
Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime fixer, prepares to take the stand as the key witness against his former boss
CNN
Nobody has anything nice to say about Michael Cohen.
Nobody has anything nice to say about Michael Cohen. Donald Trump’s former fixer and lawyer is expected to take the stand Monday as the key witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s case against the former president, prepared to give testimony connecting to Trump the $130,000 hush money payment Cohen made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Through three weeks of testimony, jurors have already heard plenty about Cohen through numerous witnesses, who have painted an unflattering portrait of an aggressive, impulsive and unlikeable attorney. David Pecker, former head of National Enquirer parent company American Media Inc., said Cohen was “prone to exaggeration.” Former Trump aide Hope Hicks said Cohen liked to call himself a “fixer” – a role she said was possible only because “he first broke it.” And Daniels’ former attorney Keith Davidson said he only worked with Cohen because he was a “jerk” whom Daniels’ then-manager Gina Rodriguez – along with everyone else – didn’t want to deal with. “Gina called me up to tell me that: ‘Some jerk called me and was very, very aggressive and threatened to sue me. And I, um, would like you, Keith, to call this jerk back,’” Davidson testified in the third week of the trial. “I hate to ask it this way, but who was that jerk?” asked Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass.

Former election clerk Tina Peters’ prison sentence has long been a rallying cry for President Donald Trump and other 2020 election deniers. Now, her lawyers are heading back to court to appeal her conviction as Colorado’s Democratic governor has signaled a new openness to letting her out of prison early.

The Trump administration’s sweeping legal effort to obtain Americans’ sensitive data from states’ voter rolls is now almost entirely reliant upon a Jim Crow-era civil rights law passed to protect Black voters from disenfranchisement – a notable shift in how the administration is pressing its demands.

White House officials are heaping blame on DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro over her office’s criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell, faulting her for blindsiding them with an inquiry that has forced the administration into a dayslong damage control campaign, four people familiar with the matter told CNN.

The aircraft used in the US military’s first strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean, a strike which has drawn intense scrutiny and resulted in numerous Congressional briefings, was painted as a civilian aircraft and was part of a closely guarded classified program, sources familiar with the program told CNN. Its use “immediately drew scrutiny and real concerns” from lawmakers, one of the sources familiar said, and legislators began asking questions about the aircraft during briefings in September.

DOJ pleads with lawyers to get through ‘grind’ of Epstein files as criticism of redactions continues
“It is a grind,” the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division said in an email. “While we certainly encourage aggressive overachievers, we need reviewers to hit the 1,000-page mark each day.”

A new classified legal opinion produced by the Justice Department argues that President Donald Trump was not limited by domestic law when approving the US operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro because of his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief and that he is not constrained by international law when it comes to carrying out law enforcement operations overseas, according to sources who have read the memo.







