Michael Cohen Says He Lied for Trump … and That’s Not the Worst of It

Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen testified Monday that he regularly bullied and harassed people who posed a threat to his boss’s ambitions—and his efforts were all rewarded.

While on the stand in Trump’s hush-money trial, Cohen admitted that completing “the task” was the only thing that mattered while working for Trump, specifying that lying for him “was needed” and that bullying Trump’s opposition was also sometimes necessary “in order to accomplish the task.”

“The only thing that was on my mind was to accomplish the task to make him happy,” Cohen said, adding that he was rewarded for the aggressive behavior by being given more power in Trump’s organization, including through job titles and seats.

Cohen described Trump as a “micromanager” who was aware of his every move and said that the pair spoke “every single day, and multiple times a day.” Other times, Cohen would communicate with Trump via one of his other close confidants, including his former assistant Rhona Graff, Trump Organization employee turned director of Oval Office Operations Keith Schiller, Trump’s children, or Hope Hicks.

Those admissions are not good for Trump’s legal team, who have attempted to frame the former president as an individual completely unaware of the behind-the-scenes actions intended to clean up his public profile ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Earlier this month, Hicks testified under subpoena that Trump understood it was prudent to bury the hush-money scandal before the election—even after Trump claimed he had no knowledge of the hush-money payments.

“Mr. Trump’s opinion was that it was better to be dealing with it now and it would’ve been bad to have that story come out before the election,” Hicks said.

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Trump found time on the night before his hush-money trial resumes to attack Whoopi Goldberg, of all people.

At 1:36 a.m. Monday, Trump reposted an altered image of Goldberg on Truth Social from a user, whose original caption was “I’m moving to Canada for sure this time!”

Trump added “Canada doesn’t want you Whoopi, NOBODY DOES!!!” to his repost.

With his trial starting bright and early Monday morning, why the former president felt the need to take a shot at a co-host of ABC’s The View, is anyone’s guess. The last time Goldberg took a shot at Trump on the show was late last month, when she called out the former president’s fixation on “anti-white racism.”

Perhaps the former president is feeling constrained by his gag order that prevents him from attacking court staff, the case’s witness, or their families. He took the bizarre step of praising fictional serial psychopath and serial killer Hannibal Lecter at a rally over the weekend as well, so could it be the latest example of his cognitive decline? He also might still be smarting over adult film actress Stormy Daniels’s damaging testimony last week, which included salacious and unflattering details about him. Or maybe he’s angry because the star witness on Monday is his former fixer and attorney Michael Cohen, who could have some of the most damaging testimony against the former president so far.

Cohen has direct knowledge of the allegations against Trump, as he allegedly carried out the hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels that are at the center of the case. He has also called Trump “Von ShitzInPantz” as well as a “racist jackass who referred to African nations as ‘shithole countries.’” Trump faces 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime for paying off Daniels to cover up their affair ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He has pleaded not guilty.

Republicans apparently haven’t cast aside the possibility of overturning another election.

At least two top GOP lawmakers have felt the need to add caveats to statements affirming that they’ll embrace the outcome come November, including the former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Lindsey Graham.

“Will you accept the results of the 2024 election no matter who wins?” prompted MSNBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker on Sunday.

“Yeah, I’ll accept them if there’s no massive cheating,” Graham said. In the same breath, Graham specified that he “accepted 2020” as a measure of his commitment to accepting election outcomes, even though he clearly hasn’t let go of the outcome enough not to buy in a little to his party’s election interference scandal.

Meanwhile, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance fully committed to accepting the results of the general election—so long as Trump is the victor.

“Look Dana, I fully commit to accept the results of 2024. I think that Donald Trump will be the victory,” Vance told CNN’s Dana Bash. “If it’s a free and fair election, Dana, I think every Republican will enthusiastically accept the results. And again, I think that those results will show that Donald Trump will be reelected president.”

Conservatives have insisted—without evidence—that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump since he refused to concede to President Joe Biden’s victory. The scandal resulted in a slew of criminal charges for Trump and his allies in their efforts to undermine elections in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia. Simultaneously, news outlets that aired the baseless allegations, including Fox News and Newsmax, are under the gun for historic defamation lawsuits by voting machine companies. The gamut of lies has been thoroughly debunked, but Republicans attempting to curry favor with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee continue to double down on it.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that an El Paso woman who gave birth despite supposedly receiving a tubal ligation can’t sue her medical provider because “society views a healthy child’s arrival as a net boon and a gift.”

The nine-member court, whose members are all Republican, ruled unanimously that Grissel Velasco could not seek damages from Dr. Michiel Noe and his medical practice, Sun City Women’s Health Care, for medical expenses, physical and mental harms, and the costs of raising her now 8-year-old girl.

“Texas law does not regard a healthy child as an injury for which a parent must be compensated but, rather, as a life with inherent dignity and profound, immeasurable value,” wrote Justice Rebeca Huddle.

