Donald Trump in Manhattan court as opening statements begin in hush money trial: Live updates

Colangelo says: “No politician wants bad press. But the evidence at trial will show that this was not spin, or communications strategy. This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy … It was election fraud. Pure and simple.”

Trump has largely been facing forward. Colangelo is speaking at a podium to Trump’s right, slightly behind him.

Karen McDougal meanwhile was offered $150,000 for the “limited life rights to the story of her affair … but the real reason … was to make sure she did not publicise details of her affair of Trump before the 2016 election,” Colangelo says.

He says that Pecker will testify that $150,000 was way more than AMI would normally pay for that kind of story.

Cohen recorded a conversation with Trump in September 2016 — “You’ll get a chance to hear that conversation in this trial,” Colangelo says — on which Cohen said he spoke to then Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg about how to set that up.

“You’ll hear [Trump] ask Cohen, ‘What do we have to pay for this? 150?’” he said. “You’ll hear in his own voice suggest paying in cash.”

AMI then agreed to sell the rights to a shell company set up by Cohen, giving Trump the rights to the McDougal story. Jurors will be shown a “fake” invoice billing the shell company for so-called “advisory” services, and that Cohen, Pecker and Trump would not appear in the transaction. Pecker then told Cohen the deal was off, and that AMI would instead eat the cost.

Jurors just heard Colangelo quote from the Access Hollywood tape, which gives context to the campaign going into “damage control mode” when it learned of the Stormy Daniels story

Three catch-and-kill deals stem from the Trump Tower agreement and lay the foundation for the case: The doorman, Karen McDougal, and Stormy Daniels.

According to Colangelo, the doorman’s story — which shows Cohen actively colluding in a catch-and-kill scheme with a media enterprise” — was ultimately bunk, but Cohen told Pecker not to release him from his NDA until after the election.

Pecker then “deliberately delayed” the release of his NDA, Colangelo says.

“The core of the conspiracy was David Pecker’s agreement to act as eyes and ears of the campaign,” Colangelo says.

He outlines the 2015 Trump Tower catch-and-kill scheme at the heart of the case, in which a publisher “buys a story, demands a source sign a non-disclosure agreement, then declines to publish” – in this case, to support Trump.

“It’s a way of buying damaging information, not to publish it, but to hide it, make it go away,” he says.

Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, and AMI’s David Pecker “conspired to influence the 2016 presidential election” by conceiving of the catch-and-kill scheme, Colangelo says.