Trump Had Quite a Dramatic Week

Keeping up with Trump’s court schedule is a dizzying task, since he faces two federal trials, a criminal trial in Georgia, and a separate civil trial and criminal trial in New York. (Oh, and he’s running for president.) To make things easier, we’ll be recapping the biggest Trump trial news at the end of each week. 

This week was chock-full of drama, as Trump came face-to-face with his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen during his New York fraud trial. Trump was also slapped with another hefty fine for violating a gag order, and yet another one of his former attorneys, Jenna Ellis, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case.

Trump’s disgraced former attorney and personal fixer took the witness stand in the former president’s civil fraud trial in New York, and it didn’t take long for drama to unfold. Cohen played a major role in establishing New York Attorney General Letitia James’ case against Trump, with his 2019 congressional testimony tipping off authorities to Trump’s consistent overinflating of his properties and net worth in order to secure bank loans and more-favorable insurance rates.

Over the course of two days, Cohen testified that he and former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization Allen Weisselberg were tasked with inflating Trump’s net worth in order to hit the former president’s desired number, which Cohen said Trump “arbitrarily elected.”

However, during cross-examination, Trump lawyer Alina Habba called Cohen’s credibility into question. Despite Cohen’s pleading guilty to federal tax evasion charges in 2018, he said in court this week that he wasn’t actually guilty but had simply committed “tax omission” and failed to correct inaccurate loan paperwork. He also claimed he had been lying when he told lawmakers that he didn’t recall Trump or Weisselberg asking him to inflate Trump’s financials.

But after the court’s lunch break, when Cohen returned to the witness stand, he suddenly backtracked and said his 2018 testimony had not been false. By that point, a lawyer for the New York attorney general stepped in for questioning, and Cohen clarified that what he meant was that Trump hadn’t explicitly directed Cohen to fudge his financials, because the former president “speaks like a mob boss” and “tells you what he wants without specifically telling you.” For example, Cohen said, Trump would say things like, “I’m actually not worth four-and-a-half-billion dollars. I’m really worth more like six.”

Cohen’s waffling on this point compelled Trump’s legal team to demand a verdict in favor of Trump—and Judge Arthur Engoron promptly denied it. That led Trump to throw his hands up in the air and abruptly leave the courtroom in a huff. Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, Trump said, “The witness just admitted that we won the trial, and the judge should end this trial immediately.”

Speaking with reporters during a court lunch break, while Cohen was still on the witness stand and after he’d stormed out of the courtroom earlier that day, Trump said, “This judge is a very partisan judge, with a person who’s very partisan sitting alongside him perhaps even much more partisan than he is.”

The comments immediately drew Engoron’s attention, and he called the former president to the witness stand after the break had ended. “To whom were you referring?” he asked Trump.

“You and Cohen,” said Trump.

Engoron did not buy that, suspecting that Trump had actually been referring to his law clerk Allison Greenfield, who sits directly to his right on the bench and whom the former president has previously attacked on Truth Social. The judge concluded, “As the trier of fact, I find the witness is not credible,” and fined Trump $10,000 for defying a gag order—again.

Trump had previously claimed that Greenfield was “running this case” and that she was Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend, driving Engoron to impose a gag order to begin with. Trump was just found in violation of that gag order last week, after Engoron discovered that his Truth Social posts about Greenfield were still being displayed on Trump’s presidential campaign website. (That first gag-order violation cost Trump $5,000.)

Appearing teary-eyed in a Georgia courthouse, the 38-year-old Ellis pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings—but not without placing the blame on others. She said she had been operating under the assumption that “lawyers with many more years of experience than I” were providing her with “true and reliable information.” That could be a not-so-subtle nod to her co-defendant Rudy Giuliani, with whom she traveled to battleground states in an effort to persuade local officials and lawmakers to reject the election results of their states. (She also authored an infamous memo that detailed how former Vice President Mike Pence could thwart the electoral vote count.)

Ellis’ plea deal means she avoids jail time but must complete three to five years of probation, do 100 hours of community service, pay $5,000 in restitution to the Georgia secretary of state, and write an apology letter to the state of Georgia. And just like her fellow co-defendants Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, Ellis must testify in future trials related to Atlanta-area District Attorney Fani Willis’ election interference case.

Clues began dropping in the months leading up to to Ellis’ plea deal that perhaps served as the writing on the wall; in August, she openly questioned why Trump wasn’t paying for any of his co-defendants’ legal fees, including her own, and in September, she declared on her podcast that she couldn’t support Trump’s 2024 bid for president because of his “frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.”

Fresh reporting from ABC News says Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, spoke with special counsel Jack Smith’s team at least three times this year about his 2020 election interference and classified documents cases. However, this happened only after Meadows was granted immunity to testify under oath, so any information he provided can’t be used against him in a federal prosecution. We don’t know what exactly Meadows said in his testimony, but anonymous sources told ABC that the former chief of staff told federal investigators he had “long believed Trump was being dishonest,” including when Trump claimed that the election had been “a major fraud” within hours of the polls closing on Nov. 3, 2020. That’s when key swing states’ results began coming in and showed Trump losing.

Meadows also allegedly told federal investigators that he has yet to see any evidence of fraud in the 2020 election and that he agrees with the government’s assessment that it was a secure election—contradicting what he himself said in his 2021 book The Chief’s Chief, in which he still falsely claimed that the election had been stolen and rigged. Anonymous sources told ABC that Meadows claimed he privately told Trump that Rudy Giuliani hadn’t provided any evidence to back up his claims of voter fraud. However, Meadows told investigators he never heard Trump acknowledge he’d lost the election.

Meadows was the one who organized the infamous phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump demanded that he find “11,780 votes” for him, along with helping investigate claims of voter fraud coming through by way of Giuliani. Up until November 2021, as he promoted his book, he continued to publicly insist that there had been fraud at play in the 2020 election—but it appears Meadows has now changed his tune, with the penalty of perjury hanging over his head.

The Department of Justice originally requested that a gag order be placed on Trump in advance of his trial for Smith’s election interference case, which Judge Tanya Chutkan granted and the former president immediately appealed. Trump’s legal team also asked that Chutkan place that gag order on hold, pending resolution of the appeal. Chutkan agreed to consider the request, and while she does, she lifted any restrictions. But Smith has obviously been closely watching Trump’s other legal battles play out—on Wednesday, he sent another request to Chutkan urging her to reimpose the gag order. He cited Trump’s public rhetoric around Greenfield, Engoron’s law clerk involved in Trump’s New York civil fraud case, as well as how Trump has twice violated a similar gag order imposed by Engoron.

Smith also pointed to Trump’s latest Truth Social post about Meadows and ABC News’ reporting on his possible immunity deal. In the post, Trump insinuates that Meadows has been “hounded like a dog for three years” and threatened with jail time to get him to say “BAD THINGS” about the former president, and says that only “weaklings and cowards” would make any such deal with prosecutors.

This sort of rhetoric is meant to intimidate witness Meadows, Smith said, arguing that a gag order must be reimposed, or else Trump “will not stop his harmful and prejudicial attacks.” He’s also asking that Chutkan expand an earlier protective order that was part of Trump’s parole conditions to include a ban on communicating with witnesses about the facts of the case, even through indirect messages on social media or in speeches. Trump’s legal team has until Saturday to respond to Smith’s latest filing.