take these actions to do things they knew, consciousness of guilt, might have been illegal, but they needed to at least keep the campaign on life support. we do know that the election was close. 10,000 votes in michigan. 44,000 in pennsylvania out of over 100 million nationwide. razor thin in three states and losing the electoral college. the voters then did not know about the hush money scheme. there are no do overs in presidential campaigns. what this trial is bringing to the jury as the intense political motivation for what prosecutors say was a crime that went well beyond politics as usual. that does it for our special coverage. msnbc has you covered with more trial coverage, right now. michael, did you get any sleep last night? >> the final witness for the

prosecution. michael cohen, back on the stand. >> susan hoffinger went through the different times that michael cohen has lied, his legal troubles, the fact he has been disbarred. >> and under cross-examination from the defense. >> he is obsessed with revenge against donald trump, that's what they're saying. >> as donald trump roles and with a full entourage including the speaker of the house. >> president trump is a friend and i wanted to be here to support him. >> tonight, chris hayes and alex wagner break down what happened inside and outside the courtroom with rachel maddow, katie phang and msnbc political experts, when special coverage of trump on trial begins right now. >> good evening from new york, i am chris hayes, along with alex wagner. thank you for joining us for our special coverage of day 17 of donald trump's criminal trial. we will be joined by rachel

maddow and lawrence o'donnell in a minute to break down what we heard from the most pivotal witness in the case, michael cohen, today. in my case the experience was first-hand as i watched cohen testify live in the courthouse and the big question today, because cross began, is how did michael cohen do? the morning began with finishing direct testimony with the prosecution before an anticipated cross-examination with the defense in the afternoon and from the stand, well, he told the jury a story that is now familiar in the broad outlines. michael cohen's transformation from a loyal, conniving, energetic hustler on behalf of donald trump, who admired and emulated his boss, to a fierce trump critic who has now spent years cooperating with investigations into him and occasionally railing against him. the transformation from trump acolyte to critic effectively

destroyed the previous version of michael cohen's life, a version you get the sense that he enjoyed. today he sat 10 feet away from the man responsible for all of that, while he outlined what prosecutors say is an illegal scheme to falsify business records tied the hush money paid to stormy daniels. the problem, of course, is that much like his former boss, michael cohen is a guy with a long record of not telling the truth. of obfuscating, avoiding, lying. at least from where i was sitting today in the courthouse when it came to the core allegations and that we will discuss in the next few hours, cohen did seem six-year -- did seem sincere or at least on the level, but the major question might be what the jury makes of the man they saw on the stand today. >> i will have a lot of questions for you. >> great. >> i will say that i was struck

over the course of the past few days and it came to a head today that a certain part of the defense strategy seems to be predicated on the assumption that people are no bigger than the jobs they do, right? and that stormy daniels would reveal herself on the stand to be a sleazy bottom feeder and that under withering cross- examination she would fall like a house of cards. the same assumption seemed to be made for michael cohen and as it turned out, stormy daniels was an incredibly strong, sort of resilient witness that seemed incredibly credible and in some ways humiliated the defense and the cross-examination and michael cohen, who they tried to prod into being a rage machine to reveal he was nothing more than a bottom feeding grifter, ended up keeping his composure. they would give the jury outlandish statements he made and he would say it sounds like

something i would say. he was unapologetic, took pride in the work he did and i don't know, he seemed credible on paper. what was it like in the courtroom? >> in the courtroom, throughout the day we started with the direct and went to cross after the lunch break. generally my first time in the courtroom. unlike tommy tuberville i did not find it depressing. it is like my bronx elementary school. this is -- judge merchan, the judge presiding has tremendous and palpable equity with which he orders the proceedings. it feels like the epitome of judicial temperament exuding from the bench. everything that is happening is sort of orderly and moving along. in terms of cohen, i agree with you. lisa rubin had this point, i

think we will talk to her in this hour. the big question today was, will there be some blowout moment? like in a few good men, where he slams the podium and says yes, i'm lying, or whatever. i don't know what the fantasy was, but you are right that he kept composure the entire time and maintained that quiet, chastened version of himself. there are a few glimmers of the other michael cohen. >> they are like, did you call him a cheeto faced dictator? i am mashing up the assertions together, but it is like he had sort of relinquished his rage in a lot of ways, for the most part. that seems really powerful to me. >> i will say and we will talk about this more throughout the evening, on cross there were moments where he seemed nervous, shifty, a little cottonmouth, going for water.

