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The prosecution is entering large batches of text messages into evidence.
One batch involves text messages between ex-Trump attorney Michael Cohen and Hope Hicks, who was once considered one of Donald Trump's closest confidantes and most trusted aides.
The first text shown was from November 4, 2016. Cohen texted Hicks, "Call me."
Hicks is expected to be called to testify in the criminal hush money trial.

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Michael Cohen had 39,745 contacts on one of his cell phones, Douglas Daus testified.

Daus called it "unusual."

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Douglas Daus confirms Michael Cohen had contacts on his phone that include Hope Hicks, David Pecker, Donald Trump, Melania Trump and more.

The phone had 10 pages of contacts for Donald Trump, Daus said.

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Prosecutors are now showing a photo of Michael Cohen from the podium at the White House briefing room. Daus is asked to identify who is in the photo.

Daus says he knows the photo is of Cohen because he watches "a lot of news."

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Douglas Daus explains a calendar entry from Michael Cohen's phone that indicated he had a "meeting with POTUS" at 4:30 p.m. on February 8, 2017.

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Say what you will, the man can be hilarious when he wants to be.

Contrary to the FAKE NEWS MEDIA, I don’t fall asleep during the Crooked D.A.’s Witch Hunt, especially not today. I simply close my beautiful blue eyes, sometimes, listen intensely, and take it ALL in!!!

Donald Trump Truth Social 02:05 PM EST 05/02/24

— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) May 2, 2024

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Douglas Daus is now confirming the metadata for audio recordings on Michael Cohen's phone.

Daus is a digital evidence analyst at the Manhattan district attorney's office.

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Prosecutors are now playing a recording from September 2016.
Trump's voice can be heard in the courtroom.
Trump is on a phone call when the recording starts. When he hangs up, Cohen can be heard saying, "Great call by the way. Big time."

Cohen says he needs to open up a company, and that he's spoken with the Trump Organization's chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up.

Prosecutors showed a transcript of the last 46 seconds of the call, where the relevant discussion of opening up a company happens.
CNN reported in 2018 on a recording of the conversation.

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Trump attorney Emil Bove is now conducting the defense's cross-examination of digital evidence analyst Douglas Daus.

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Emil Bove asks Douglas Daus about his work in Iraq doing forensics and intel collection, and the differences between that work and what he does for the Manhattan DA.
The Trump attorney asks him to confirm the integrity of the data matters more in a criminal case because people's rights are at stake.
Bove is asking Daus whether the ideal is for a device that's obtained to go immediately "in the vault," but that sometimes there's a lag time.
Some context: Bove is getting into the weeds of data extraction, deleted data and other weedsy info about phone data. Jurors are still following along, turning their heads between Daus and Bove as they go back and forth.

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aggiehawg said:

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Emil Bove confronts Keith Davidson with a recording in which he told Michael Cohen that Stormy Daniels wanted the money "more than you could ever imagine," and that he said: "If he loses this election, and he's going to lose, we all lose all ****ing leverage."

"'This case is worth zero.' Do you recall saying that to Mr. Cohen," Bove asks.
Davidson confirms he said this.

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Trump attorney Emil Bove is now walking through the agreement with Stormy Daniels, noting it was not signed by Donald Trump.
"It's blank here in the DD space?" Bove asks, referring to Trump's pseudonym, David Dennison.
"Yes," Keith Davidson says.

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BOOM 100% a shakedown in his own words

I stand by what I have said all along. Cohen was buying up ndas with his own money to them turn around to make money off Trump. He may have been just as guilty of extortion as the rest of them or he was able to slip the charges through as legal charges without anyone from Trump's side noticing.

There is no case. It is just to tie up Trump and damage him with the hopes of a conviction or at least a hung jury.

If Trump is found not guilty, this will be the biggest political mistake ever.

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Court is wrapping up for the day and the jury is being dismissed.
Judge Juan Merchan says that a juror has an appointment tomorrow afternoon so they will break at 3:45 p.m. ET.

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Trump attorney Emil Bove will resume his cross-examination of Douglas Daus tomorrow.

