Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen told jurors on Monday that the Republican presidential candidate personally approved a hush money payment to bury a porn star’s story of a sexual encounter before it could derail his 2016 campaign.

“Just do it,” Cohen said Trump told him, instructing him to figure out the best way of paying adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 to stay quiet about an alleged 2006 liaison, which he denies.

The October 2016 payment is at the center of the historic trial, which entered its fifth week in New York state criminal court in Manhattan. Prosecutors have said they could rest their case this week.

In hours of dramatic testimony, Cohen, 57, once one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants and now the prosecution’s star witness, described multiple episodes in which Trump signed off on payments aimed at quashing sex-scandal stories while he campaigned for the highest office in the land.

In the final weeks before the 2016 election, Cohen learned that Daniels was shopping her story to tabloids. It was a pivotal moment for the Trump campaign, which was reeling from the release of an audio recording from the TV show “Access Hollywood” in which Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitals.

“He said to me, ‘This is a disaster, a total disaster. Women are going to hate me,’ Cohen, wearing a dark suit and pink tie, testified Trump had said. “‘Guys, they think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.’”

Prosecutors have said Trump paid Cohen back after the election and hid the reimbursements by recording them falsely as legal retainer fees in Trump’s real estate company’s records.

Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records tied to the reimbursements. Prosecutors say the altered records covered up election-law and tax-law violations – since the money was essentially an unreported contribution to Trump’s campaign – that elevate the crimes from misdemeanors to felonies punishable by up to four years in prison.

Trump, who is running against Democratic President Joe Biden in November, has pleaded not guilty and argues the case is a politically motivated attempt to interfere with his campaign to take back the White House.

Trump’s defense has suggested the payment to Daniels, who testified last week, was meant to protect his family from embarrassment. But Cohen testified that Trump was solely concerned with the effect on his campaign.

“He wasn’t thinking about Melania. This was all about the campaign,” Cohen said, referring to Trump’s wife. At the defense table, Trump, 77, shook his head.

Cohen also told the 12 jurors and six alternates that Trump urged him to delay sending payment to Daniels’ lawyer until after the election, telling him that the story would no longer matter.

Trump’s lawyers have argued that Cohen, a felon and admitted perjurer, is lying about Trump’s involvement and acted on his own. But Cohen said he would never have taken such drastic steps without Trump’s approval.

“Everything required Mr. Trump’s sign-off,” Cohen said.

Offering a detailed timeline of the chaotic days during the 2016 campaign’s final weeks, Cohen said he set up a shell company – falsely listed as a “real estate consulting company” – to facilitate the payment through a bank across the street from New York City’s Trump Tower.

Cohen described how he and campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks frantically tried to contain the fallout when the Wall Street Journal published a story detailing another hush money payment while also mentioning Daniels.

Jurors saw emails showing the two advisers hammering out a denial, while phone records showed a number of calls between them on the day the story appeared.

That testimony could undercut any defense claim that the hush money payments were not tied to the campaign.

SECRET PAYMENTS

Cohen testified earlier in the day that Trump approved other payments to forestall damaging stories.

When Trump was preparing to announce his 2016 campaign, Cohen said, Trump warned him there would be “a lot of women coming forward.”

Cohen said he, Trump and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker agreed to use the tabloid to boost Trump’s presidential candidacy while blocking any negative stories.

That arrangement included a $150,000 payment from Pecker’s company to former Playboy model Karen McDougal to buy her story about a year-long affair she said she and Trump had, Cohen said. Trump has also denied that relationship.

Jurors were played a recording Cohen said he made of a meeting in which Trump asked him, “So what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?”

Pecker previously testified at the trial that he acquired McDougal’s story to keep it under wraps and that he eventually decided not to seek reimbursement from Trump.

For nearly a decade, Cohen worked as an executive and lawyer for Trump’s company and once said he would take a bullet for Trump.

Cohen said it was fair to describe his role as a fixer for Trump, testifying that he took care of “whatever he wanted.” Among his duties was threatening to sue people and planting positive stories in the press, he said.

Trump, he said, communicated by phone or in person and never set up an email address. Jurors were shown multiple phone records of Cohen’s calls to Trump at moments when he testified he was executing the hush money deals.

“He would comment that emails are like written papers, that he knows too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case,” Cohen said.

Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to violating federal campaign finance law by paying off Daniels and testified that Trump directed him to do so. Federal prosecutors did not charge Trump with any crime.

The Manhattan trial is widely seen as less consequential than three other criminal prosecutions Trump faces, all of which are mired in delays.

The other cases charge Trump with trying to overturn his 2020 presidential defeat and mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Trump pleaded not guilty to all three.

Cohen will resume testifying on Tuesday. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit China on May 16-17, his first foreign trip since his inauguration for a new term as president, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.

