May 6 (UPI) — Week four of Donald Trump‘s hush-money trial wrapped-up Monday with the former president fined for a 10th gag order violation and threatened with possible jail time as current and former Trump Organization officials took the stand.
After ex-Trump Organization comptroller Jeff McConney took the stand, he was replaced by the company’s current accounts payable supervisor, Deborah Tarasoff, who began work for the company 24 years ago in 2000.
It is alleged that Tarasoff had helped prepare 12 checks — each signed by Trump — for $35,000 each that were used to reimburse Michael Cohen in 2017 totaling $130,000 for alleged Stormy Daniels hush-money payments, and that Tarasoff had falsely documented the bookkeeping expenses.
“If (Trump) didn’t want to sign it, he didn’t sign it,” Tarasoff said about the checks singed by Trump. “It was signed in Sharpie and it was black and that’s what he uses.”
Tarasoff, who was on stand for a little over an hour, had testified to many of the things McConney said about who in the Trump Organization had been authorized to sign checks and for what amounts. She said that if the former president did not want to approve a check, he would write “Void” on it.
But Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche during Tarasoff’s cross-examination had managed to minimize her role by outlining how she not only didn’t know Trumps check-signing process, but also did not interact with him and was never present for conversations or got permissions by Trump himself.
She instead spoke of how her directions had came through McConney and then afterward by former Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg, who in March had plead guilty to perjury.
Weisselberg, she said, “had his hands in everything.” Asked if he interacted with Trump, she said, “To my knowledge, yes.”
Tarasoff had testified that she didn’t know what happened to the checks for Cohen that were sent to the White House and which were approved and signed by Trump then returned to her.
“When Mr. Weisselberg on some of the emails or Mr. McConney told you to go ahead and pay it, generate a check, you didn’t get permission from President Trump himself, correct?” Blanche asked, to which she replied, “Correct.”
The Trump Organization’s retired comptroller, McConney, who was employed by the company from 1987 until his February 2023 retirement, faced questions from the legal teams as they walked through the Trump Organization’s financial practices and its series of networks or other trusts set up over the years which were used to process money and payments.
The jury was presented with 12 vouchers showing monthly $35,000 payments made to Trump attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen beginning in February 2017.
McConney testified that the payments were listed as “legal expenses” and included a description saying they were part of a legal retainer agreement, contradicting earlier testimony in the hush-money case that no such agreement was in place for Cohen.
Nine of those 11 payments were sent directly from Trump’s bank account, with checks sent directly to the White House for him to sign.
He indicated that after Trump’s 2017 inauguration as president, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Allen Weisselberg were given signature authority to sign checks on a Trump trust account, which was previously only held by Trump, but anything over $10,000 had to be signed by two of the signatories.
McConney testified that his employment had overlapped with Cohen’s whose last payment had been Jan. 27, 2017, adding that he had had conversations with Weisselberg about additional payments to Cohen had sought for himself.
He said that Weisselberg also ordered him to pay $130,000 to Cohen for reimbursement for hush-money payments to to Stormy Daniels and $50,000 to Red Finch for tech services.
He said that he eventually made payments to Cohen through Donald Trump’s personal account but doesn’t recall further payments to Cohen after Dec. 2017.
McConney is barred for three years from holding an official role in any New York company and is permanently banned for life from any financial management roles in the state.
McConney told a story about how Trump had strongly suggested to him that McConney “negotiate my bills, look at my bills” and fake fired him.
The former president had reportedly laughed and smiled at some points during McConney’s testimony about the story.
“He got off the phone call, and he said, ‘You’re not fired but my cash balances went down from last week,'” McConney said, adding “It was a teaching moment. Just because somebody is asking for money negotiate with them, talk to them.”
“Al said, ‘we have to get some money to Michael, reimburse Michael,'” McConney testified on the stand. “I started taking notes on what Allen said.”
Earlier, Judge Juan Merchan fined Trump for an additional gag order violation, saying “the magnitude of this decision is not lost on me but at the end of the day I have a job to do,” adding how “the last thing I want to do is to put you in jail,” but it had appeared to Merchan that the continuous flow of $1,000 gag order violation fines “are not serving as a deterrent” for Trump to stop violating his own gag order.
“You are the former president of the United States, and possibly the next president as well,” the judge had to remind Trump.
“There are many reasons why incarceration is truly a last resort for you,” Merchan said as he told Trump — who would be the first ex-president to be put in prison for any period of time — that he will impose a jail sanction “if necessary.”
Trump has repeatedly and almost daily called Merchan “conflicted” as he railed against the judge just before going in this court in the morning.
“It’s a ridiculous case, I did nothing wrong,” Trump told a pool of reporters. “And yet the judge gags me and I’m not allowed to talk about, I guess, his total conflict.”
McConney took the stand in the morning while there had been no advance posting of whom the prosecution will put on the stand to follow former White House communications director Hope Hicks‘ testimony from last week.
Trump’s top communications director from 2015 to 2018, Hicks had broke down and cried in her Friday testimony on stand. Hicks had recalled Trump’s reaction when news broke in 2018 of an alleged hush-money payment to cover up a supposed affair with porn film actress Stormy Daniels, saying that it was preferable to having negative press during his 2016 campaign run.
“He wanted to know how it was playing, and just my thoughts and opinion about this story versus having a different kind of story before the election had Mr. Cohen not made that payment,” said Hicks, the first witness from Trump’s inner circle to enter the witness box.
“I think Mr. Trump’s opinion was it was better to be dealing with it now, and it would have been bad to have that story come out before the election,” she stated.
However, Hicks appeared to undercut the idea that the primary motivation behind Trump’s alleged actions was an illegal bid to influence the election — the whole premise of the prosecution’s case — by going on to testify that Trump was equally concerned about keeping news stories about affairs from his wife, Melania Trump.
Hicks related how when, four days before the 2016 election, a story hit about a $150,000 payment by the National Enquirer to Playboy model Karen McDougal to cover up the alleged affair with the former president, Trump had instructed staff to hide the newspapers.
“He was concerned about how it would be viewed by his wife, and he wanted me to make sure that the newspapers weren’t delivered to his residence that morning,” she said.
Trump was also keen to avoid situations that would cause “anyone in his family to be hurt or embarrassed”, she said.
Earlier in the session, Hicks also testified about the chaos triggered by The Washington Post’s October 2016 revelation of the infamous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts about groping women with impunity.
She told jurors she was “very concerned” when The Washington Post first contacted her for comment.
“Everyone was just absorbing the shock of it,” Hicks said adding that their initial response was “deny, deny, deny.”
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up $130,000 paid to his former lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse him for a paying off Daniels to keep quiet about sex with Trump.
The Republican presidential candidate denies ever having had sexual relations with Daniels.
