President Trump’s defense attorney in his ongoing hush-money trial cross-examined celebrity attorney Keith Davidson on Tuesday, digging up old stories about Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, and Hulk Hogan.      

Before court reporters could indulge in celebrity gossip, the presiding trial judge, Juan Merchan, started the day with yet another contempt hearing, after a prosecutor, Christopher Conroy, alleged that Mr. Trump had violated the judge’s gag order again.   

“He has done it again here,” Mr. Conroy lamented. “He places this process and proceeding here in jeopardy.” The prosecutor detailed four recent instances of comments Mr. Trump made about witnesses and about the jury even though, Mr. Conroy claimed, the gag order prohibits him from doing so. On Tuesday, the judge fined Mr. Trump a total sum of $9,000 for having violated the restriction nine times, and threatened the former president with jail time should Mr. Trump not respect the order. 

“We are not yet seeking jail,” the prosecutor added. Instead, he argued, Mr. Trump should be fined $1,000 per violation again, which would add another $4,000 to his gag order tab. 

One of the defense attorneys, Todd Blanche, said his client was not “willfully” violating the gag order, but defending himself against attacks made by witnesses and others against him. Mr. Blanche even cited President Biden’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner remarks, in which he said, “Donald has had a few tough days recently — you might call it stormy weather.” 

Judge Merchan said Mr. Trump was free to respond to President Biden; the gag order only included people involved in the trial and their family members. But Mr. Blanche pushed back. President Biden’s remark about the ‘stormy weather’ referred to Stormy Daniels, the adult film star, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, a key witness in this trial who has been vociferously insulting Mr. Trump. Another central figure in the criminal case is Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and current nemesis.  

Mr. Blanche presented tweets from Cohen’s X account and comments he made on TikTok and on his podcast, such as a photoshopped image of Mr. Trump wearing an orange jumpsuit. He decried the current circumstances in which Cohen could attack Mr. Trump, but Mr. Trump could not strike back. Mr. Blanche insisted that everyone, including the press seated inside the courtroom, was permitted to make comments about Mr. Trump, while he was not allowed to defend himself, even though he is running for president.

​​”We very much believe that this is a political persecution and that this is a political trial,” Mr. Blanche added. 

“I’m not accepting your argument,” the judge answered. He seemed most concerned about comments Mr. Trump had made about the jury, when he said “the jury was 95 percent Democrats and the jury had been rushed through.” Judge Merchan found this comment to be an “implication” that “this is not a fair jury.”

He did not issue a ruling on the new violations yet, but instead he called the witness, who had begun to testify on Tuesday, back to the stand. 

As the Sun previously reported,  Keith Davidson, an attorney from Brooklyn who now resides and works in Beverly Hills, represented the adult film star Ms. Clifford, and brokered the agreement between her and Cohen that led to the $130,000 hush-money payment which is at the heart of this case. 

Ms. Clifford claims she had a one-time sexual encounter with Mr. Trump at a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe in 2006. Mr. Trump denies ever having had sex with her. The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who brought the historic case against Mr. Trump, accuses the former president of directing Cohen to pay Ms. Clifford $130,000 shortly before the 2016 presidential election to keep her from publicizing the story to voters. 

On Tuesday, Mr. Davidson detailed how Cohen kept delaying the payment, but finally, in a last minute quest, on the brink of the election, paid the $130,000 out of his own pocket, to stop Clifford from spreading the salacious story and protect Mr. Trump’s election campaign. 

Continuing to tell the story, the attorney now testified that after Mr. Trump won the presidency, he received a phone call from Cohen in December 2016. According to Mr. Davidson, Cohen ranted that Mr. Trump was not going to take him to Washington D.C. and that he had still not repaid him the $130,000 for the hush-money. 

“Jesus Christ, can you f—– believe I’m not going to Washington?” Mr. Davidson cited Cohen as saying. “After everything I’ve done for that f—– guy. I can’t believe I’m not going to Washington. I’ve saved that guy’s ass so many times you don’t even know.”

Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer, fixer and confidante, had thought he would be made President Trump’s chief of staff or an equivalently powerful job, when, in fact, he was being offered no formal role in the administration at all.

Mr. Cohen vented specifically that he had not been reimbursed for his payment to Ms. Clifford, which he’d paid for personally with a home equity line of credit.

“That guy’s not even paid me the $130,000 back,” Mr. Davidson said Cohen told him.

Through further testimony, the jury learned that on January 12, 2018, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of Cohen’s payment to Ms. Clifford. Two days before that, Mr. Davidson now recalled, Ms. Clifford published a written statement denying that she ever had an affair with Mr. Trump. “I am denying this affair because it never happened,” Ms. Clifford’s statement read. She is believed to have been responding to an item on a gossip blog.

