Perhaps it’s just me, but this email from Costello really sounds like a mob lawyer telling someone that the mob boss (Trump) wants him to do something. It’s shifty mob boss language.
Is that supposed to be “he attacked not only Michael Cohen…”?
I guess so. I missed that because I was concentrating on the “He overrode them…” bit.
The quoted section is about 20% down the article.
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If (as seems likely) calling Costello was Trumps doing he has totally shot himself in this balls here. Instead of the last witness testimony being Cohen and his possibly dubious memory of calling Trump, it’s Costello shortly after being censured for contempt being forced to deny the time he clearly tries to stop Cohen from testifying against Trump.
Yeah totally, having this be the last bit of witness testimony the jury hear has got to be bad for the defense.
Wouldn’t it actually be Daniel Sitko, the paralegal for Todd Blanche who was the last witness testimony? The defense called two witnesses, not just one.
Fairly sure the defense doesn’t even recall calling him at this point.
LOL, maybe. 
Prosecution: How can we rehabilitate Cohen and make him seem less sleazy than the rest of Trump’s team? We don’t have great options here.
Defense: hold my beer.
Oh yeah true, but still the fact I had forgotten Sitko and have not idea what he spoke about probably means the Cohen testimony would be the last memorable witness testimony for the jury
What did Sitko talk about?
He had a summary of phone calls between Cohen and Costello, and was presenting them to the court to show how many times they talked and for how long. It didn’t seem like much, it was just an attempt to potentially poke a hole in how Cohen had characterized their relationship.
I wonder if they weren’t going to call Costello to the stand, if they’d even bother with that though. I feel like that was just setting things up for Costello’s testimony. So maybe if they hadn’t called Costello, Cohen really would have been the last witness. Just a WAG on my part.
They called Sitko first, so Costello is the last witness the jury will have heard from.
Sitko was called by the defense to confirm/summarize a list of calls between Cohen and Costello.
Pretty dry stuff and clearly overshadowed by what happened after.
Right - which the prosecution tore apart with a simple question -
“Can you tell who he was talking to at that shared number?”
(reminding the jury that Cohen had OTHER business at that time with a different partner at the firm.)
Don’t forget, I was responding to the suggestion that if Costello hadn’t taken the stand that Cohen would have been the last witness, and it was a reminder that there was someone in between them.
Ah, missed that
the in between guy was be cause of costello. no costello, no in between guy.
That was my WAG too.
IANAMoriarty, of course, but I’ve been pondering this. The 1D viewpoint is, I think, that Cohen told Costello that Trump did nothing wrong and that he wasn’t involved in the Stormy payoff. It’s not quite a contemporaneous account, but it’s closer than present day. I’m pretty sure that’s all there is to it. “See, once upon a time he told this guy that Trump was clean.”
Of course, it’s apparent from Costello’s own testimony and behavior that by this point, Cohen was already suspicious (and rightly so) that Costello wasn’t acting in good faith. He was trying to suss out what Cohen was telling to the authorities to report back to Trump. I’m assuming the jury was aware of all of that, and Trump (who evidently insisted on this witness) is absolutely convinced that he’s fooled everyone.
And it’s been established that Cohen lied to cover for Trump. For all intents and purposes, it was one of his job duties as a ‘fixer’.
The defense could have let the trial end with Cohen admitting to overcharging on Red Finch – the same pile of money used to reimburse him for the Daniels payoff. Instead they let it end with prosecutors reading Costello’s threatening emails.
It’s also telling they didn’t call Schiller to testify about the October call.