Tuesday Briefing

Michael Cohen spoke about doing Donald Trump’s dirty work for a decade.Credit…Mike Segar/Reuters

Michael Cohen on the stand

Michael Cohen — the do-anything fixer who once boasted about burying Donald Trump’s secrets and spreading his lies — testified yesterday at Trump’s criminal trial.

In a crucial passage, he said that the hush-money payment that he made to Stormy Daniels came at Trump’s direction. “He expressed to me, ‘Just do it,’” Cohen said on the stand in New York, adding, “I was doing everything and more to protect my boss.” Here’s the latest.

Cohen’s testimony is a key to prosecutors’ efforts to tie Trump to allegations of a conspiracy to safeguard his presidential campaign in 2016 by burying Daniels’s account of a 2006 sexual encounter. Cohen admitted to lying and bullying for Trump, buying and suppressing negative stories while acting the part of a “thug.”

Cohen, who still faces cross-examination from the defense, also ground down some key assertions: that Trump was, as his lawyers argue, oblivious to his fixer’s machinations, and that the former president was a family man deeply worried about how Daniels’s accusations would harm his marriage. Cohen described Trump as a micromanager, who was focused above all else on his campaign.