Sleazebags and Audio Files

Prosecutors are overcoming the reputations of their witnesses and leading the jury to focus on the hard evidence.

Image of Keith Davidson on the stand, courtesy of CNN

It’s no mystery that the prosecution’s chief witnesses in the Manhattan criminal case are all super shady. 

David Pecker helped Trump “catch and kill” stories, burying them by having his paper, The National Enquirer, buy the exclusive rights and then put them in deep freeze.

Michael Cohen is a convicted felon and one-time fixer for Trump. He conspired with his boss and David Pecker to buy the silence of Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels and then cover the tracks.

There’s also Keith Davidson, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels whose testimony continued yesterday. Davidson was in the business of representing people who could embarrass celebrities, and the defense worked hard to show he was nothing more than a shake down artist.

It’s a risky thing to have so many questionable characters point their fingers at a man of even worse repute, the one for whom all this sleazy stuff was done. But that’s the nature of a conspiracy where the criminal underlings rat out the man in charge.

The jury will have to look past the moral failings of these men and look instead at what they did and said. Luckily, there is audio of that. Those recordings, made surreptitiously by Michael Cohen, were played in open court yesterday, and they confirm what Trump and his co-conspirators were up to.

Let’s take a look at what Davidson testified to yesterday, how the defense tried to undermine him, and then at those all-important audio files that will be difficult for the defense to explain away.

Keith Davidson is no saint

The prosecution wants to establish in the jury’s mind that there was a plot to pay off McDougal and Daniels, and that Trump was in the know. The defense, on the other hand, wants to put distance between the transaction and Trump and convince at least one juror that Trump wasn’t involved.

Davidson spent a day and half on the stand explaining how he had struck deals on behalf of McDougal and Daniels, with Cohen as the intermediary negotiating on behalf of Trump. One problem for the state is that Trump’s name appears nowhere on the agreements, and even under his pseudonym of David Dennison, there is no signature.

But on the basic question of whether Trump was involved, the prosecution has common sense on its side. After all, Cohen wouldn’t spend all this time trying to silence two women—one with whom Trump had a long affair, the other a one night stand—solely for his own benefit and without specific instructions from the man actually involved. And he certainly wouldn’t have paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 himself, using money from his home equity line of credit funneled through a shell company, with no expectation to be repaid by Trump.

As expected, the defense launched an aggressive cross-examination of Davidson, painting him as an opportunist and exploiter who sought to “extract” money for his clients using the dirt they had on celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Tila Tequila, Charlie Sheen and Hulk Hogan. The defense wants the jury to draw an inference here: If other clients used Davidson to extort those famous people, then McDougal and Daniels were no different in trying to shake down Trump.

While this might successfully muddy up Davidson, there are two problems with this approach. 

First, the “catch and kill” scheme cooked up by Trump, Pecker and Cohen—and made explicitly in service to the Trump Campaign during that August 2015 meeting in Trump Tower—was about proactively going out and buying up damaging stories. People who sell the exclusive rights to their stories to The National Enquirer might reasonably expect that they would get printed, not buried. Trump can’t easily claim he was being shaken down by people who had come forward to what they thought was the press.

Second, the fact that Cohen and Davidson worked so closely together meant Davidson got a clear look into who and what Cohen was and how he operated on behalf of Trump in that time period.

Cohen gives up the game

As the New York Times reported, Davidson testified at length about how unpleasant it was to work with Cohen, who was feverishly focused on keeping Trump’s sexual escapades out of the press. He described Cohen as occasionally unhinged and aggressive, and noted how crushed Cohen was after the election when he learned that he would not be going to Washington with the new president. 

That call occurred on a Saturday, and as Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch Network reported, Davidson testified that Cohen was upset that he wouldn’t be given a job in the new Trump administration after all. “I thought he was going to kill himself,” Davidson remarked.

Davidson said Cohen complained that he “saved that guy’s ass so many times” by helping to cover up stories, and said Trump still hadn’t reimbursed him for the $130,000 he paid to Stormy Daniels. 

Remember this moment, because Cohen will likely corroborate it later. The conversation is evidence from two different people, who were both involved in the scheme directly, talking about Trump’s involvement, too. People don’t lie until there’s something to cover up, and at the time no one else knew about the arrangement.

You might wonder why the prosecution is allowing one of its witnesses to denigrate the other. In my mind, this is akin to letting the pressure out of a boiler that might otherwise blow. By acknowledging that Cohen has many failings as a person, and doing it in a more controlled way with a witness on their side, the prosecution likely is hoping the jury will be prepped for when the defense comes after Cohen big time. And in the back of their minds, they will also be weighing what kind of man Trump is that he used a guy like Cohen to fix his problems. 

Dirty up Cohen too much, and you might splash mud on Trump.

Davidson also testified about how he and Cohen schemed to keep the deal from getting out. In 2018, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported a blockbuster (and true) story that a Trump lawyer had paid Daniels $130,000 as part of an arrangement to buy her silence. At Davidson’s direction, Daniels sought to sow doubt over the story, claiming in a statement that she had not had a “sexual and/or romantic affair” with the president—an intentionally and “cleverly misleading” statement, according to prosecutors, that defined “affair” as something ongoing. (There are echoes of Bill Clinton’s infamous and misleading denial, I must add.)

The receipts

Davidson was also able to provide some critical context to audio evidence that prosecutors played for the jury. Michael Cohen was in the habit, it seems, of secretly recording conversations he had with his co-conspirators. Perhaps deep down Cohen knew that they might be needed one day, and he would have leverage.

On one such recording, made back in 2017, jurors could hear Cohen saying to Davidson that Trump hated “the fact that we did it.” That admission referred to the payment to Stormy Daniels, Davidson explained. This helps establish Trump’s knowledge and intent at the time. And remember, Cohen was telling Davidson all this when he was still working for and loyal to Trump, even if he was disappointed in Trump’s treatment of him.

There was also a telling text exchange introduced before the jury between Davidson and Dylan Howard, the Editor in Chief of the National Enquirer at the time. It was Election Night 2016, and the networks had just called the election for Donald Trump.

”What have we done?” Davidson asked Howard. 

This underscores the prosecution’s argument that the catch and kill scheme and the Daniels payoff were for the benefit of the Trump Campaign, and that the two men had helped enable Trump to hide damaging stories and get himself elected.

Later in the day, the prosecution played for the jury more audio files that they had retrieved off Michael Cohen’s phone. I’m going to leave you with this one from 2016 to consider. If I were on the jury, this would seal in my mind that Trump was very much involved and in the know, not only about the payoff, but the criminal cover-up. As a bit of context, remember that Allen Weisselberg is Trump’s Chief Financial Officer, and the name “David Dennison” was Trump’s code name that he used to hide his true identity in these deals to silence women who had sought to come forward.

Cohen: I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up.

Trump: Let me know what’s happening, ok? It’s such bullshit. I think this goes away quickly.

Cohen: Big time.

Cohen: I need to open up a company for the transfer, for our friend David.