On his first day on the stand Friday, banker Gary Farro told jurors that he was assigned to work with Michael Cohen in 2015 after one of Farro’s colleagues left First Republic Bank, and that in October 2016, Cohen had frantically tried to open an account for a new account. company called Resolution Consultants LLC.
Prosecutors allege Cohen intended to use that account to wire $125,000 to AMI, parent company of the National Enquirer, for the rights to Playboy playmate Karen McDougal’s story about an alleged affair with Trump, but the deal fell through after publisher David Pecker consulted with his lawyers.
“I’m not going to move forward. It’s a bad idea and I want you to break the deal,” Pecker told Cohen. “He was very, very, angry. Very upset. He was basically yelling at me.”
Ultimately, Farro said the Resolution Consultants LLC account was never funded or opened by Cohen; prosecutors say the account was abandoned along with the agreement to reimburse AMI for McDougal’s story. Then, Farro said, Cohen contacted him in October 2016 to open a new account for a company called Essential Consultants LLC, which Farro said Cohen described as a real estate consulting company “to collect fees for the work of investment advice that (Cohen) does for real. real estate transactions. »
According to prosecutors, the day after creating the account, Cohen used it to transfer $130,000 to Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence before the 2016 election.
ABC News
