Trump defence team accuse Cohen of lying
Donald Trump's lawyers accused the star prosecution witness in his hush money trial of lying to jurors, portraying Trump fixer-turned-foe Michael Cohen on Thursday as a fabulist who was bent on seeing the presumptive Republican presidential nominee behind bars. Defence attorney Todd Blanche pressed Cohen for hours with questions that focused as much on his misdeeds as on the case's specific allegations and tried to sow doubt in jurors’ minds about Cohen’s crucial testimony implicating the former US president. Over the past couple of days, Trump's defence team has attempted to portray Cohen — a onetime Trump loyalist who has become one of his biggest foes — as a media-obsessed opportunist who turned on the former president after he was denied a White House job. Whether the defence is successful in undermining Cohen's testimony could determine Trump's fate in the case.  Over the course of the trial's fourth week of testimony, Cohen described for jurors meetings and conversations he said he had with Trump about the alleged scheme to stifle stories about sex that threatened to torpedo Trump's 2016 campaign. Trump, who insists the prosecution is an effort to damage his campaign to reclaim the White House, says the payments to Cohen were properly categorised as legal expenses because Cohen was a lawyer.  Trump's legal defence has suggested the former president was trying to protect his family, not his campaign, by squelching what he says were false, scurrilous claims. (AP)