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oldag00 said:

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aggiehawg said:

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Keith Davidson is recalling a time near the holidays that year while in a "strangely decorated department store" he got a call from "a very despondent and saddened Michael Cohen."
"He said something to the effect of 'Jesus Christ, can you ****ing believe I'm not going to Washington after everything I've done for that ****ing guy. I can't believe I'm not going to Washington. I've saved that guy's a** so many times you don't even know.'"
Trump is not paying attention to Davidson as he recalls this.
Davidson is shown the receipt from the store where he was shopping at the time he got the call from Cohen to remind him of the date of the call. It was December 9.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked him how the store was decorated. Davidson, after a pause, described it as a warehouse-like big box store decorated like Alice & Wonderland. "There were these huge rabbits," he says.

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"That ****ing guy is not even paying me the $130,000 back," Keith Davidson recalls Michael Cohen telling him during the December phone call.

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Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass is now showing Keith Davidson's January 2018 email response to the Wall Street Journal before they published an article about Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump.
"Comment: Nothing about the present day regurgitation of these rumors causes us to rethink our prior denial issued in 2011," Davidson wrote to the WSJ reporter.
Davidson forwarded that email thread to Michael Cohen to let him know how he handled the story.

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"We had a mutuality of interest in this period of time," Davidson says of why he forwarded the email to Cohen. "We had a fully executed settlement agreement and confidentiality agreement" that was the subject of the story.

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The bolded seems particularly damaging to the prosecution's case. Why would repayment to Cohen be in question if Trump was coordinating all these actions?

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Because at times Trump likes to make people sue him for the amounts owed before paying some part thereof. Trump settled with Cohen in his $1.3 million dollar suit.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna95580

Other lawyers stiffed (pre-2016) for six figures:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/

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. . . As Trump now turned his ire on his former lawyers, however, Morrison Cohen counter-sued. In court records, the law firm alleged Trump didn't pay nearly a half million dollars in legal fees. Trump and his ex-lawyers settled their disputes out of court, confidentially, in 2009.

In 2012, Virginia-based law firm Cook, Heyward, Lee, Hopper & Feehan filed a lawsuit against the Trump Organization for $94,511 for legal fees and costs. The case was eventually settled out of court. But as the case unfolded, court records detail how Trump's senior deputies attacked the attorneys' quality of work in the local and trade press, leading the firm to make claims of defamation that a judge ultimately rejected on free speech grounds.
. . .

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This is also seven years before the election with respect to Cohen. So he must've had no problem doing what he did and getting paid what he got paid because he kept on doing it for some reason.

You mean, big ass corporations and billionaires use their weight to push companies and people around. wow. That's news.

We could go look at F100 companies and see very similar behavior. How about we look at Microsoft ..... sheeeeeeesh.

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The Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has kept a low profile throughout Donald Trump's criminal case but was spotted in court today ahead of the testimony of Manhattan DA office's employee Douglas Daus.

Bragg likes to show up to support employees like Daus who are not used to testifying in a big case like this, a person familiar with his management style said.

The Trump team has refused to stipulate to much of the evidence, which makes it necessary for employees like Daus to take the stand.

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CNN editorializng again. I will note one thing. Michael Cohen was raided by the FBI in April 2018. The feds.

Even allowing a city employee to etstify without the foundation and chain of custody fom the FBI agent(s) who seized that before Daus ever saw it, IS a stipulation.

Holding the state to their burden of proof including foundational witnesses is a large part of due process. Check off the list to establish what they need to ensure evidence is admissible. State's burden of proof, hold them to it.

Mornin', all.

CNN live blog is HERE

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Judge Juan Merchan is on the bench and court is back in session.

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Trump attorney Todd Blanche is beginning by raising evidentiary objections to the next witness, a summary witness.
He cites a Trump's posts on Truth Social, Trump tweets and a tweet and article by the Washington Post and Blanche argues that there is hearsay information in the tweets and the article.
The article in question is the Post's piece on the "Access Hollywood" tape from October 2016.

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aggiehawg said:

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Trump attorney Todd Blanche is beginning by raising evidentiary objections to the next witness, a summary witness.
He cites a Trump's posts on Truth Social, Trump tweets and a tweet and article by the Washington Post and Blanche argues that there is hearsay information in the tweets and the article.
The article in question is the Post's piece on the "Access Hollywood" tape from October 2016.

