Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testifies before grand jury

Karen Freifeld

(Reuters) – Michael Cohen, a former lawyer and aide to Donald Trump, is expected to testify Monday afternoon before a Manhattan grand jury investigating silence payments he says he arranged for porn star Stormy Daniels on behalf of the former president .

Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen’s attorney, confirmed to Reuters that Cohen is due to testify in private at 2:00 pm (6:00 pm GMT). He declined to comment other than that.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Grand jury meetings are not public.

The renewed interest in Stormy Daniels and the $130,000 payment she received ahead of the 2016 presidential election comes at a critical time for Trump, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. an association with Trump, who denies this happened.

Trump has been given the opportunity to testify before a grand jury as a person under investigation, former president’s lawyer Susan Necheles told Reuters last Thursday. against him.

“… The Manhattan District Attorney is now threatening to charge former President Trump with a seven-year-old Stormy Daniels settlement,” Necheles said in a statement released Friday. “For the district attorney’s office to charge former President Trump, a victim of extortion, with a crime because his then-convicted liar lawyer Michael Cohen paid the extortionist would be an unprecedented and outrageous selective prosecution.”

Cohen was sentenced to prison in 2018 by a Manhattan federal court for arranging silence payments for Daniels and another woman during the 2016 Trump campaign.

It is doubtful that Trump, who has called the investigation a witch hunt, will agree to testify.

“I did absolutely nothing wrong, I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels,” he told Truth Social last week.

Joseph Takopina, another Trump lawyer, told ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday that he did not plan to sit on the grand jury, though no decision has yet been made.

(Reporting by Karen Freifeld; editing by Noeleen Walder and Bill Burcroth)

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