Live Updates: Former Employee Says Trump Used Personal Account to Repay Hush Money
"A longtime Trump Organization employee testified in Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial that Mr. Trump had used his personal bank account to reimburse his longtime fixer for the money that bought a porn star’s silence.
ON THE STAND
Jeffrey McConney
Ex-Trump Organization controller who facilitated payments to Cohen that were falsely described as “legal expenses” in records.
Pinned
A former Trump Organization employee who handled a key payment at the center of Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan told the jury on Monday that much of the money had come from the personal bank account of Mr. Trump, who was by then the president of the United States.
The employee, Jeffrey S. McConney, the former corporate controller at the Trump Organization, described the reimbursement of Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime fixer, who paid $130,000 out of his pocket to buy the silence of a porn star during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Once Mr. Trump was sworn in, he reimbursed Mr. Cohen for the hush money paid to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, who claimed to have had sex with Mr. Trump.
In his cross-examination, Trump’s lawyer Emil Bove is trying to establish some distance between Trump and the actions of his accounting department. Trump has opened his eyes for this section and is paying close attention. He smiled as Jeffrey McConney said he never discussed accounting software with Trump.
McConney said he never gave Trump a tour of the company’s accounting software. But it’s important to remember the government’s lawyers need not prove that Trump personally falsified the records, only that he orchestrated their falsification.
Emil Bove, one of Trump's lawyers, has begun his cross-examination of Jeffrey McConney. Michael Cohen, who has been slammed a few times in this trial, just got trolled again, as Bove asked McConney to confirm that Cohen was a lawyer. McConney scoffed and said “OK,” in a dismissive way.
Matthew Colangelo, a prosecutor, ends his direct questioning by asking Jeffrey McConney a series of questions about a financial disclosure publicized in 2018 in which Trump reported to the government that he had repaid more than $100,000 to Mr. Cohen the previous year. This form is further documentary evidence of the hush-money reimbursement, and as our colleagues reported then, raised many questions when it was first made public. Now we see prosecutors using them at Trump’s criminal trial as further evidence of the transaction at issue in the case.
We have now reviewed several general ledgers associated with Trump himself and his trust. 12 of the 34 counts against Trump are related to ledger entries that accounted for the reimbursements to Michael Cohen. It’s not clear, yet, that we’ve actually seen the entries in question — the ledgers we saw related to 2018, while the payments in question were made in 2017.
Tax forms were generated to account for the money paid to Michael Cohen, the implication being false records were also filed with the I.R.S.
We’re back in action, if “action” means a steady, often stultifying recitation of business records. As dull as it seems, it is critical to the prosecution’s case in trying to prove said business records were false and meant to cover a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, who could testify later this week.
As has almost always been the way, prosecutors return post-break before Trump does.
We’ve concluded looking at the series of 11 invoices that prosecutors say were falsified. With that testimony, we take our morning break.
Jeffrey McConney ambles out of the courtroom at the break. He doesn’t seem to look at Trump.
The last 10 minutes or so have consisted of a slow procession of invoices from Michael Cohen and related emails between Jeffrey McConney, Deborah Tarasoff and Allen Weisselberg being shown on the video monitors in the courtroom. These, prosecutors say, are the false documents. They don’t look like much, and despite their centrality to the case, the room has taken on a relaxed atmosphere as we make our way through them.
It’s worth noting that Cohen was not working for the Trump Organization anymore as he was submitting these invoices. At some point in 2017, he set up shop at Squire Patton Boggs’s offices in Midtown. Cohen continued to describe himself as Trump’s personal lawyer that year, providing a connection to Trump directly. But he was not working for the company.
This may be repetitive but it doesn’t appear that the prosecutors have lost the jurors. They appear to be following along on their screens.
As Jeffrey McConney continued to testify, Trump turned to one of his lawyers, Emil Bove, and whispered to him urgently, with Bove responding a bit more calmly and nodding.
In a funny aside, Jeffrey McConney is asked where Trump physically was in 2017. He deadpans that Trump was in Washington, D.C. He then describes the fact that the checks would have to be sent to the White House for the president of the United States to sign.
McConney makes clear that starting in March 2017, these checks reimbursing Michael Cohen began coming out of Trump’s personal bank account.
In March 2017, Trump began a pressure campaign on his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to get him to reverse his recusal from the investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians.
We are beginning to see the roots of what prosecutors say are false about the documents at issue in this case. Jeffrey McConney told Deborah Tarasoff, who dealt with the details of payroll at the Trump Organization and who is also expected to testify, to record the payments to Michael Cohen as “legal expenses.” He also told her to say they were being made as part of a “retainer” agreement between Cohen and Trump, which prosecutors say did not exist. Prosecutors say that was a way to disguise the hush-money reimbursement to Cohen. To find Trump guilty, jurors will have to agree that these documents were indeed falsified.