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Hasn't stopped them to this point but hey it's a new day.

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Trump attorney Todd Blanche invokes the recent Court of Appeals decision overturning Harvey Weinstein's conviction.

Judge Juan Merchan says "the Weinstein decision really doesn't factor into this."

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Judge Juan Merchan reiterates that he ruled that a full transcript of the "Access Hollywood" tape can come into evidence per his previous ruling. But the judge says that the story in the Washington Post with a photo of Trump is "damning evidence" and Merchan said he does not want those words associated with a photo of Trump for the jury.

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"It's very powerful evidence, it's damning evidence, and I don't think it's necessary," Merchan says.

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Merchan says that prosecutors need to have the ability to establish the date of the article, which is why they say they want to introduce it.

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aggiehawg said:

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Trump attorney Todd Blanche invokes the recent Court of Appeals decision overturning Harvey Weinstein's conviction.

Judge Juan Merchan says "the Weinstein decision really doesn't factor into this."

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yeah, he's our guy, you can't use that.

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Douglas Daus, who processes digital evidence in the Manhattan district attorney's office, is back on the stand to continue to be cross-examined by defense attorney Emil Bove.

Jurors are seated as the questioning is underway.

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Wait...what?

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Trump attorney Emil Bove is asking Douglas Daus about the chain of custody of Michael Cohen's two cell phones when they were turned over to the Manhattan district attorney's office in January 2023.

There is a gap from January 19, when Cohen signed a form to turn over his cell phone, and January 23, when the cell phone was taken into custody, Daus agrees.

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January 2023?

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Douglas Daus confirms that Michael Cohen had encrypted messaging app Signal on his phone.
When users on Signal set up the app to delete messages, it is "very difficult" to recover messages forensically, he explains.

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There are some serious issues with Cohen's cell phone evidence. The time gap for one. It would be one thing if the DA's expert was using a digital file from Cohen's phone that was taken by Coehn's phone by the feds when Cohen's house and office was raided by them in April 2018. Clen chain of custody there.

But nearly five years later? When Cohen hands it over voluntarily? Who knows what has been deleted or manipulated in some way? Cohen has been very vocal about his hatred of Trump. His motivation to tamper with evidence is well known.

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Trump attorney Emil Bove is asking Douglas Daus about a "factory wipe" of Michael Cohen's first phone on October 1, 2016, after the date of the September 6, 2016 audio recording on the phone between Cohen and Donald Trump.
Bove asks Daus if the wipe "raises questions" about that audio file.
"You have to have a look at where that file came from," Daus says.
Bove has Daus confirm that there was a backup and a sync of the phone in January 2017, when the phone was connected to Cohen's laptop.
Daus was asked if he knew what was transferred back to the phone.
"That file certainly," Daus said.

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Trump attorney Emil Bove asked Douglas Daus whether the reason that Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen had so many contacts on his cell phone was because he synced the phone to his laptop, which was connected to his iCloud account.

Daus says it "could be" an explanation for why Cohen had more than 39,000 contacts.

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Trump attorney Bove brings up that 46 seconds was cut off of the file of the September 6, 2016 audio recording on the phone between Michael Cohen and Donald Trump.
Daus agrees that he doesn't know how much longer the conversation between Trump and Cohen continued.
Bove continues by mentioning news coverage about the audio recording in 2018, asking Daus whether this means that Cohen and his attorney sent the file to the media in 2018.
"Could have, yes," Daus says. He agrees that it shows "the file is out there" in 2018.
Daus confirms that the data on the phone does not show a phone call that would have interfered with the recording on September 6.

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Douglas Daus explains that had the audio recording been edited or modified after September 6, it would show in the metadata.
Trump attorney Emil Bove moves to strike the answer which Judge Juan Merchan overrules.
Bove then asks Daus if that was his hypothesis. Daus agrees, and confirms there was nothing in the metadata showing the file was modified.