there were long pauses. when you ask someone a question they go -- that paws doesn't make you think now i am going to get the truth. there was a little bit of that. again, all of that i think is a little atmospheric because none of that pertains and i think we will talk about it through the next few hours. none of that really drilled down to the sort of core issues for guilt or innocence of the defendant, who sat there, i will say, with the phalanx of friends, family members. >>'s buffer zone. >> is buffer zone. the person who puts together the word document with nice articles about him. >> we will talk about that. >> i did see the sausage getting made. the sausage that gets fed to donald trump's ego, being made. this epitomizes a little bit of the cross, which is blanche

saying -- i don't know how much the jurors know. blanche saying, i am still in 2015, that in your view president trump speaks from the heart? i said that. blanche, all he wants to do is make this country great again. cohen. sounds right, yes. at that time you weren't lying, right? at that time i was knee-deep into the cult of donald trump, yes. that was the story that got told today. we watched, under direct, the trajectory of michael cohen in the fold and outside the fold and that continued in the cross of is there something the jury should suspect because he went from inside the folder outside the fold? we're joined now by rachel maddow and lawrence o'donnell, who was also at the courthouse

today. >> the simple scorecard reporting is not a single relevant point was scored against michael cohen on cross examination. to everyone's surprise, the demeanor held up. the suspense was, wow, that is the most remarkable version of michael cohen we have ever seen. can he do it on cross? when he is challenged he is such a combative guy in every environment, but he was contained, as most people are, by the pressures and the confines of the courtroom, especially the witness stand. you've got to remember that when lives end up in a criminal courtroom and you are the key witness for a criminal prosecution, yours is a broken life. because you are here as the eyewitness to your friends murder and you are part of a tragedy yourself.

so michael cohen's life was broken by all of this and what you saw on the witness stand was this broken man and i love some of what we saw from the courtroom art. the capturing of michael cohen's mournful face, which is what this was. this was someone morning for his own mistakes. terrible mistakes he made in his life and then describing eventually what was a family intervention to get him to turn away from what was literally his life of crime with donald trump and save what could be left of his life by the simple course of telling the truth to prosecutors, doing time in prison it turns out is going to be a consequence of this. chris, one thing i would say about michael cohen's pauses on answering questions as i took those to be a smart moment.

the jury won't be thinking the way i am about it, but having seen a lot of witnesses, especially lawyer witnesses, what he is doing is listening to every word you just said and deciding how to answer it, whether he should answer it, whether he should ask for clarification. it never felt to me like there was something weird about the pause, but it could to a juror who does not know what i see is going through his mind. >> having been through depositions, there is a little bit of this. a question is asked and you sort of quibble the characterization, so you brush it back a little bit, so that blanche comes back. at one point there was a big standoff when he said, was it a lie? well, it wasn't truthful. if you want to call it a lie -- there were a few of those standoffs, but i think it was intentional on cohen's part because he is a lawyer, he is being careful.

he understands the weight of this. is this going to last? it was very clear today the sort of spectral presence he has is a gaunt, broken guy. that remained throughout. rachel, obviously you are following closely today, i'm sure. what was your big take away? >> my big take away was, is this all there is from the defense? i think that the defense is under no obligation to put any witnesses forward at all. lawrence has been articulate and persuasive in saying that there is 0% chance they will put the defendant, their own client, donald trump, on the stand in his own defense. but we don't know if they will put anybody. so if they don't, this is the defense. the cross-examination of michael cohen is the defense case.

