Thursday’s testimony included some fairly contentious back and forth between entertainment attorney Keith Davidson and Trump counsel Emil Bove. Bove was clearly insinuating that Davidson was running a scheme in which he tried to extort celebrities who had connections to his clients. Bove also suggested that Michael Cohen was part of the scheme.
However, in redirect, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass pulled out an audio conversation between Davidson and Cohen that hinted Trump had been involved in, or was at least aware of, their negotiations over Stormy Daniel’s story.
This was followed by relatively brief testimony from forensic analyst Douglas Daus who testified he had been able to fully extract data from two cell phones belonging to Cohen.
The jury then heard an audio recording from one of those phones in which Trump and Cohen directly discussed the steps to deal with Daniels and Cohen’s need to be paid back. That’s a hard step for the defense to get past, and Bove spent the last moments of the day attempting to undercut the authenticity of the recording.Â
Bonus points to the prosecution if they use redirect to once again play another audio recording.
Court is scheduled to begin at 9:30 ET on Friday when Daus will likely return to the stand while Bove completes a lengthy speech about the integrity of digital evidence. After that, it’s unclear who will be up next.
At the beginning of the week, there were hints the prosecution expected to call either Karen McDougal or Stormy Daniels before the week was done, but that may no longer be on the schedule. We will know tomorrow.
