Former fixer Michael Cohen testifies at trial he lied for Trump
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00:00Now the star witness for the prosecution in the Donald Trump criminal trial has
00:04taken the stand today. Michael Cohen is Trump's former lawyer and prosecutors
00:09are hoping that he will tell the jurors that he did help Trump illegally hide a
00:15hush money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Well to tell us a bit
00:20more Ketavan Ghorjasani our foreign editor and indeed our former
00:23correspondent in Washington is with me now. Ketavan before we get into what's
00:26happening today just remind us exactly who is Michael Cohen. Well as you said
00:31he's Donald Trump's former lawyer he's 57 years old and he worked for Donald
00:37Trump for nearly a decade first with the Trump family's real estate company and
00:43then as Donald Trump's private lawyer especially that first year in the White
00:48House in 2017 and he was seen at the time as the ultimate Trump loyalist
00:55himself he described as Trump's spokesman, thug, pitbull and lawless
01:02lawyer. He even wrote in his book and said multiple times that he would take a
01:09bullet for Donald Trump if that was necessary. He was the one who in 2016
01:15paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet and was then paid back by the
01:24Trump organization for so-called legal fees and that is of course at the core
01:29of this trial but he broke with Trump back in 2018 when he pled guilty in
01:35front of federal court for campaign finance violations. That's when the
01:39break really happened with Donald Trump. He was sentenced at the time for three
01:43years in prison and since then he has turned from loyalist to one of Donald
01:50Trump's fiercest critics. Even during this trial he's been talking publicly
01:55about the case so much so that the judge himself asked him to stop talking
01:59publicly about this case after Michael Cohen appeared on social media with a
02:04t-shirt that portrayed Donald Trump behind a bar so he's really very close
02:11to Donald Trump or was at some point and he has now really turned on him and he
02:18is already testifying as we speak. I described him as a star witness for the
02:23prosecution is that a fair description do you think? Absolutely but it could go
02:28both ways he's definitely the star as in in the opening statements both the
02:33defense and the prosecution mentioned his name many many times way more than
02:38anybody else 130 times. For the prosecution he's definitely a star
02:43witness he's probably the closest witness that they have that was so close
02:48to Donald Trump. He wrote once in his book I know where the skeletons are
02:54buried because I was the one who buried them. So who better to tie all of this
03:01together which is what the prosecution needs to tie the payment to Stormy
03:06Daniels and the receiving the reimbursement of that payment and the
03:12falsifying of the business records who better than the person who made that
03:16payment and then received the reimbursement. The problem is that he is
03:20far from a great and good witness that's something that the prosecution has
03:26already tried to preempt basically showing that yes he does have flaws he
03:32has lied multiple times he was actually asked by one of the attorneys for the
03:36prosecution at the start of his testimony if he had ever lied for Trump
03:41he said yes he lied to Congress in 2017. Trump's defense they're going to make
03:46the case that he is not to be trusted that he is vindictive that he's out to
03:51get a Donald Trump and the key to this trial is likely going to be who does the
03:55jury believe that he is a star witness or that he is not a credible witness.
04:00All right it's gonna be a really interesting couple of days. Ketavan
04:02Gorjastadi. Thanks very much.