Under Texas law, a parent could only recover damages, such as medical expenses, from during the pregnancy, delivery, and afterward—nothing more, Huddle said.

Huddle cited the fact that Noe had reimbursed Velasco $400 for the cost of the tubal ligation, a sterilization procedure in which a woman’s fallopian tubes are cut and tied to prevent pregnancy, and that her pregnancy was covered by the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Velasco’s lawyer, Jose Lopez, said in a statement that the ruling had “taken away a patient’s voice and choice and has immunized the negligent doctor from civil liability.”

The ruling fits right along with Texas’s extreme laws on abortion, which include a near-total ban passed in 2021. Last summer, a group of women sued the state over the law and one woman vomited while telling the story of how she was forced to give birth to a baby that died shortly after delivery.

Anti-abortion activists in the state want to execute women and minors who seek abortions or in-vitro fertilization. And the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, has threatened to prosecute doctors and hospitals for carrying out abortions, even if a court orders one out of health concerns. All of this seems to indicate a forced birth-or-else policy in the state.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is no longer welcome in 16 percent of her home state.

The MAGA Republican has been banned from the territories of five of the nine Sioux tribes in her state for derogatory comments she made at a town hall in March, accusing the community of failing their children.

“Because they live with 80 percent to 90 percent unemployment,” Noem said at the time. “Their kids don’t have any hope. They don’t have parents who show up and help them. They have a tribal council or a president who focuses on a political agenda more than they care about actually helping somebody’s life look better.”

On Tuesday, the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe became the fifth tribe to pass a resolution barring Noem. They join similar actions taken by the Oglala, Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, and Rosebud Sioux tribes, which have so far banned the state’s executive leader from 13,000 square miles of land—approximately 90 percent of the state’s Indigenous-owned territory.

“As tribal leaders, it is our duty to honor the voice or the wishes of our people, and that’s who we work on the behalf of,” Sisseton Tribal Chairman J. Garrett Renville told local station KELO. “The people at this time would like that in place until there was a formal apology.”

Native tribes have had a strained relationship with Noem since she took office in 2019. Since then, Noem and South Dakota’s Indigenous population have disagreed over the construction of the XL Keystone pipeline and the removal of Native American histories from South Dakota’s education standards. Noem also violated the tribes’ sovereignty during the Covid-19 pandemic, undermining tribal efforts to enact lockdowns and quarantine zones while the state’s infection count skyrocketed.

“Governor Noem claims she wants to establish meaningful relationships with Tribes to provide solutions for systemic problems. However, her actions as Governor blatantly show otherwise,” the Rosebud Sioux Tribe said in a news release in April after issuing their own ban.

Noem doesn’t seem to have a lot of backers in her corner anymore. The South Dakota governor alienated millions of Americans when she revealed in her latest book, No Going Back, that she shot and killed her puppy. Some of the people disgusted with the canine execution included some of her strongest allies, including Donald Trump, who has reportedly removed Noem from his shortlist of candidates to become his vice president over the anecdote.

If Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, Republicans and conservatives want criminals to die—literally. 

Project 2025, a coalition of conservatives and Republicans, released a document last year laying out its policy wish list for all of the government. Hidden deep within the playbook, on page 554, is a plan to execute every inmate on federal death row—and add more criminals to it with the help of the Supreme Court, HuffPost reported Friday. 

Right now, there’s a federal moratorium on executions that was restored shortly after Biden’s election. The Trump administration had ended it in 2019 with the first federal execution in nearly 13 years and the tacit approval of the Supreme Court. The federal government would execute 13 inmates before Trump’s term ended, the most in a single year since 1896. Now it seems the rest of the GOP plans to pick up where the Trump administration left off. 

The next administration should “do everything possible to obtain finality” for every prisoner on federal death row, which currently includes 40 people, says the plan, written by Gene Hamilton,  a former official in Trump’s Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

“It should also pursue the death penalty for applicable crimes—particularly heinous crimes involving violence and sexual abuse of children—until Congress says otherwise through legislation,” Hamilton continues, writing in a footnote that this could require a new Supreme Court ruling, “but the [Justice Department] should place a priority on doing so.”

It’s unclear if Trump will strictly abide by this conservative playbook. The fact that he has trouble articulating his plans coherently suggests that it’ll be up to the people he surrounds himself with. If he appoints Cabinet members who are longtime Republican operatives, or even hard-right advisers such as Stephen Miller, it seems likely. 

Donald Trump is—once again—trying to backpedal on his opinions about TikTok.

The presumed GOP presidential nominee is trying to argue that it wasn’t conservatives who originally pushed to ban the popular social media platform, but rather President Joe Biden.

“Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, before cooking up a novel conspiracy that Biden is removing American access to the platform in a bid to help one of its social media rivals, Facebook.

“He is the one pushing it to close, and doing it to help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the Republican Party. It’s called ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” Trump said.