This is also why the prosecutors laid out their case they way they did — with the conspiracy around concealing negative information about Trump ahead of the election coming first.
Matthew Colangelo, the prosecutor, asked McConney if he ever saw a retainer agreement. He responded: “I did not.”
On screen is an email from Allen Weisselberg to Jeffrey McConney saying that it was okay to pay the money to Michael Cohen, “per agreement with Don and Eric.” Eric Trump is sitting in the courtroom as this takes place.
Notably, McConney testifies that he didn’t send the invoice from Cohen to the legal department for review. He acknowledges he typically would do so with invoices.
Jeffrey McConney is testifying about hugely important documentary evidence, only barely disguised by the financial documents and handwritten notes on screen. We just now learned that the payment came from Trump’s personal bank account. It appears we are about to see that the invoices Michael Cohen sent for the payment were prompted by Cohen’s conversation with Allen Weisselberg, in an arrangement, again, that Cohen will testify was confirmed with Trump.
Earlier in McConney’s testimony, the prosecution team established an important context for this: That Trump himself paid extremely close attention to his finances and especially to any outgoing cash.
McConney said he soon got in touch with Cohen about processing these payments. He emailed Cohen in early February 2017 with a reminder to send him invoices. The subject line was “$$.”
Jurors are seeing a lot of notes scribbled by Jeffrey McConney. It looks more like how someone might track their personal taxes on the fly, not something coming out of a company.
This evidence helps to counter one of the arguments that the defense made in its opening statement, asking the jury to consider why, if Michael Cohen made a payment of $130,000, he was paid so much more than he would have been owed. But Jeffrey McConney just walked us through the disparity in the amounts, which includes both a bonus for Cohen and tax considerations.
This also underscores the prosecution’s argument that top officials in the Trump Organization were involved in making Cohen financially whole. And McConney just walked through how closely Trump, historically, has paid attention to his bottom line.
We’re seeing a bank statement from Michael Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, marked with a handwritten notation by Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer. It outlines the reimbursement to Cohen, which included a bonus and monies to cover a tax burden. Weisselberg’s handwriting is a scrawl but Jeffrey McConney seems to be able to read it.
We are seeing important evidence right now, of the instructions Weisselberg gave to McConney as related to paying Cohen, in part to reimburse the hush-money payment. This fulfills several important functions: Cohen is expected to testify that he spoke with Trump about being repaid, and that Trump asked Weisselberg to handle the specifics. So here, we see paper evidence of what prosecutors will say is the aftermath of that conversation, and the blueprints for the repayment.
Jeffrey McConney, and the courtroom, are now being shown banking records that are going to lead to the heart of the case.
Last week, we saw only a brief glimpse of the hush money payment actually changing hands, when Keith Davidson, Stormy Daniels’s 2016 lawyer, texted someone the words “funds received.” Now, we’re seeing more evidence of that all-important transaction, including a withdrawal of about $130,000 related to the company Michael Cohen set up to facilitate the payment.
Jeffrey McConney is beginning to testify, albeit fairly euphemistically, about the reimbursement to Michael Cohen for the hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels. McConney says that in 2017, his boss, Allen Weisselberg, told him that Cohen needed some money. Some of it was related to Cohen’s bonus, McConney testifies, and adds, “And then there was some other money he was owed.” Cohen was owed $130,000 for the hush-money payment.
The prosecutor just asked Jeffrey McConney: “Are you familiar with” Michael Cohen? This is going to introduce key conversations between a former top financial official at the Trump Organization and Cohen, a key witness for the prosection.
McConney is being fairly mocking of Cohen. Asked about his role, McConney says, “He said he was a lawyer.”
Jeffrey McConney is no stranger to the witness stand. I have seen him testify three times. In 2023, at Trump’s civil fraud trial, he teared up on the stand. “I just wanted to relax and stop being accused of misrepresenting assets for the company that I loved working for. I’m sorry,” he testified. McConney was also a defendant in that case.
Jeffrey S. McConney worked as the corporate controller at the Trump Organization and, prosecutors say, helped arrange the reimbursement for a $130,000 hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, who has long claimed to have had an affair with Donald J. Trump.
That reimbursement is at the center of the criminal case against Mr. Trump. Prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office have accused Mr. Trump of falsifying business records by mislabeling the reimbursements in 2017 to Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer and fixer, as “legal expenses.” Mr. Cohen made the payment to Ms. Daniels in the last days of the 2016 campaign.
The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan rebuked the former president on Monday for mounting “a direct attack on the rule of law,” holding him in contempt of court for a second time and threatening to jail him if he continued to break a gag order that bars him from attacking jurors.
In a moment of remarkable courtroom drama, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, addressed Mr. Trump personally from the bench, saying that if there were further violations, he might bypass financial penalties and place the former president behind bars."
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