Jury in Trump trial gets inside look into payments to Michael Cohen

As much as this trial is about salacious headlines and sensationalist drama, it's also about accounting.

McConney explained how Cohen's $130,000 wire to Daniels' attorney in October 2016 led to a series of 12 monthly payments to Cohen of $35,000, totaling $420,000.

McConney recounted a conversation with former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg in January 2017, when Trump assumed the presidency.

McConney said Weisselberg came in with a notepad and said he needed to discuss payments to Cohen.

“He kind of threw the pillow at me and said, 'Take this off,'” McConney said, adding that he was also given a copy of a bank statement from Cohen showing his $130,000 wire to the lawyer Jurors were shown McConney's notes from that day, which appeared under the heading “Trump.”

The notes showed a series of scribbled math, with a base salary of $180,000 for Daniels' cable, plus $50,000 he had paid a technology services company, doubled to $360,000.

McConney said the doubling was a practice called “grossing up,” in which the company increased certain payments to executives to offset a potential 50 percent tax rate.

Added to the $360,000 was a bonus of $60,000, which McConney mistakenly listed as $50,000 before correcting the total. McConney said Cohen had complained about not getting a big enough bonus at the end of 2016, and this was intended to remedy that.

The notes included calculations, reflected by Weisselberg's writings in Cohen's statements: $420,000 divided by 12 equals monthly payments of $35,000.

Finally, near the bottom, McConney wrote a note that he said meant the payments had to come from Trump's personal bank account: “Transfer monthly from DJT.”

Despite this instruction, the first checks were sent from a trust set up to hold Trump's assets while he was in office. Its administrators were the two adult children of Weisselberg and Trump.

But in late March of that year, they made the decision to have the payments come directly from Trump's personal account. That meant the only person who could sign for them was the president of the United States, McConney said.

“At some point we had to start taking checks to the White House for President Trump to sign,” McConney said. “It was a whole new process for us.”