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Cohen Wavers on Recollection of Key Conversation With Trump at Trial

Star prosecution witness Michael Cohen conceded on the stand at Donald Trump’s hush-money trial that a key conversation he earlier recounted having with the former president might not have actually happened the way he testified it did.

Trump’s onetime fixer had previously testified that he spoke to Trump on the phone in October 2016 to reassure his boss that he was handling a payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about her alleged affair with Trump.

On Thursday, Todd Blanche, a lawyer for Trump, confronted Cohen with text messages that appeared to show that Cohen hadn’t talked to Trump but to Trump’s bodyguard to discuss a teenage prank caller who was harassing Cohen.

Cohen, who appeared blindsided, wavered on his recollection of the phone call as Blanche accused him of lying, but he insisted that he also spoke to Trump during the 96-second call. “I believe I was telling the truth,” Cohen said of his earlier testimony. The back-and-forth kept some jurors spellbound and put Cohen’s credibility under greater scrutiny.

Cohen, who has testified over three days, previously told jurors that his ex-boss directed him to pay $130,000 to Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election to buy her silence about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump. He said Trump directed a coverup of the payment after he won the election.
The prosecution’s final witness, Cohen is the only one who testified to having firsthand knowledge of Trump’s role in the alleged coverup of the hush-money payment.
Lawyers for Trump have portrayed Cohen, a convicted liar, as an opportunist who holds a grudge and is eager to make money off his former boss. He has made millions of dollars, they said, from writing two books, hosting podcasts and doing TikTok videos about Trump.

Blanche spent much of Thursday morning grilling Cohen over previously pleading guilty to lying to Congress, making false statements to a bank and tax evasion. They also sparred over whether some of his statements to Congress constituted lies.
Blanche on Thursday also pressed Cohen on past statements he made on podcasts and in media interviews where he relished the idea of Trump being indicted in the hush-money case.

“He is about to get a taste of what I went through, and I promise you, it’s not fun,” Cohen, who served time in prison, said in a podcast.

Cohen acknowledged he made the statement.
The defense also drilled into how as a lawyer, Cohen secretly recorded phone conversations with reporters, associates and even his client, Trump.

“You understand that it is not ethical to record a conversation with your client?” Blanche asked.

“That’s correct,” Cohen replied.

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Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records for allegedly concealing the Daniels payment. He denies the affair. Prosecutors say that the payment was intended to ward off negative publicity during a critical moment in the 2016 election when Trump was under fire over his treatment of women.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has denied wrongdoing and said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat whose office brought the charges, was politically driven.
Prosecutors have called 19 witnesses in the past four weeks. Cross-examination of Cohen was expected to resume Monday. Prosecutors have said they would rest their case after Cohen finishes testifying, leaving Trump’s legal team to decide if it will put up its own witnesses—and for Trump to say whether he will testify.

“That’s another decision that we need to make,” Blanche said of Trump. The former president has said in interviews in recent weeks that he wanted to testify.

Blanche also said he may call one expert witness on campaign-finance law, Bradley Smith, a former Federal Election Commission chairman. However, Justice Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the trial, said Thursday that Smith would most likely be limited in what he could testify about.

If the defense doesn’t present a case, Merchan told both sides to be prepared for closing arguments on Tuesday.

See more here: Michael Cohen Testifies for Third Day in Donald Trump’s Hush-Money Trial - WSJ
Gulf Shores weighs bringing Hangout Fest back, agreement up after 2025

After this weekend’s Hangout Music Festival, in which thousands will descend on Gulf Shores’ public beaches, the city will decide whether it wants to continue its relationship with the 14-year-old festival, which brings A-List musical talent—and national attention— to the beaches.

Read the rest of the story here: Gulf Shores weighs bringing Hangout Fest back, agreement up after 2025 - al.com
NIH official finally admits taxpayers funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan — after years of denials

National Institutes of Health (NIH) principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak admitted to Congress Thursday that US taxpayers funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in the months and years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Dr. Tabak,” asked Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, “did NIH fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through [Manhattan-based nonprofit] EcoHealth [Alliance]?”

“It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” Tabak answered. “If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”
The response comes after more than four years of evasions from federal public health officials — including Tabak himself and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci — about the controversial research practice that modifies viruses to make them more infectious.

In July 2023, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) barred the Wuhan Institute of Virology from receiving federal grants for the next 10 years.

EcoHealth Alliance, whose mission statement declares it is “working to prevent pandemics,” had all of its grant funding pulled by HHS for the next three years on Tuesday.
EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak, in a hearing earlier this month before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, testified that his organization “never has and did not do gain-of-function research, by definition.”

But that claim directly contradicted Daszak’s private correspondence, including a 2016 email in which he celebrated the end of an Obama administration pause on gain-of-function research.

The EcoHealth head was also called out in sworn testimony to the COVID panel by Dr. Ralph Baric, a leading coronavirologist who initiated the research himself and declared it was “absolutely” gain-of-function.
In an October 2021 letter to Congress, Tabak had acknowledged NIH funded a “limited experiment” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”

He did not describe it as gain-of-function research — but disclosed that EcoHealth “failed to report” the bat coronaviruses modified with SARS and MERS viruses had been made 10,000 times more infectious, in violation of its grant terms.

The NIH scrubbed its website of a longstanding definition for gain-of-function research the same day that the letter was sent.
Fauci has repeatedly denied that the Wuhan lab research involved gain-of-function experiments, clashing with Republicans in high-profile hearings and “playing semantics” with the term during a closed-door interview with the House COVID panel earlier this year.
Fauci is scheduled to answer questions about the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab and theories of the origin of the pandemic in a public subcommittee hearing set for June 3.

READ MORE: NIH director admits taxpayers funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan — four years after COVID pandemic began (nypost.com)