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One take from Davidson's testimony yesterday:

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First, Davidson threw his client, the former adult movie copulator, under the B train by leaving her naked and exposed as the conniving extortionist she has always appeared to be in this shakedown of Trump. Davidson, who insisted on correcting attorneys nomenclature and another verbiage on the stand, pedantically yet thoroughly, discredited the prosecution's case that Trump frantically tried to silence the statuesque porno professional for a supposed long-ago tryst for the purpose of stealing the 2016 election. If you're new here, this is the prosecution's theory. There's more to it than that, but stop laughing and read more over here, here and here.

Under questioning by Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass, Davidson went over the nondisclosure agreement he helped draw up for Daniels. Steinglass was gingerly trying to ask Davidson if Stormy's agreement was a lie when she signed it to collect $130,000 or now, in court.
But it was what he said under cross-examination by Trump's attorney that appears to have left Stormy in even more legal jeopardy than she was before.

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Fox reported:

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The ex-lawyer of adult film actress Stormy Daniels testified Thursday that he thought Donald Trump was "going to lose" the 2016 presidential election, and pressed Trump's ex-lawyer Michael Cohen to settle the payment before losing "leverage."

During the final rounds of questioning to Daniel's lawyer, Keith Davidson, he admitted he spoke to Cohen, pressing him to settle the $130,000 payment to Daniels to quiet her claims of an alleged extramarital affair she had with Trump in 2006, before the 2016 election. He said Trump "will lose", and subsequently his client would lose her leverage. Trump has denied ever having the affair.

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This shows that Davidson reached out to Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, to press him for money before the 2016 election because he, like the rest of the Pauline Kael Manhattanites, just knew Trump wouldn't win. He wanted to shake him down for money sooner because he knew he would "lose leverage" after he lost.

Matt reported that Davidson denied on the stand that he and his client removed the foundation for the proposition that the payment was "hush money." It was a "consideration," he insisted. "It wasn't a payoff. And it wasn't hush money. It was a consideration," he testified.

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LINK

Back to CNN's blog.

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Trump attorney Emil Bove is now asking Douglas Daus about another sync of Michael Cohen's phone in October 2020.

"We don't know what it was from?" Bove asks. "I do not," Daus replies.
"We'd have to take Michael Cohen's word" for what happened to this phone in 2020, Bove says.

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Michael Cohen's word?

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Criminal defense attorney Bill Brennan, who has represented Donald Trump in the past, told CNN's Kaitlin Collins that despite all the dramatic testimony so far, prosecutors have yet to tie wrongdoing to the former president.
"What we've heard so far is a lot of salacious conversations and sleazy deals between a disbarred lawyer who was known as the fixer, the [publisher] of a tabloid rag, and a lawyer that makes a living on the bottom selling non-disclosure agreements," Brennan said, referring to Michael Cohen, David Pecker and Keith Davidson, respectively.
"The jury's heard a lot of 'As the World Turns' soap opera testimony, but the prosecution has yet to tie it to this defendant," Brennan said. "They've got to do that."

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The defense has completed cross-examination of witness Douglas Daus and prosecutors are back for another round of questioning.

Earlier, Trump read a note from attorney Todd Blanche and leaned in to whisper to him as his attorney Emil Bove questioned the witness.

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Prosecutor Chris Conroy is starting his redirect, and says digital evidence analyst Douglas Daus was asked a series of questions about a phone being used.

"It is unusual for a phone to be used?" Conroy asks. "No," Daus says.

Conroy says that the other recordings Defense attorney Emil Bove asked about are not relevant to this case, which Daus confirms.

Trump wrote something on a notepad and handed it to Bove.

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Who told Daus what was relevant or not?

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The prosecution's redirect is over, and Trump attorney Emil Bove is back up for recross-examination.
Bove asks, "Did you see gaps in the handling of this data that created risk for such tampering?"
"Yes," Douglas Daus testifies.

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BOOM!

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Prosecutor Chris Conray is back up for more questioning of witness Douglas Das.
Conroy's one question was if he made a phone call seven years ago with the phone in his pocket he wouldn't expect to see it show up in the call log on the phone.
Daus responds, "I would not."
Daus is off the stand.

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That cell phone evidence is sketchy, at best. I assume there was a pretrial challenge as to its admissibility. Missing 46 seconds from the recording is problematical and having to rely on Cohen's expected testimony to adequately explain that is risky for the state. The cell phone evidence is supposed to bolster Cohen's credibility as corroboration, not the other way around.