to get what blanche was able to get out of him today, there was nothing. which makes me feel like they must be incredibly confident in their ability to try to get a mistrial ruling here or something surprising is going to happen on thursday or they just did not bring it, because there really was nothing. especially when you consider that when the prosecution laid out their case at the outset, they basically said this is a documents case. we are going to put michael cohen on the stand. he is a very controversial guy and for good reason and you will hear about why, but everything we need to prove to you in order to come back with a guilty verdict will be bolstered by corroborating evidence from multiple witnesses and documents. they spent the last couple of weeks doing that. authenticating the documents and getting the corroborating testimony. they get to michael cohen and he performs perfectly as a witness for them. he does not lose his cool, as you guys were saying. he answers all the right questions. he doesn't go into weird

soliloquies or sidebars that might be picked apart. they hand him over to the defense after lunch and i have to tell you, i thought this is it. they will keep donald trump out of prison. it was just nothing. so maybe thursday is going to be something, but otherwise it looks like they are not mounting a defense at all. >> i was struck by the same thing. not only where's the beef, but also the sort of spaghetti against the wall nature of the line of questioning from the defense, rachel. they tried to paint cohen as a bunch of things. an unreliable narrator or grifter or someone in it for themselves, selfish. >> ray spurned the lover. >> someone who was obsessed with donald trump and then when he was cast aside for not getting a position in the white house he was intent on destroying donald trump. did you find any of those

characterizations particularly effective? >> i might have found anyone of them effective, had the prosecution not laid all of them out in advance to put them in context and tell us all what they mean. i did not know that michael cohen had called the defense lawyer, todd blanche, a crying little swearword. the very first thing today. that he had complained about the defense lawyers in a tiktok video or something. that was new. will that change my view about what michael cohen brings to the case? no, but the prosecution did a good job eliciting from the other witnesses. oh yeah, michael cohen called himself a lawyer. a fixer, he only fixes things he broke. we got all of this stuff, all of the ad hominem anything you could want we have already had and then they put it in context. here is when he stopped serving donald trump. here is what he has done since.

here are the sins he committed and the ways he atoned. so, for todd blanche to be out as the defense lawyer saying, michael cohen, didn't you lie to congress? the jury must be thinking we heard the explanation already and we know what that is. why are you bringing it up? >> the thing that struck me today on that point, on the cross, again, i do think there are plausible stories to tell. for instance, spending a lot of time on his podcast and all of the different merchandise you sell on your website or associated websites. showing donald trump in prison and send him to the big house and not the white house. there is a story to tell that this guy is so out for revenge he will do whatever it takes to put him behind bars. but that part at least was legible to me. there were large parts of the cross today that i could not follow. i think i am pretty good at

following stuff, generally. i followed the direct. part of this i will say is a small color thing and something we can talk about with legal experts. in the direct all of the evidence is being put up for all of us to see, which is extremely helpful because you see the documents. during the cross, when they would present a document to michael cohen to refresh his memory, it was not admitted into evidence broadly. which means he is looking at a screen. again, this is intentional. it means that it is really hard to follow the whole thing. there were long lines of questioning where i was like, i am just lost here. what are we doing with the phones? why are we on the phones still? >> it got worse because michael cohen is looking at a document none of us can see and is saying you are mystery -- you

are misrepresenting what is on this document. welcome to the representation of a guilty client. this is what it looks like when a criminal defense lawyer has a client to did exactly what stormy daniels says he did. this is what it looks like when you are representing a client to did, indeed, conspire to create false business records. if they had something better you would have heard it in the first 10 minutes. they don't have anything better. you're not going to hear anything better. the game is, and it is a legitimate legal game, that they will try to create not just reasonable doubt, but presidential level reasonable doubt. they will want you to bring a higher level of reasonable doubt because this man was president, so you can't possibly convict him on the word of that man. >> stay with us. it was a combative scene in the courtroom, but the scene outside was somehow just as wild. we are talking about the