“At the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin will pay a state visit to China on May 16-17 as his first foreign trip after taking office,” the Kremlin said.

Putin and Xi “will discuss in detail the entire range of issues of the comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation, identify key areas for further development of Russian-Chinese practical cooperation, and exchange views in detail on the most pressing international and regional issues.”

The Kremlin said that after the meeting the two leaders would sign a joint statement.

Reuters reported exclusively in March that Putin would travel to China in May. 

Palestinians on Wednesday will mark the 76th year of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the core of their national struggle. But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now unfolding in Gaza.

Palestinians refer to it as the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. Some 700,000 Palestinians — a majority of the prewar population — fled or were driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.

After the war, Israel refused to allow them to return because it would have resulted in a Palestinian majority within its borders. Instead, they became a seemingly permanent refugee community that now numbers some 6 million, with most living in slum-like urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

In Gaza, the refugees and their descendants make up around three-quarters of the population.

Israel’s rejection of what Palestinians say is their right of return has been a core grievance in the conflict and was one of the thorniest issues in peace talks that last collapsed 15 years ago. The refugee camps have always been the main bastions of Palestinian militancy.

Now, many Palestinians fear a repeat of their painful history on an even more cataclysmic scale.

All across Gaza, Palestinians in recent days have been loading up cars and donkey carts or setting out on foot to already overcrowded tent camps as Israel expands its offensive. The images from several rounds of mass evacuations throughout the seven-month war are strikingly similar to black-and-white photographs from 1948.

Mustafa al-Gazzar, now 81, still recalls his family’s monthslong flight from their village in what is now central Israel to the southern city of Rafah, when he was 5. At one point they were bombed from the air, at another, they dug holes under a tree to sleep in for warmth.

Al-Gazzar, now a great-grandfather, was forced to flee again over the weekend, this time to a tent in Muwasi, a barren coastal area where some 450,000 Palestinians live in a squalid camp. He says the conditions are worse than in 1948, when the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees was able to regularly provide food and other essentials.

“My hope in 1948 was to return, but my hope today is to survive,” he said. “I live in such fear,” he added, breaking into tears. “I cannot provide for my children and grandchildren.”

The war in Gaza, which was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack into Israel, has killed over 35,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, making it by far the deadliest round of fighting in the history of the conflict. The initial Hamas attack killed some 1,200 Israelis.

The war has forced some 1.7 million Palestinians — around three quarters of the territory’s population — to flee their homes, often multiple times. That is well over twice the number that fled before and during the 1948 war.

Israel has sealed its border. Egypt has only allowed a small number of Palestinians to leave, in part because it fears a mass influx of Palestinians could generate another long-term refugee crisis.

The international community is strongly opposed to any mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza — an idea embraced by far-right members of the Israeli government, who refer to it as “voluntary emigration.”

Israel has long called for the refugees of 1948 to be absorbed into host countries, saying that calls for their return are unrealistic and would endanger its existence as a Jewish-majority state. It points to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries during the turmoil following its establishment, though few of them want to return.

Even if Palestinians are not expelled from Gaza en masse, many fear that they will never be able to return to their homes or that the destruction wreaked on the territory will make it impossible to live there. A recent UN estimate said it would take until 2040 to rebuild destroyed homes.

The Jewish militias in the 1948 war with the armies of neighboring Arab nations were mainly armed with lighter weapons like rifles, machine guns and mortars. Hundreds of depopulated Palestinian villages were demolished after the war, while Israelis moved into Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, Jaffa and other cities.

In Gaza, Israel has unleashed one of the deadliest and most destructive military campaigns in recent history, at times dropping 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) bombs on dense, residential areas. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to wastelands of rubble and plowed-up roads, many littered with unexploded bombs.

The World Bank estimates that $18.5 billion in damage has been inflicted on Gaza, roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of the entire Palestinian territories in 2022. And that was in January, in the early days of Israel’s devastating ground operations in Khan Younis and before it went into Rafah.

Yara Asi, a Palestinian assistant professor at the University of Central Florida who has done research on the damage to civilian infrastructure in the war, says it’s “extremely difficult” to imagine the kind of international effort that would be necessary to rebuild Gaza.

Even before the war, many Palestinians spoke of an ongoing Nakba, in which Israel gradually forces them out of Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories it captured during the 1967 war that the Palestinians want for a future state. They point to home demolitions, settlement construction and other discriminatory policies that long predate the war, and which major rights groups say amount to apartheid, allegations Israel denies.

Asi and others fear that if another genuine Nakba occurs, it will be in the form of a gradual departure.

“It won’t be called forcible displacement in some cases. It will be called emigration, it will be called something else,” Asi said.

“But in essence, it is people who wish to stay, who have done everything in their power to stay for generations in impossible conditions, finally reaching a point where life is just not livable.”