Donald Trump was expected to return to court Thursday morning as witness testimony in his hush money trial enters a third day.
\nThe trial resumes at the same time that the US Supreme Court hears arguments in Washington over whether he should be immune from prosecution for actions he took during his time as president.
\nAt his trial in Manhattan, veteran tabloid publisher David Pecker took the stand earlier in the week, testifying about his longtime friendship with the former president and a pledge he made to be the \u201ceyes and ears\u201d of Trump\u2019s 2016 presidential campaign.
\nPecker, the National Enquirer\u2019s former publisher, said the pledge culminated in an agreement to warn Trump\u2019s personal lawyer about potentially damaging stories and help quash them. Pecker said the tabloid ultimately ran negative stories about Trump\u2019s political opponents and even paid $30,000 for a doorman\u2019s silence.
\nPecker was expected to return to the stand Thursday.
\nThe testimony was sought to bolster prosecutors\u2019 premise that Trump sought to illegally influence the 2016 election through a \u201ccatch-and-kill\u201d strategy to buy up and then spike negative stories. Key to that premise are so-called hush money payments that were paid to porn actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, along with the doorman.
\nProsecutors say Trump obscured the true nature of those payments and falsely recorded them as legal expenses.
\nHe has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
\nThe case is the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president and the first of four prosecutions of Trump to reach a jury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Donald Trump was expected to return to court Thursday morning as witness testimony in his hush money trial enters a third day. The trial resumes at the same time that the US Supreme Court hears arguments in Washington over whether he should be immune from prosecution for actions he took during his time as president. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19797,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19794"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19799,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19794\/revisions\/19799"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}