“I think it’s effectively true,” Mr. Davidson added of Ms. Clifford’s statement, a “relationship is an ongoing interaction.”     

During the cross-examination, Mr. Trump’s defense attorney, Emil Bove, tried unsuccessfully to get Mr. Davidson to say that he committed extortion when he brokered Ms. Clifford’s hush-money deal. Then Mr. Bove dug his teeth into Mr. Davidson’s history of clients, further attempting to make Mr. Davidson seem like a man who makes his money by threatening to publish salacious stories about lower tier celebrities. 

Mr. Bove questioned Mr. Davidson about his alleged involvement in a TMZ story that had reported on Lindsey Lohan’s alcohol addiction and treatment at a rehab facility.

“I don’t recall that,” Mr. Davidson said.

Mr. Bove inquired about another client, Charlie Sheen, for whom Mr. Davidson said he arranged “some kind of settlement.”

Mr. Bove kept pushing and poking Mr. Davidson. “We’re both lawyers here. I’m not trying to play lawyer games with you,” Mr. Bove said, adding that he just wanted “truthful answers.”

“You are getting truthful answers,” Mr. Davidson answered. He did say he negotiated an offer for Hulk Hogan in regards to alleged sex tape. The allegation was investigated by the FBI. 

“An investigation related to extortion?” Mr. Bove kept pressing. 

“I believe so,” Mr. Davidson replied, and confirmed that he himself had not been charged in the investigation. 

After a brief redirect examination by prosecutor Joshua Steinglass, Mr Bove returned again to re-cross examine Mr. Davidson. Mr. Bove introduced a recorded phone conversation between Mr. Davidson and Mr. Cohen, in which Cohen told Mr. Davidson, “And I can’t even tell you how many times he said to me, ‘I hate the fact that we did it.’ And my comment to him was, ‘But every person that you’ve spoken to told you it was the right move.'”

Mr. Davidson testified that Cohen was referring to Mr. Trump and Ms. Clifford’s hush-money deal. Mr. Bove asked Mr. Davidson again, if had ever  personally met Mr. Trump. He hadn’t.  

In the afternoon, Mr. Bragg entered the courtroom and Mr. Trump stared at him. Shortly after the lunch break, another defense lawyer, Susan Necheles, passed the judge several articles her team had printed out that were written by legal scholars like Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University. Ms. Necheles said that these articles were “very critical of this case,” and that Mr. Trump “would like to post on his Truth,” meaning his Truth Social media platform.

“We think they are perfectly fine, but we think there is ambiguity in the gag order,” Ms. Necheles continued, asking the judge if he could look at the articles before Mr. Trump posts them. Judge Merchan said, “There is no ambiguity in the order.” He added, “I am not going to give an advanced ruling on this … When in doubt, steer clear.”

Prosecutors called their next witness, an expert who extracted Cohen’s cell phone data. The witness, Douglas Daus, works for the lab that does forensic analysis of cell data for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. 

Mr. Daus testified about an audio conversation between Cohen and Mr. Trump on Sept. 6, 2016, at 10:56 a.m. Unbeknownst to his boss, Cohen had been surreptitiously recording their conversations as an insurance policy.

“I need to open up a company for the transfer for all of that info regarding our friend David,” Mr. Cohen could be heard saying on the call, referring to Mr. Davidson as David. “I am all over that, and I spoke to Allen about it when it comes time for the financing.” By Allen, he was referring to the Trump Organization’s then-CFO, Allen Weisselberg, who was recently sentenced to several months in jail at Rikers’ Island for perjury.

“What financing?” Mr. Trump asked Cohen. 

“We’ll have to pay him something,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to the payment to Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal.

Ms. McDougal, the Playboy Playmate of the Month and Playmate of the Year for 1998, also represented by Mr. Davidson, was paid $150,000 by the National Enquirer for her silence regarding a nine-month sexual affair she claims to have had with the future president in 2005 and 2006. That payment was made by the Enquirer, which, prosecutors claim, had a compact with Mr. Trump to protect him and “catch and kill” negative stories. These payments also included a $30,000 payment to a Trump Tower doorman peddling an apocryphal yarn about a Trump love child. But when it came to Ms. Clifford’s demands the Enquirer balked at another payment, thereby leading Cohen to resort to his home equity account.

On cross-examination, Mr. Bove tried to question the reliability of the 2016 recording of Mr. Trump and Cohen, saying it could have been “subject to the risk of manipulation.” Especially troubling to Mr. Bove was the fact that the recording suddenly cuts off, and Mr. Daus was not able to provide an answer as to why. 

Mr. Daus’s testimony will continue on Friday.