According to accounts, the defense team for former President Donald Trump charged disgraced former lawyer Michael Cohen with fabricating a phone call from October 2016 that he said was regarding a payment to Stormy Daniels.
One of Trump’s defense lawyers, Todd Blanche, questioned Cohen about the call that reportedly took place to Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, shortly after 8:00 p.m. that fall evening, during Cohen’s cross-examination during the business records trial. According to The Hill, Cohen told Trump during the discussion that he needed to pay Daniels. It seems that Blanche was recommending that he get in touch with Schiller over a teenage bully’s harassing phone calls.
Blanche was reportedly hinting to Keith Schiller that “it seems ludicrous that Michael Cohen may have simultaneously reported a prankster and talked to Trump about the hush-money payment,” according to the New York Times.
According to Matthew Russell Lee of The Inner City Press, the call lasted under two minutes. Here are some additional details about the conversation:
“Blanche rewrote the last fifteen minutes. He persuaded Cohen to admit—or, depending on one’s viewpoint, merely to say—that the harasser had been calling Cohen for the previous three days and had ultimately forgotten to block their number. Cohen texted the number, letting the Secret Service know he’d be giving it to them. He stated that he discovered, or received information, that the victim was 14 years old. He then texted Keith Schiller, requesting that he take action.”
Cohen texted Schiller about the harassing calls in between, according to Lee’s tweets. The second text was sent at 8:14 p.m., while the first one was sent at 7:48 p.m. From the courtroom, Katelynn Richardson of The Daily Caller stated that Schiller “left a voicemail at 8:01” and then “texted me” at 8:02 p.m. Then, at 8:02, he received a call from the discredited former lawyer.
“You misrepresented this. You claimed that you did not recall the harassing phone calls, but now you say that you discussed the harasser and Stormy Daniels throughout the one-minute and thirty-six-second call,” Blanche said, according to Lee.
Cohen asserted during Tuesday’s cross-examination that the conversation may have been about Daniel and the 14-year-old harasser. Cohen’s TikTok videos concerning the trial and Trump were the focus of the questioning.
