The past week of testimony has been all about the star witness, Michael Cohen, who was on the stand for all three days the court was in session. Trump's former attorney and fixer spent nearly two days providing damning testimony - then faced a grilling from Trump's team that called into question some of his key claims.
Cohen is at the centre of the criminal case as the man who set up the deal to pay the adult film actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 (£100,000) shortly before the 2016 presidential election to keep her from speaking out about an alleged affair she had with Trump. Trump then allegedly repaid him that sum and more once he was in the White House. Trump allegedly knowingly marked these payments as legal expenses as a way to cover up the paper trail, leading to the criminal charges he faces: 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
Cohen testified this week that Trump had directly instructed him to pay Daniels to buy her silence, and that Trump signed off on a scheme to repay Cohen while concealing the reason for the payments.
Cohen said that when Daniels' attorney approached him in October 2016 about a deal to keep Daniels quiet, Trump told him to "just take care of it". He said he and Trump dragged their feet on paying Daniels because they hoped to get past election day, when her story would no longer matter to Trump. When Daniels threatened to go public if she was not paid, Cohen paid her himself.
When asked if he would have done so without getting a sign-off from Trump, Cohen responded: "No, because everything required Mr Trump's sign-off and on top of that, I wanted the money back."
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