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what's this? your wings. light 'em up! gentlemen, it's a beautiful... ...day to fly. i do have a lot of surrogates and they are speaking very beautifully. they come from washington and they are highly respected. >> donald trump loves ranting about the prosecution against him and the witnesses and the

judges and the judges daughter and the jurors, but how to do it without running afoul of his gag order? well, have thursday republican proxies do it for him. last week it was rick scott and yesterday it was jd vance. outside the courtroom today sycophants and vice presidential wannabes swelled to include the governor of north dakota, multiple backbench congressmen, vivek ramaswamy, and even the speaker of the house. >> all of us are here as friends of donald trump, supporting him in our personal capacity. >> president trump is innocent of these charges. >> the american people already acquitted donald trump. >> the judicial system has been weaponized against donald trump. >> this is a farce. >> it is one of the most depressing places i've been in my life. >> where is the crime? >> we have a biden donor judge.

>> the real book keeping is the judges own family member collecting millions of dollars as a democratic operative. >> he couldn't say those things himself, a lot of them. some of those he could, but they said it for him. good to have you here. i want to say one thing about this, because i was sitting in the morning behind that row of folks. so it was eric trump, boris epshteyn, the staffer who puts together the papers that donald trump holds. i actually got to watch her paste articles into a word document throughout the day day >> that is a job in trump world. >> the portfolio of that and then congressman burgum. what was striking to me as here is michael cohen up on the stand, being like, let me tell you how it goes when you devote your life in the most humiliating possible way, where you give up your own sense of

core self, of who you are, and devote yourself to serving this man. here is what it looks like. they are in the front row, doing the thing, auditioning to be the next version of michael cohen or mike pence. at least he never had a mob running through the capital trying to literally murder him. it was so striking that these people have decided -- doug burgum is worth $400 million, the governor of a state. what are you doing there? listen to the guy on the stand because this is not the only person who has this story. i have news for you. >> i have to say, television is a visual medium. it is not my area of expertise, but i feel like i can do a little bit of analysis here that one thing that changed in the republican party is being in the tank for donald trump

over the last five years has changed and become more tanked that they all now dressed like him, too. they were all wearing the same outfit, like they were rockettes. i don't know -- but just to see them all lined up. because mike johnson is the speaker, he gets a stripe, but all the rest of them, it is the same thing. they just like him to praise him. they all use the same language and describe him as their friend. i don't know if donald trump has friends. i don't think vivek ramaswamy is one of them, if he does have friends. this is a display and a job interview, as you say, chris. but it is also a serious thing. what they are doing is showing up and attacking the judicial system and i have more to say about that. but just seeing them all show up together, dressed like a

squad, to call him there dear friend, when he doesn't know what any of their last names are, i just found it sad. >> let me squeeze in a fact check on the light you heard about the judges daughter making millions of dollars. the judges daughter has never made $1 million. this is all part of the propaganda line going on down there, but here is the most important thing that happened politically in america today and it is a historic turn. the republican party has risen up old lady and bravely in defense of what they call adultery with porn stars, paying off the porn stars secretly, so that you might more successfully run for president. that is the position they took

today. it will be fascinating to see what their position is at their churches on sunday about why they were at the porn star trial and another state where they don't live. for them to be the party that is completely and 100% in favor of sex of any kind with porn stars in any state of marriage you might be in, but totally opposed to any possible abortion option that might result from the republican candidate having sex with a porn star. they have come down solidly against that end of the story. they can't let the story and that way, but they will defend every other thing that donald trump did in that room with stormy daniels and everything he has done about it since. >> never forget that donald trump is the man who had the miss universe pageant. this, the reason they are in matching outfits as it is the swimsuit competition. instead of swimsuits they are wearing matching suits and they

