Court hears how Trump payments changed hands
Judge threatens jail time over gag order breach
NEW YORK •Thejudgepresiding over Donald Trump’s hush money trial fined him $1,000 on Monday and warned of jail time for future gag order violations while jurors heard detailed testimony for the first time about the financial reimbursements at the centre of the case.
The testimony from Jeffrey Mcconney, the former Trump Organization controller, provided a mechanical but vital recitation of how the company reimbursed payments meant to suppress embarrassing stories from surfacing during the 2016 presidential campaign and then logged them as legal expenses in a manner that Manhattan prosecutors said broke the law.
Mcconney’s appearance came as the landmark criminal trial, the first involving a former American president, entered its third week of testimony. His account lacked the drama offered Friday by longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks, but it nonetheless helped prosecutors trying to pull back the curtain on the transactions designed to protect Trump’s presidential bid during a pivotal stretch of the race.
Mcconney, who told jurors how reimbursement cheques were drawn from Trump’s personal accounts, also provided testimony that could help the defence. He acknowledged, for instance, that Trump never asked him to log the reimbursements as legal expenses or discussed the matter with him at all.
His testimony followed a stern warning from Judge Juan M. Merchan that additional violations of a gag order barring Trump from inflammatory out-of-court comments about witnesses, jurors and others closely connected to the case could result in jail time.
The $1,000 fine imposed Monday marks the second time since the trial began last month that Trump has been sanctioned for violating the gag order. He was fined $9,000 last week, $1,000 for each of nine violations.
“It appears that the $1,000 fines are not serving as a deterrent. Therefore going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction,” Merchan said before jurors were brought into the courtroom.
Trump’s statements, the judge added, “threaten to interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. I cannot allow that to continue.”
Trump sat forward in his seat, glowering at the judge as he handed down the ruling. When the judge finished speaking, Trump shook his head twice and crossed his arms.
Yet even as Merchan warned of jail time in his most pointed and direct admonition, he also made clear his reservations about a step that he described as a “last resort.”
“The last thing I want to do is put you in jail,” Merchan said. “You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president as well. There are many reasons why incarceration is truly a last resort for me. To take that step would be disruptive to these proceedings.”
The latest violation stems from an April 22 interview with television channel Real America’s Voice in which Trump criticized the speed at which the jury was picked and claimed, without evidence, that it was stacked with Democrats.
Once testimony resumed, Mcconney recounted conversations with longtime Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg in January 2017 about reimbursing Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer, for a $130,000 payment intended to buy the silence of a porn actor who has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. Weisselberg “said we had to get some money to Michael, we had to reimburse Michael.
He tossed a pad toward me, and I started taking notes on what he said,” Mcconney testified. “That’s how I found out about it.”
“He kind of threw the pad at me and said, ‘Take this down,’”’ said Mcconney, who worked for Trump’s company for about 36 years, retiring last year after he was granted immunity to testify for the prosecution at the Trump Organization’s New York criminal tax fraud trial.
A bank statement displayed in court showed Cohen paying $130,000 to Keith Davidson, the lawyer for porn actor Stormy Daniels, on Oct. 27, 2016, out of an account for an entity Cohen created for the purpose.
Weisselberg’s handwritten notes were stapled to the bank statement in the company’s files, Mcconney said.
Those notes spell out a plan to pay Cohen $420,000, which included a base reimbursement that was then doubled to reflect anticipated taxes as well as a $60,000 bonus and an expense that prosecutors have
described as a technology contract. Mcconney’s own notes were also shown in court. After calculations that laid out that Cohen would get $35,000 a month for 12 months, Mcconney wrote: “wire monthly from DJT.”
Asked what that meant, Mcconney said: “That was out of the president’s personal bank account.”
Trump is accused of falsifying business records by labelling the money paid to Cohen in his company’s records as legal fees.
Prosecutors contend that by paying him income and giving him extra to account for taxes, the Trump executives were able to conceal the reimbursement.