| 05:09:51 PM
Next on the witness stand is Gary Farro, a client manager and executive director at Flagstar Bank. Previously, he worked at First Republic Bank, which collapsed amid the 2023 banking crisis.
Rebecca Mangold of the DA's office zeros in on Farro’s time at First Republic in 2016. Farro was a relationship banker and one of his clients was Michael Cohen.
Farro says in Oct. 2016, Cohen told him he wanted to open up a new LLC account, and that it was for real estate. Cohen wanted this account opened up immediately, Farro says, but that was unusual for him.
The entity that was created was called Resolution Consultants LLC. That was the company that Cohen was going to use to facilitate AMI’s sale of the rights to Karen McDougal’s affair story to Trump. However, David Pecker testified that he backed out of that deal at the last minute.
According to Farro, the Resolution Consultants account was never funded and Cohen told him later that he wanted to go in a different direction, and opened an account for a new LLC, called Essential Consultants, the entity that prosecutors say was used to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000 for the rights to her story of a sexual encounter with Trump.
That’s it for today. The trial will resume on Tuesday morning.