all have their turn at the microphone for the interview portion where they are auditioning. i think you are right to point out the shameless hypocrisy. beyond that, mike johnson, speaker of the house, second in line for the presidency telling the country that the judicial system is a sham seems like a problem for this country, right? again, they literally have the cautionary tale. michael cohen sitting on the stand, telling what it is like to cash out in the moral bankruptcy court and it makes no difference. >> just to say this quickly, there is something comedic about it and pathetic. pathetic in a way that almost breaks my ability to mentally model what they are doing. i really feel like if someone asked me to do this kind of thing there is nothing you could offer me that would make me desire to humiliate myself in that way.

that is pure vanity, not an ethical objection. >> it is kind of ethical. >> it is just so pathetic, but it also has something really menacing about it and it is this. they are trying to shoot the moon. they are making a high leveraged bet. that is the bet that michael cohen made that i could be the counsel to the united states and be adjacent to power and have people do what i want them to do. they are making a high-level bit that they can be adjacent to power and adjacent to unconstrained power that is worth what is on display in the swimsuit competition. rachel. >> yes. i would also say, as a last point here, that the rule of law is a concept, but also a really specific thing. to your point, alex, to have the speaker of the house saying don't listen to this witness and the prosecution is a sham and

this is a politically motivated proceeding and this court proceeding is a joke and should not be paid attention to, the rule of law is a specific thing. people work in the court system and have families and people have to serve as witnesses and jurors in the system. to have every leading light in the republican party lining up and saying our judicial system does not count, our judicial system is a joke and is stacked against you and me and we should disparage it. this is an important moment in the rule of law for the united states of america, because this is not donald trump against the judicial system holding him to account. this is the republican party, one of the two governing parties of the united states, lining up and sing our court system effectively ought to be dismantled. this is a crucial moment for us as a democracy, as ridiculous as this seems. we will look back on this time is a much more serious moment

than when kevin mccarthy went to mar-a-lago after january 6 and kissed the ring. we will look at all of these republican politicians showing up to the courthouse and denouncing the judicial branch of government as a crucial moment in the fall of american democracy if this proceeds to another trump presidency. this will be a landmark thing, as stupid as it feels in the moment. >> one of the great losses of not being able to televise this trial in a new york state court is that america cannot see how completely fair it is. donald trump's lawyers get half of their objection sustained, half of their objections overruled. if we were televising this, if america could see every ruling that judge merchan made. what you described, chris, as his fairness and helpful that fairness is constantly. you could say to these people, tell me which of the rulings you disagreed with. which objection do you think he

should not have sustained? there is no capacity to do that because we are not televising this and america is not seeing how fair this trial actually is. >> rachel maddow and lawrence o'donnell, thank you. we will dive into the legal strategy behind what we heard today and how it all might play out, next. only purple's gel flex grid passes the raw egg test. no other mattress cradles your body and simultaneously supports your spine. memory foam doesn't come close. get your best sleep guaranteed. save up to $800 during our memorial day sale. visit purple.com or a store near you higher shipping rates may be “the cost of doing business...” but at what cost? turn shipping to your advantage. with low cost ground shipping from the united states postal service.

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during the first day of

michael cohen's cross- examination, the defense aims to make one thing very clear. michael cohen has allegedly been obsessed with donald trump even before he became president. here is defense attorney todd blanche. you were obsessed with donald trump, weren't you? cohen, i don't know if i would use the word obsessed. i admired him tremendously. blanche, in your first bike you discovered -- first book you describe yourself as being obsessed, correct? cohen. that's correct. joining us now is lisa rubin, our msnbc legal correspondent inside the court is today and charles coleman, former prosecutor and now civil rights attorney. lisa, let me start with you. the idea that michael cohen was

