Michael Cohen, a disgruntled former attorney, will testify against Trump in the hush money trial

On Monday, Michael Cohen, the estranged former fixer of Donald Trump, is scheduled to start testifying. The outcome of this evidence might determine whether or not jurors find the former US president guilty of concealing a payment made to a porn star in order to quiet her when she claimed to have had a sexual encounter.

Cohen,57, worked as an executive and attorney for almost ten years at Trump’s family real estate business in New York. He previously declared that he would take a bullet for Trump, who is a Republican seeking to unseat Democratic President Joe Biden in this year’s U.S. election on November 5 opens new tab.

As federal investigators looking into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign narrowed down on Cohen, who is now one of Trump’s most vocal detractors and regularly disparages him on social media and podcasts, Cohen, who had been Trump’s personal attorney from the beginning of the White House years in 2017, broke with him.

On Friday, defense attorney Todd Blanche said that Cohen had spoken on social media while sporting a T-shirt picturing President Trump in jail. As a result, Justice Juan Merchan ordered prosecutors to order Cohen to cease making public statements regarding the case.

Trial began on April 15 in Manhattan’s New York State Criminal Court. At the crux of the case is Cohen’s $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels regarding a 2006 alleged sexual encounter with Trump, which she said she had with him before the 2016 election.

In the books of his New York-based real estate company, Trump allegedly misrepresented his 2017 reimbursement payments to Cohen as legal costs, according to prosecutors from the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

According to them, the tampered business documents concealed tax and election law infractions, turning the 34 charges against Trump from misdemeanors to felonies carrying a maximum four-year jail sentence.

Trump has entered a not guilty plea to each of the 34 charges against him and has denied ever having had sex with Daniels. He contends that the lawsuit is an attempt to sabotage his campaign with political motivations. The prosecutor, Bragg, is a Democrat.

“Fat Alvin, corrupt guy,” Trump referred to Bragg during a Saturday night election rally in New Jersey.

The payment to Daniels, according to the prosecution, was a part of an unlawful plot to sway the 2016 election by purchasing the quiet of anyone who might have known harmful information. Trump’s attorneys claim that he did it to avoid embarrassing himself in front of his family.

In 2018, Cohen entered a guilty plea to breaking federal campaign finance regulations by giving Daniels the money. In his testimony, he stated that Trump gave him the order to pay. In that federal case, prosecutors never brought charges against Trump.

The six alternate jurors and the twelve jurors have been informed by Trump’s defense attorneys that Cohen is a liar and cannot be trusted. They try to dissociate Trump from the reimbursement checks and invoices that are at the center of the issue by claiming he paid Daniels on his own initiative.

Given Cohen’s repeated admissions of lying under oath, the defense has plenty of material to erode Cohen’s credibility.

He acknowledged lying to the US Congress in 2017 on a Moscow real estate project run by the Trump Organization, but he has since claimed that he did it to keep Trump safe.

In 2018, he also entered a guilty plea to breaking tax law, but he now denies ever doing the offense.