Read our ongoing coverage of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial here.
People of New York v. Donald Trump resumes Tuesday, picking up where it left off Friday, with the continuation of testimony from a banker who helped handle Michael Cohen’s business affairs. The reason the banker is here? He also tried to assist with Cohen’s fraudulent efforts to open a shell corporation to pay off Stormy Daniels, allegedly on behalf of Donald Trump.
Gary Farro, said banker, is testifying as what is called a custodial witness, or someone who can explain for the jury critical documents in a case but who had no part in the alleged crime. This helps explain why this testimony is the driest the jury has heard so far—though it’s necessary to explain the mechanics of the supposed conspiracy.
Indeed, after a week of blockbuster opening testimony from David Pecker, it’s unclear when things will heat up again with the trial’s most explosive witnesses, Cohen and Daniels. Which is why now is a good time to reflect on how Pecker laid the groundwork for a key part of the story prosecutors seem to be building: that the Trump Organization functioned as a crime family business, with Donald J. Trump as the boss.
This is in line with testimony we should eventually expect from Cohen and Daniels. In previous testimony in Trump’s civil fraud trial, Cohen described Trump as directing his minions much like a “mob boss.” Daniels has asserted that she and her daughter were threatened to keep quiet about her affair with Trump as far back in 2011, by someone she said she assumed to be working on behalf of Trump and who accosted her in a parking lot, made almost comically basic threats, then “disappeared.” While both seem likely to repeat these descriptions in trial testimony in this case, the degree to which Pecker’s testimony painted a similar picture was astonishing.
For four days, Pecker described dozens of conversations in which Cohen passed along orders he had received from “the boss,” with an apparent combination of reverence and fear. Here are some of the most evocative examples:
“I received a call from Michael Cohen telling me that ‘the boss’ wanted to see me”—in reference to an invitation to an August 2015 meeting in which the three would agree for the National Enquirer to be the “eyes and ears” of the campaign to help the candidate to buy up and suppress negative stories.
Cohen “thanked me and he said that the boss would be very pleased”—in response to Pecker buying up a false story from a doorman claiming that Trump had an “illegitimate child” with a housekeeper at Trump Tower.
Cohen “said to me, ‘Don’t worry, I’m your friend, the boss will take care of it’ ”—in reference to reimbursing the National Enquirer for the $150,000 purchase and suppression of Karen McDougal’s story of an alleged affair with Trump.
“Michael Cohen said, ‘The boss is going to be very angry with you’ ”—in reference to Pecker ultimately refusing to sell Trump and Cohen the McDougal story after receiving advice from a lawyer.
Cohen “said that ‘the boss said that if I got hit by a bus or if the company was sold, he did not want someone else to potentially publish those stories’ ”—in reference to a vault of old Donald Trump stories the Enquirer had that Trump sought to purchase. (Pecker testified that there was nothing incriminating in those files.)
Cohen “was upset he said that the boss would be furious at me”—in reference to Pecker’s refusal to buy Daniels’ story on Trump’s behalf. “I said, ‘Michael, my suggestion to you is that you should buy this story and you should take it off the market, because if you don’t and it gets out, I believe the boss is going to be very angry at you.’ ”
This was how everyone in Trump’s orbit seemed to talk. Pecker himself kept describing incidents this way, including a time he tried to persuade McDougal not to come out with her Trump story. “I wanted her to remain within our family,” he testified.
The reason for this kind of speak is clear—it allows for a nefarious payoff and cover-up schemes to be discussed in the most oblique manner possible, with everyone understanding just what is meant without it ever having to be stated, particularly in writing. Per Pecker, Trump avoided summarizing the details of their alleged conspiracy in explicit terms, instead relying almost entirely on inference. When Pecker says he met Trump in early January, 2017—after the election but before the inauguration—Trump asked him about the McDougal story in the most roundabout way possible.
“ ‘How’s our girl doing?’ he said,” Pecker testified. “He said, ‘I want to thank you for handling the McDougal situation.’ He also said, ‘I want to thank you for the doorman story, the doorman situation.’ ”
Later, when Pecker was personally invited to the White House by Trump for a “thank-you dinner,” he would offer casually that Pecker should bring whoever he wanted: “ ‘We’re friends—business associates. It’s your dinner.’ ”
It’s not difficult to imagine these words rolling off the tongue of Vito Corleone. Of course, we’re not talking about Mafia-level crime here, tactics that can include the use of serious violence and even murder. “It’s not like they’re saying ‘this thing of ours’ and [talking about] ‘whacking,’ ” said Andrew Weissmann, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted high-profile organized crime cases in the 1990s and early 2000s and also served on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump for obstruction of justice.
But still, Weissmann recalled meeting Donald Trump Jr.’s attorney during the Mueller investigation and realizing that the last time they had spoken, the attorney was representing a Colombo crime family “soldier.” And that’s not where the similarities end either: “I think it’s the language you note, in combination with the lack of rules or morality and the valuing of loyalty over all else, that makes the comparison more apt,” Weissmann told me. “If you believe the testimony, they’re violating the law constantly.”
And Trump has sure been accused of an awful lot of lawbreaking! If Bragg and his team are trying to sell a story of the Trump Organization as an organized crime syndicate with Trump as its boss, they certainly wouldn’t be the first law enforcement agents to make that comparison. Former FBI Director James Comey described his first meeting with Trump, in which he demanded loyalty, as feeling “like Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony.” Other investigators of Trump have had the same vibe. “When Jim Comey first made that analogy, I thought it was ridiculous,” Weissmann said. “I’ve since thought he’s right.”