like a single white female character in trump lead, is the point of that to suggest that cohen might have acted on his own to make the story go away for donald trump? >> yes. >> did they do that? >> no, i don't think they did, alex. i think they were trying to show he was motivated to do it alone and was so obsessed with trump that having been spurned by him he is engaging in a scorched-earth strategy to make the man's life miserable in a way that is undeserving of whatever trump is done that could be criminally charged and i don't think they succeeded. i wrote down, after reading the cross-examination, all of the themes they floated today and not a single one was a winner today on this cross. he is media hungry, but he was before, too. he is wealthy. yes, he was before, too. he would not take direction from the d.a. in terms of shutting up about the case, okay, but does that

make him non-credible? they insinuated he was leaking information to the press and never got anywhere with that. unless they can establish that happened and was destructive to the case, i'm not sure where that goes. he is a person who was the only person who served jail time for crimes related to the ones being charged and he was sent back to prison during covid after he was released on home confinement. if he has an ax to grind, it is a deserved one. he has a binder. the d.a.s office gave him a binder with his plea allocution in it. that is supposed to make them biased? no, that is to refresh his recollection. the final one is that he messed with his phones before he gave them to the d.a.s office. the insinuation is that the fbi returned them to him in 2020. the d.a.s office did not ask for them until 2023 and the insinuation is that cohen or an investigator in the d.a.s office somehow messed with the

funds to edit that december 6, 2016 phone call there which trump makes the admissions in the case. i rest. >> charles. >> so, the defense strategy here is that they have no strategy and what i mean by that is they do not have strong facts. this is clear. we all knew this going in. so in order to try to get to the point of a hung jury or a mistrial, your strategy is confusion and misdirection and that is everything they have been doing with respect to the different legal theories they have tried to float. no i have been one as an attorney who is loath to critique and criticize other attorneys in terms of how they try cases, but we are at the point where i can honestly say that todd blanche may be in over his head because this is state court. i want to point that out. he has spent a lot of his career as a federal prosecutor. that is very different from

being a defense attorney in state court, primarily because as a federal prosecutor you do not try many cases. you settle cases a lot and in the cases you actually try, many of the defendants do not testify. quite frankly you are not is used to cross-examination as you would be if you were an attorney who practices in state court. that is the value of what we are talking about. i think in terms of donald trump federal cases, he might be the guy, but in this situation i feel like necheles would have been a better choice to conduct this cross- examination. >> i watched this. you know, i was in the courtroom and the overflow room during cross. i found myself having a hard time following it, but also i am not the median juror. one thing that was clear to me and did seem effective is cohen seemed shifty. he was taking sips of water. i would describe him as squarely, right?

and confronted with things he had in the past. there were moments where you felt like he was reluctantly may be getting to the truth, but not particularly forthcoming. does that add up to them eviscerating the core facts? no. does it to my mind to defeat or get at the burden? no, but i am curious what you thought as someone also watching. how much that matters and whether that is enough to get you where you need to go. >> i thought the worst moment of the day was on direct, but i don't know how many people appreciated it. at the civil fraud trial he was asked about the plea he took and has insisted that while he pled guilty to tax evasion he did not really commit the crime. he was asked basically were you lying then or are you lying now and he said squarely on the stand, i was lying. when asked to explain that testimony today, on the other hand, he gave a very different

answer and said i'm not contesting the facts, but i did not like the process. that won't play well on cross. >> ultimately i think a lot of that depends on the characterization that the prosecution tries to put forward about him on summation. are you going to try to sell him as this reformed guy who really stood up for country and liberty and freedom and truth and justice or are you going to say this is a guy in cahoots with donald trump. a guy who may have been -- and now he has finally figured it out, that this was not to his benefit and he changed his tune? that is really where it all comes into play. i think where they ended on direct, you kind of had this strong stance and i think the defense making them look shifty may have served to undercut that. >> we have a lot more to discuss.

charles coleman, thank you as always, my friend. lisa, we are not done with you yet. please stick around. we will examine the catch and kill world that donald trump and michael cohen lived in with a guest who was there when it all went down, that is next. n. we're talking about cashbackin. not a game! we're talking about cashbacking. we're talking about... we're not talking about practice?

