Michael Cohen testified that he was in London in October 2016 when the news of the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape broke.

"Please call me," Cohen emailed Trump adviser Steve Bannon in October 2016.

"It's all over the place. Who is doing damage control here?" Cohen later emailed.

Cohen said he was trying to step in "in order to protect Mr. Trump.'

Jurors also saw phone records showing two calls between Trump and Cohen on Oct. 8, 2016.

"He wanted me to reach out to all of my contacts in the media who needed to put a spin on this," Cohen said. "The spin that he wanted to put out it was that this locker room talk -- something that Melania had recommended or at least he told me that's what Melania thought it was and use that in order to get control over the story and minimize its impact on him and his campaign."

Trump, again, shook his head no at the answer from the defense table.

Jurors then saw texts between Cohen and former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo.

"Will be too late ... he is dying right now," Cuomo texted Cohen.

Cohen explained that he believed, "That this is a tremendously negative story in regard to the Trump campaign ... this is going to be significantly impactful, especially with women voters."

Michael Cohen testified that he understood Trump would eventually pay for the rights to Karen's McDougal's story, which AMI had purchased for $150,000.

"What I was doing, I was doing at the direction of, for the benefit of Mr. Trump," Cohen said.

But Cohen and AMI's David Pecker, in their testimony, offered slightly different accounts of why Trump ultimately did not reimburse AMI for the McDougal payment.

According to Cohen, Pecker said that McDougal's cover on Men's Health magazine prompted massive sales, making the McDougal agreement an "excellent business deal" for AMI.

"It was no longer necessary," Cohen said.

"He told me to rip it up, forget it," Cohen said about the deal.

According to Cohen, Trump responded to the news by saying, "Wow, that's great."

According to Pecker, when he told Cohen that the deal was off, Cohen was furious -- and said Trump would be as well.

"He was very, very, angry, very upset, screaming basically, at me. And I said, 'I am not going forward with this agreement -- rip it up,'" Pecker testified earlier in the trial. "Michael Cohen said, 'The boss is going to be very angry at you.'

Michael Cohen said then-Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg suggested using a non-Trump entity to make the $150,000 payment to AMI to distance Trump from the deal.

"I went to Allen's Office. I expressed to him that we need funding of $150,000 to consummate this transaction. Allen then said to me, 'Well, if we do it from a Trump entity, that kind of defeats the purpose,'" Cohen recounted.

Cohen said Weisselberg suggested using a non-Trump entity for the transaction to distance Trump from the deal. Cohen said Weisselberg asked him to "think about ways that we could raise the $150,000."

"It was in order to keep it separate," Cohen said.

Cohen told the jury that he created the company "Resolution Consultants LLC" to purchase the life rights to McDougal's story. When asked about the purpose of the company, Cohen responded that it was "to use this entity for the assignment of the McDougal matter as well as the other information."

The "other information" appears to be a reference to the National Enquirer's other records on Trump that Cohen sought to attain.

Earlier in the trial, jurors heard from Cohen's banker Gary Farro about Cohen's frantic effort to create a bank account for Resolution Consultants LLC and saw the bank records associated with the company.

According to Michael Cohen, the recording he secretly made of a 2016 meeting with Trump abruptly ended because he took an incoming phone call on his phone.

"I must have believed it was an important phone call," Cohen testified.

Cohen added that he believed he recorded enough to prove to Pecker that the $150,000 reimbursement was coming, which he said was the the goal of the recording.

"I didn't want to record more -- I already had enough," Cohen said.

Jurors saw a phone record from AT&T that suggested Cohen received a call around the time of the recording.

The conversation briefly continued after the recording ended, according to Cohen.

Cohen said he told Trump, "I am going to head over to Allen Weisselberg's office and I will get back to him with more of an update."

Jurors briefly saw the metadata for the recording.

"Did you ever alter that recording?" Hoffinger asked.

"No," Cohen said.

Trump, at the defense table, shook his head "no" at Cohen's response. The former president appears much more engaged now, thumbing through a stack of papers in his hands.

Michael Cohen testified about the fallout from his work for Trump, telling the jury he is no longer a lawyer.

"I lost my law license as a direct result of this," he said.

He said he wrote his book, "Disloyal," to "pass the time" in prison, then wrote his second book, "Revenge," which he described as a "forensic dissection of the prosecution ... against a critic of the president."

The jury then saw a 2023 social media post by Donald Trump about "convicted liar and felon" Michael Cohen.

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger questioned Cohen about Trump suing him in Florida for half a billion dollars -- and for the first time in a while, Trump, at the defense table, opened his eyes, took notes, and passed them to his attorney Todd Blanche.

Cohen told the jury that he regrets what he did for Trump.

"I regret doing things for him that I should not have. Lying. Bullying people in order to effectuate a goal," Cohen said. "I don't regret working with the Trump Organization, as I expressed before some very interesting great times."

"But to keep the loyalty and do things that he had asked me to do -- I violated my moral compass, and I suffered the penalty, as has my family," Cohen said.

Trump appeared to have his eyes closed for the majority of Cohen's last answer. The prosecution completed its direct examination of Cohen, and the court recessed the lunch.