It’s at least the third instance in which Trump has conveniently forgotten how hard he fought during his own administration to ban the Chinese-owned app. Long before Biden signed the effective ban—which is purportedly about national security—into law, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order before he left office in 2020. He claimed that the video-sharing platform “[threatened] the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

And the flipped script comes at an opportune moment for the presidential candidate. Major Republican donor Jeff Yass, whom Trump appears to be courting, reportedly owns a 15 percent stake in TikTok. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is reportedly trying to rejoin Trump’s team, has new business ties to the Chinese media industry.

Another of Trump’s allies, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, revealed his own plans to acquire the social media company via an investor group just a day after the ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House.

“I think the legislation should pass, and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin told CNBC in March. “It’s a great business, and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”

ByteDance announced shortly after Biden signed the ban—which gave TikTok an ultimatum to either sell its I.P. to an American owner or stop operating within the U.S.—that the company doesn’t “have any plans to sell.”

After removing Confederate names from two of its public schools during the summer of 2020, a rural Virginia county has become the first school district in the country to reverse such a change.

Shenandoah County’s school board voted early Friday morning to reinstate the names of three Confederate officers on two schools, after a meeting that lasted for hours prompted by years of pushback, The New York Times reported. According to the Times, school board meetings were filled with local residents who said the name changes were secretive and rushed through and said they resented cultural shifts being forced upon them.

Four years ago, during protests against racial injustice across the country, the board voted 5–1 in a virtual meeting to change the names of Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High. The schools were renamed the next year as Honey Run and Mountain View. But backlash in the county, which is 90 percent white, led to a revote in 2022 that resulted in a tie.

“When you read about [Stonewall Jackson]—who he was, what he stood for, his character, his loyalty, his leadership, how Godly a man he was—those standards that he had were much higher than any leadership of the school system in 2020,” Tom Streett, one of the board members, said Friday before he and the rest of the board voted 5–1 to restore the names.

The protests across the United States during the summer of 2020 against racial injustice resulted in changes ranging from new school curricula about the country’s racial history to name changes such as those in Shenandoah County. In the years since, though, the right wing has pushed back on any changes to the pre-2020 status quo, from denying that systematic racism exists to inventing the specter of “critical race theory” to prevent any mention of racism in schools or school policy, even winning school board elections on the premise. The result has been a decimation of public education in America.

Donald Trump is suddenly in the odd situation of having to defend against his own words.

An old tweet of his was admitted into evidence in his hush-money trial Friday, and the post appears to challenge what Trump’s legal defense has tried to claim since opening statements.

In May 2018, Trump admitted on Twitter (now called X) that his former fixer Michael Cohen actually did receive a “monthly retainer”—even though Trump’s attorneys have attempted to argue that Cohen was not paid back for the $130,000 hush-money payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels. Instead, Trump’s lawyers claim Cohen was paid as an employee.

“Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between these two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement or NDA,” Trump wrote at the time.

Prosecutors have argued that the retainer fee was simply a guise to pay Cohen back.

The timestamp on the tweet also provides further evidence that Trump was aware of multiple $35,000 checks to Cohen inked by his two sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, made via a revocable trust.

Trump is accused of using Cohen to sweep an affair with Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election. The Republican presidential nominee faces 34 felony charges in this case for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime. Trump has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

Donald Trump’s former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson could leave the Republican Party behind and vote for Joe Biden in November.

Hutchinson made the comment during an event at Colorado Mesa University on Tuesday. Video posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday shows Hutchinson addressing the crowd.

“I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my life, but I would absolutely consider voting for Joe Biden this upcoming November because he will not seek to destroy our nation. He will not seek to destroy our Constitution,” she said.

Hutchinson’s statement does not come lightly. She had a harrowing time while working in Trump’s White House, describing a hostile environment where Trump threw dishes, wanted to allow armed supporters at his January 6 rally, and tried to strangle a Secret Service agent. In her book, Enough, Hutchinson accused former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani of groping her just before Trump’s speech on January 6. She also had to put up with aggressive advances from Representative Matt Gaetz, a Trump acolyte who even falsely claimed that two dated, she said. She would become a star witness for the House January 6 investigative committee.

During House Republicans’ failed attempt to impeach Biden, one of their witnesses, Tony Bobulinski, tried to paint Hutchinson as an “absolute liar and a fraud” because she described an “out of sight” meeting between him and Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, at a 2020 campaign rally in Rome, Georgia. Hutchinson shut him down with photographic evidence of the meeting.

Hutchinson is not the first Trump White House aide to signal support for Biden. Former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews told MSNBC late last month that she’d be voting for the president’s reelection, stating that “when we have a candidate on the ballot who will not uphold the Constitution, then I feel like I have to put policy aside, and I want to support the person who is best suited to defeat Donald Trump.”

Georgia’s former Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan has also endorsed Biden, saying he plans on “voting for a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass.”