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and other attorney introduced him to castillo for the possibility of representing him in the matter. when they met, costello told he's incredibly close to rudy giuliani come as close as you can imagine. costello also told him the relationship would be very beneficial, since giuliani had the ear of-president trump and was resentment representing him as lawyer. he felt pressured to hire castillo to represent him, a man meshed into the trump world, making sure that anything cohen got back to trump . costello told cohen about a conversation he just had with giuliani who said "thank you for opening this back channel of communication." legal correspondent, kirk right, national enquirer, special correspondent for the hollywood reporter, i felt that the castillo stuff today was

incriminating, because it felt almost like a mob boss parody >> sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places. it was almost straight out of a mafia movie. if cohen did not have the slayer thrust on him saying, you know, you are, the comments being spoken about you in the white house, you know, he is basically looking at this moment but it was just kind of terrifying that this kind of language is being used by someone who clearly has his office right by the fbi. >> he is representing himself to cohen, look, i'm with rudy, and rudy is representing the president. if you hire me, you have the back channel, and we are on the

same team, and over the course of these various emails that get introduced, which are corroborative, cohen is corroborating the testimony, it sounds to me, little hyperbolic , and when you read the emails ima it was like oh, they were absolutely putting the screws to him. >> absolutely. one of the selling points that costello had was i know how this is done, and yet he is sending emails like this the entire time, but people kept asking why does robert costello want to represent him so badly? it is partially lyrical, but he wants to secure the bag. he gets frustrated with michael cohen-- >> who does not sign on-- >> right, and he doesn't want to sign the agreement, and that's just about money. i was just going to say when i read that exchange, i thought of all the other co- conspirators and defendants who are being represented by trump lawyers, and man, did it sound like a roadmap.

you come with us, we will pay your bills. you will do as we say. >> cohen even said he thought he thought robert costello was sketchy, which is funny coming from him. it was a lot. >> there's also this sense in which, and this is something that suffuses the entire trial, when it's just that work, sketchy, it was funny when michael cohen said it, but everyone is operating in the most dodgy way possible. it is so clear which suffuses trump world is everyone operating in the sketchy as to fashion possible. >> you have the tabloid publisher, david pecker, davidson, representing stormy daniels and karen mcdougal. you have these sort of bottom feeders, these people that you couldn't cast them better in a movie, and here they are testifying in this case. it's magic.

>> one of the things we saw, that costello moment into being a pivotal fulcrum, because that is the make or break moment. does he stay on board? they read a tweet in court but when basically the word gets out that he is cooperating, the president of the united states, he says, i feel bad for paul medford and his wonderful family. justice applied tremendous pressure on him, and unlike michael cohen, he refused to "break." making stories to get a "deal. " such perspective from a brave man, like basically, i see you, i see what you're doing from the white house, from the president of the united states. >> that's the day after he takes his first plea, so it's pretty clear what the connection is there. i will say, michael cohen loved donald trump, but the one thing he loved more is his family, so that we do in particular really had to knife michael cohen. he took his pleas largely

because of his family and said he would do it again. >> costello, again, i am using michael cohen's characterization-- i don't know the man-- but, one of the themes is lawyers for donald trump, lewis for trump world do end up in hot water, and the line of folks that have been disbursed, that face criminal charges, michael cohen, john eastman, who said he represented the president, on his way to getting disbarred. lisa, locklin, thank you both. this is special coverage of trump on trial. ump on trial. safari? hot air balloon ride? swim with elephants? wait, can we afford a safari? great question. like everything, it takes a little planning. or, put the money towards a down-payment... ...on a ranch ...in montana ...with horses let's take a look at those scenarios. j.p. morgan wealth management has advisors in chase branches and tools,

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♪ welcome back to our special coverage of the first ever crimin