Trump lawyers try to block email from Ivanka from being entered into fraud trial evidence

Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen left court for lunch on Tuesday after bombshell testimony that he helped his former boss artificially inflate his assets – and came back for an afternoon session that was almost as lively.

MSNBC's Lisa Rubin was among those in the courtroom, live tweeting events as they unfurled.

Among the things Cohen described about his time working with Trump is that his boss refused to communicate with him electronically or in handwritten notes – only exchanging numbers written in red pen. In the time before color copying, red pens didn't show well on black-and-white copy machines, appearing "faint or non-existent," said Cina L. Wong, CDE, a certified and court-qualified forensic handwriting expert.

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A prosecutor from the attorney general's office, Colleen Fahert, pivoted to asking about Trump's insurance. She showed him a financial statement from a meeting with insurers. Trump, Cohen said, would pop into the meetings about three-fourths of the way through.

"When he came in, he would tout his net worth and tell the underwriters he was richer than their companies. 'Maybe he should self-insure,' Trump would muse," Rubin said of Cohen's characterization.

As for the Buffalo Bills, the football team that Trump tried and failed to purchase, Cohen said a reporter named Kat Clark was working on a profile about Trump and his net worth and used some of the previous statements that inflated the values to "prove" how much he was "worth." Trump used the same statements when trying to buy the Bills.

"We had a meeting in Mr. Trump's office with members of Deutsche Bank's team for the purpose of securing a loan that would be predicated off of his assets to bid to acquire the Buffalo Bills," said Cohen, according to The Messenger's Adam Klasfeld, reporting from court.

An email from 2014 was sent from Ivanka Trump to Jason Greenblatt, Allen Weisselberg, and Michael Cohen. The subject was "Deutsche Bank to Morgan Stanley letter." It was a forward of a message sent from Ivanka to Rosemary Vrabic, an executive from Deutsche Bank, said Klasfeld.

Trump's lawyer perked up and immediately objected to the note being admitted into evidence, saying it amounted to little more than a "drive-by" reference to the team.

"I believe we all can agree that Mr. Trump never owned the Buffalo Bills, correct?" Judge Arthur Engoron asked before he admitted the documents to the record.

Earlier in the day, Cohen admitted that he inflated assets based on Trump's instructions.

"We would look at the assets and increase its values in order to achieve the number [that Trump wanted]," Cohen told the court looking at documents.

He explained that each year, over several, Trump asked him to "reverse engineer the values of properties" to meet his goal of his net worth.