Trump trial updates: Appeals court denies defense's bid for judge's recusal

Michael Cohen told jurors that he requested that his then-attorney Robert Costello reach out to Rudy Giuliani to get help paying for his own defense lawyers after Cohen's office and hotel room were raided by the FBI in 2018.

"The payment was not being made in accordance with the invoices," Cohen said about his own legal bills, which were initially covered by the Trump Organization after the FBI raid that resulted in part from Cohen's involvement in the Stormy Daniels arrangement.

Cohen said he asked Costello to tell Giuliani to communicate the payment issue to Trump.

"I expressed to him that the nonpayment was becoming an issue," Cohen said. "To, yes, let Mr. Giuliani know to pass it along to Mr. Trump that it is becoming an issue."

Cohen confirmed that he received approximately $4 million from his consulting work between 2017 and 2018.

Court was subsequently recessed for the mid-morning break.

Testifying about Robert Costello, Michael Cohen's attorney for a period until Cohen ended the association, Cohen initially said he spoke with Costello approximately a dozen times over the phone in 2018.

When defense attorney Todd Blanche suggested they actually spoke on the phone 75 times, Cohen responded, "It seems excessive but possible."

Blanche suggested that some of their phone calls lasted more than 30 minutes. According to Blanche, Cohen and Costello spoke for a total of nine hours over the course of a few months in 2018.

Last week, Michael Cohen testified that he did not trust Robert Costello to be his lawyer because he worried any information shared with him would get to Rudy Giuliani and then get to Trump.

But Cohen testified today that he took advantage of that back channel -- including asking Costello to ask Giuliani to try to learn more about the origins of the federal investigation that led to the search of Cohen's office and hotel room.

“I spoke with the person you asked me to and he said he would find out exactly how the matter ended up in the SDNY and in particular who in Main Justice approved this,” Costello wrote in an email to Cohen on April 23, 2018.

Cohen confirmed the “person” mentioned above was Rudy Giuliani.

Defense attorney Todd Blanche asked Cohen about the large sums of money he made through his consulting work with other companies in 2017 -- an apparent effort to legitimize the money Cohen made from Trump as the being the result of legal work.

Cohen testified he was paid $600,000 by AT&T in 2017, communicating with them just 20 times.

"And there's nothing wrong with that?" Blanche asked.

"I don't believe so," Cohen said.

Cohen said he was paid $100,000 per month from Novartis, $100,000 per month from an aerospace company, and $150,000 a month from a bank.

Cohen was also paid $50,000 by a company in 2017 to help restart a nuclear power plant formerly run by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

On direct examination, Cohen had testified he did less than 10 hours of work or Trump in 2017 -- an attempt by prosecutors to cast doubt on the fact that the payments Cohen received were for any legitimate legal work.

Blanche appears to be trying to rebut those assertions by painting Trump's payments as just another one of Cohen's lucrative consulting jobs, in which he made hundreds of thousands of dollars while doing little work for his clients.