Trump trial live updates: Ex-president claims judge is ‘making big money’ off the ‘scam’ case as Michael Cohen leaves his apartment to take the stand again

When Donald Trump sat down with his lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to discuss his plans to run for president in 2016 he had a simple warning.

‘You know that when this comes out, meaning the announcement, just be prepared, there’s going to be a lot of women coming forward,’ is how Cohen remembered the conversation.

During more than five hours of riveting testimony on Monday, Cohen described the extraordinary lengths he went to in keeping their stories out of the headlines.

He worked his contacts in the media, set up front companies and received invoices from businesses with meaningless names like ‘Investor Advisory Services.’

And in so doing the prosecution’s star witness added the one link missing from the past three weeks of evidence: He told the court that Trump told him to do it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s move to join Trump’s court entourage is an extraordinary move for the man who is third in line for the presidency, and is another sign of the total embrace Trump is getting from congressional Republicans.

It comes days after days after the House rejected an effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to remove Johnson from office through a procedural motion.

Trump sided with the speaker in the spat, meeting with Johnson and posting in advance that ‘this is not the time’ to move to vacate the chair, as Greene was proposing.

The Speaker’s office left no doubt which side he is on.

‘The Speaker will then address media outside of the ongoing sham prosecution of President Trump,’ his office announced.

‘Speaker Johnson will address the political persecution of the 45th President of the United States by President Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice and the left-wing Manhattan district attorney.’

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a Trump critic, criticized the move.

‘Have to admit I’m surprised that @SpeakerJohnson wants to be in the “I cheated on my wife with a porn star” club. I guess he’s not that concerned with teaching morality to our young people after all,’ she posted.

Donald Trump attacked the judge in the hush money trial again on Tuesday by claiming he is ‘making big money’ off the ‘scam and its outcome’.

The former president took his targeting of Judge Juan Merchan to a new level in an early morning tirade on Truth Social.

‘Virtually every Legal Analyst and Scholar said yesterday, at the end of the day, THAT THERE IS NO CASE, AND THAT THIS WITCH HUNT SHOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN BROUGHT, AND SHOULD BE THROWN OUT NOW!!!

‘WHY WASN’T THIS HOAX BROUGHT SEVEN YEARS AGO, INSTEAD OF IN THE MIDDLE OF MY WINNING CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT — ELECTION INTERFERENCE.

‘The problem is that this Judge, Merchan, is TOTALLY COMPROMISED, CONFLICTED, AND CORRUPT, MAKING BIG MONEY OFF OF THIS SCAM AND ITS OUTCOME.

‘He can’t render a fair decision, too much is at stake for him and the Democrats. The Appellate Division should remove him immediately!’

Stormy Daniels wore a bulletproof vest to and from the courthouse in New York last week when she appeared as a witness in Donald Trump’s hush money trial.

Stormy Daniels attorney, said his client was particularly worried about being targeted as she came to detail the alleged sexual encounter at the center of the trial.

‘She was concerned about the security coming in to New York,’ Clark Brewster told CNN on Monday night.

‘She wore a bulletproof vest every day until until she got to the courthouse’, he explained.

Michael Cohen has left his Manhattan apartment to head downtown to the court for his second day of testimony.

Donald Trump’s former fixer stepped out in a suit and light blue tie after spending Monday detailing how he arranged hush money deals for his old boss.

He will take the stand and will first be questioned by the prosecution.

Then he will face a bruising cross-examination from Trump’s lawyers who will attack from all sides to undermine his credibility

Donald Trump will bring two running mate contenders in his entourage when he arrives in court for the Manhattan trial on Tuesday.

The former president brought his son Eric and his team of loyal aides for the opening weeks of the case.

Now he is turning to Republican politicians and candidates to be his vice president for support.

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and Vivek Ramaswamy will sit in the Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday for the second day of Michael Cohen’s testimony.

Speaker Mike Johnson and GOP Congressmen Byron Donalds and Cory Mills will also be in tow.

Limited in the campaigning he can do from the courtroom, he is now bringing the VP stakes and his biggest allies with him.

Michael Cohen was new on the job, and anxious to please his new boss that he was worth his new $375,000 salary and Fifth Avenue skyscraper office.

So in an early display of his tough guy lawyer chops, he went to work on an outstanding billing conundrum at the ill-fated Trump University. About 50 vendors had not been paid, with a total that ‘far exceeded’ the $2 million available in the venture’s bank account.

The personal injury lawyer got to work, creating a hand-written spread sheet that ‘came up with basically 20 percent of everyone’s invoice’ – denying each of them 80 per cent of what they were owed. (Two other vendors ‘just went away.’) He called each of them one-by-one to tell them what they were getting.

Donald Trump’s response when Cohen told him what he accomplished? ‘Fantastic,’ Cohen testified. It made him feel ‘like I was on top of the world,’ at a company that he described as like ‘a big family.’

Years later, it would be Cohen’s turn to feel what it was like to feel stiffed, even after helping guide Trump to the White House. His annual bonus came in at two-thirds of what it had been before.

‘I was truly insulted, personally hurt by it,’ Cohen told prosecutor Susan Hoffinger. He told her he was ‘truly pissed off and angry’ and that ‘I used quite a few expletives.’

Michael Cohen will return to the stand on Tuesday morning to deliver more testimony against his old boss, Donald Trump.

The fixer and lawyer, who was convicted over the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and lying to Congress, is set to face grueling questioning from the former president’s lawyers.

Cohen also described working at ‘the direction of and for the benefit’ of the presumptive Republican nominee.