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Trump attorney Emil Bove smirked and shook his head as prosecutor Chris Conroy asked his last inquiry on another round of questions.

Donald Trump hit Bove's arm and gestured for him to get back up there, but Bove shook his head no.

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Bove was correct. he'd made his point.

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The next witness is Georgia Longstreet, a paralegal at the district attorney's office.

Prosecutor Rebecca Mangold will question her.

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Georgia Longstreet says she identified "publicly available materials" relevant to Donald Trump's case, including social media posts and news articles.
She says she's reviewed anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 social media posts.
Trump is watching her and writing something. Meanwhile, attorney Todd Blanche is smiling.

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Hearsay upon hearsay upon hearsay.

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Trump's legal team signaled ahead of the hush money criminal trial that they would attack the veracity and completeness of the information on Michael Cohen's electronic devices part of a broader strategy to chip away at the credibility of a key witness.

Before the trial began, Trump's team tried to subpoena the Manhattan district attorney's employee who was responsible for the phones during the four-day lapse before delivering the devices for review by the department of Douglas Daus, the man who we've been hearing testify.

Trump's lawyers indicated in the letter they wanted to "challenge the integrity of evidence DANY will seek to offer from Cohen's phones, for use in cross-examination of Cohen" and "regarding the bias and hostility toward President Trump to attack the lack of integrity of DANY's investigation under federal constitutional."

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Georgia Longstreet is now explaining the social media platforms Twitter and Truth Social.
Longstreet says she reviewed the account @realdonaldtrump on Twitter, and she confirms this was Donald Trump's account.
Prosecutors are expected to introduce social media posts made by Trump.

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Georgia Longstreet is explaining to the jury that she placed the URL of websites into the Wayback Machine to retrieve news articles.

Prosecutors said earlier this morning they are using the digital archive service to introduce the Washington Post's article on the "Access Hollywood" tape as it appeared in October 2016.

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Georgia Longstreet, a paralegal in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, testified that she's reviewed anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 social media posts related to the Trump case.

CNN's Jeremy Herb in the courthouse said the witness is meant to establish a foundation so prosecutors can introduce social media posts made by Trump.

Longstreet is not a household name, but it's not uncommon to call a paralegal or other administrative staffer to testify.

"Typically, you would call a paralegal … just to do basic mechanics," CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said. "'Yes, this is an article that appeared in the New York Post on such and such a date. This is a tweet or a Truth Social that was sent on such and such a date.'"

"I have to wonder if they're being set up for, perhaps by the end of the day, we're gonna get a headline witness," such as Stormy Daniels, Honig suggested.

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Judge Juan Merchan is going back through exhibits the defense is objecting to.
Attorney Todd Blanche says assuming the judge rejects his heresy objection they have agreed to a stipulation involving the Washington Post article. Prosecutors said with the stipulation, they will not seek to offer the Washington Post article.
Trump is looking at the screen as the judge is hearing arguments on the Twitter posts being admitted into evidence.

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Defense attorney Todd Blanche objected to a Truth Social post where Donald Trump wrote, "If you go after me, I'm coming after you."
Prosecutors want to get the post into evidence to show Trump's "pressure campaign" against witnesses set to testify.
Judge Juan Merchan said he is letting the social media post into evidence, saying he's satisfied that the prosecutors have laid proper foundation.

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Prosecutors are now playing the statement Trump released on Twitter in response to the "Access Hollywood" tape.
The statement said: "Anyone who knows me knows these words don't reflect who I am. I said it. I was wrong and I apologize."
The video was played while embedded within the Trump tweet on the screen.

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Trump attorney Todd Blanche is starting questioning Georgia Longstreet, a paralegal at the Manhattan district attorney's office.

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Trump attorney Todd Blanche is asking Georgia Longstreet if she has listened to all of Michael Cohen's "Mea Culpa" podcasts.
"Absolutely not," Longstreet says, generating laughs from the courtroom, including from Blanche.
Donald Trump leaned back and smiled.

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That's a good sign for Trump, that the jury laughs at the mention of Cohen's podcasts.