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.

New York's Appellate Division has upheld Judge Juan Merchan's decision not to recuse himself from former President Trump's hush money case.

Trump's defense team had sought Merchan's recusal based on his daughter's work for a consulting firm with Democratic clients.

A panel of appellate judges ruled that Trump failed to prove the judge overstepped his authority by denying a defense motion for recusal.

"Petitioner has failed to establish that the court acted in excess of its jurisdiction by denying his motion," today's order said. "Petitioner also has not established that he has a clear right to recusal."

The judges also found that the defense appeal was procedurally improper since they waited too long to appeal Merchan's August 2023 recusal order, then rushed to the Appellate Division before Merchan ruled on their more recent recusal motion.

The appellate court also upheld Merchan's decision denying Trump's argument that some of his social media posts were covered by presidential immunity.

The appeals court said Trump could include both appeals in its general appeal of the verdict should he be found guilty.

The court also denied Trump's request for a change of venue for the trial, which Trump had sought before the trial began last month.

The former president has repeatedly criticized Judge Merchan as "conflicted" throughout the trial.