right? They all know that what they're doing is maybe not on the up and up.

So there's clearly an effort to put distance between this payment and then-Candidate Trump.

Defense attorneys, again, argued this is to protect his family. Prosecutors arguing this is all done in an effort to help him win the White House, which is why falsifying business records, which has -- we haven't actually gotten to that part, yet -- it is being charged as a felony.

But back to this point about Allen Weisselberg, it is something that prosecutors are going to have to address with the jury. If there were three people involved in this alleged conspiracy, why haven't we heard from one of them? And of course, we know it's complicated.

Now, Cohen has said he sent an email to Davidson, Stormy Daniels' lawyer, to show we're moving forward with the deal and to ensure that she gets paid.

Now, the jury is shown the wire transfer from Cohen's essential consultants account to Keith Davidson's account. And this is the payment.

And it really starts the story of the alleged criminal behavior here, which is how Cohen gets reimbursed through the Trump Organization, through what prosecutors here is allege or falsified documents.

So this -- this right here really starts the story of the 34 counts of falsifying business records.

COATES: And yet, we've heard the start and restart many times now of this actual part. It's the first time we've heard, to be chronologically going all the way to that point.

Up until now, witnesses have been able to tell you a little part of it. But when it comes to falsifications of business records, they don't necessarily have that information.

This is the person who has the chronology, the background, has been a part of all the different aspects of it. And now gets those 34 counts.

And yet, although we haven't heard from Allen Weisselberg, we've heard from a number of people who would have had some control over what the documents look like.

So a whole lot more to get to.

Paula, Kristen, stay with me.

Keeping a very close eye on developments here in New York where Trump's longtime fixer, as he was called, is testifying about the timeline of events leading up to a hush money payment of $130,000 to one Stormy Daniels.

More of our special coverage after a quick break.

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