• Donald Trump's criminal trial finally arrived at the 34 documents at the heart of the case.
• Prosecutors allege Trump falsified records to cover up reimbursements to Michael Cohen.
• Longtime Trump Organization employees testified about the handling of reimbursements.

For the past two weeks, jurors in former President Donald Trump's Manhattan criminal trial heard about extra-marital affairs, seedy "catch and kill" machinations, and the frantic damage control within his campaign ahead of the 2016 election.

On Monday, they heard a lot about accounting.

Prosecutors spent the day presenting two dry — but crucial — witnesses who handled The Trump Organization's finances, cutting checks and creating records within the company.

Those witnesses, longtime Trump Organization employees Jeffrey McConney and Deborah Tarassoff, handled the checks, invoices, and other records that comprise the 34 business records the Manhattan district attorney's office alleges Trump illegally falsified.

This paperwork, shown on giant TV screens in the courtroom, is the crux of the case.

The purpose of those falsifications, prosecutors say, was to cover up reimbursements to Michael Cohen, who wired a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels just 11 days before the 2016 presidential election.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleges the money interfered with the election by silencing Daniels' story, long denied by Trump, of a hotel-suite fling during a Lake Tahoe celebrity golf tournament in 2006, just months after Melania Trump gave birth to their son.

After a brief hearing Monday morning — in which the judge held Trump in contempt for a 10th gag order violation and threatened to jail him — prosecutors called McConney to the stand.

Under a mop of shiny white hair, McConney testified about how finances were managed at the Trump Organization, where he worked for over 30 years and served as the company's controller before retiring in February 2023. He oversaw 401K plans, loan documents, and payroll processing.

Most crucially for the case, he also oversaw Trump's accounts payable department and the accounts receivable department.

"Accounts receivable is the other side, when someone owes you money," McConney said, making grabbing motions in the air with his hands.

The two Trump Organization employees were responsible for making sure Cohen got paid

McConney testified about a meeting in January 2017 with Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's chief financial officer at the time.

Weisselberg has since stepped down from the position. He was sentenced to five months in jail in 2022 for a Trump Organization felony payroll tax-fraud prosecution, and is now serving another five-month sentence for felony perjury in last year's Trump Organization civil fraud trial.

The Trump Organization needed to reimburse Cohen for some money, McConney testified that Weissberg told him.

"Are you familiar with someone named Michael Cohen?" Colangelo asked McConney on the stand.

McConney gave a heavy sigh, paused, and then answered, "Yes."

"He said he was a lawyer," McConney added, to some laughter in the courtroom.

Prosecutors showed jurors a copy of a bank statement revealing that Cohen sent $130,000 to Keith Davidson — an attorney representing Stormy Daniels, who testified earlier — from one of his accounts.

In handwritten notes shown to the jury, Weisselberg had added $50,000 to cover technical services, doubled that sum to account for the taxes, and then added on a $60,000 bonus.

That total of $420,000 should be disbursed to Cohen throughout 2017, in $35,000 chunks, McConney jotted down in a second document.

Colangelo led jurors meticulously through what prosecutors say was the phonied up paperwork for each of these reimbursement checks.

Each reimbursement check began with Cohen emailing an invoice — and a personal greeting — to Weisselberg, the CFO.

"Hope you are holding up and not damaged by the hurricane to your Florida home," Cohen emailed the CFO in September of 2017.

"Happy Thanksgiving and hope all is well," Cohen emailed the CFO when he sent along his November invoice.

In each month's email Cohen would attach a brief invoice — 11 in all, each of them a falsified document, the DA alleges.

"Dear Allen," each began. "Pursuant to the retainer agreement, kindly remit payment," the invoice would continue.

Weisselberg forwarded each invoice to McConney, the controller, who would forward them to Tarasoff, the accounts payable supervisor.

Tarasoff would print and cut the checks, 11 in all — each of them another alleged falsified document.

Jurors saw each of these checks, too, including nine Capital One personal checks to Cohen that Trump would need to sign himself throughout his first year at the White House.

That created a problem, McConney said. For decades, Trump worked from his office upstairs in Trump Tower, and it was easy to get ahold of him to sign a check. As president, he was rarely in New York, McConney said.

"Somehow, we would have to get a package to the White House," McConney said. Yet another Trump Organization employee would FedEx the checks to Trump in DC, he testified.

In the afternoon, prosecutor Christopher Conroy slogged through more records with Tarasoff, who said she has worked at the Trump Organization for 24 years.

Tarasoff sounded both anxious and cautious as she walked jurors through the process of printing, cutting, and creating payment vouchers for each check.

The parade of emails and invoices didn't excite everyone. At one point during Tarasoff's testimony, Trump's lawyer Todd Blanche let out a wide-mouthed yawn.

Conroy scored a point that seemed to demonstrate Trump was paying attention to each and every check. Sometimes, Tarassoff testified, he'd write "VOID" on a check if he didn't want it paid.

"It was signed in black and it was in Sharpie and that's what he usually uses," Tarasoff said.

• A fusion reactor in southern France achieved a significant milestone toward clean, limitless energy.
• The fusion reactor, WEST, created a super-hot plasma and sustained it for a record-breaking 6 minutes.
• The experiment is laying the groundwork for a larger fusion reactor called ITER.

A fusion reactor in southern France, called WEST, just achieved an important milestone that brings us one step closer to clean, sustainable, nearly limitless energy.

Scientists at New Jersey's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who collaborated on the project, announced today that the device created a super-hot material called a plasma that reached 90 million degrees Fahrenheit (50 million degrees Celsius) for 6 straight minutes.

The ultimate goal is to sustain a super-hot plasma for many hours, but 6 minutes is a new world record for a device like WEST. Other nuclear reactors similar to WEST have created hotter plasmas, but they haven't lasted as long.

WEST is what's called a tokamak. It's a donut-shaped fusion reactor the size of an 8-by-8-foot room with 8-foot-tall ceilings, capable of generating the same type of energy that powers our sun. That's why scientists sometimes call these machines "artificial suns."

"What we are trying to do is create a sun on Earth," Luis Delgado-Aparicio, PPPL's head of advanced projects, told Business Insider. "And that is extremely, extremely challenging," he said, but this new record suggests they're headed in the right direction.

The sun runs on nuclear fusion (when atomic nuclei combine and release energy) not to be confused with the nuclear fission process (when atomic nuclei split apart and release energy) that powers today's nuclear reactors.

Fusion energy is more powerful than any form of energy we have today. If we can harness that power, it could produce almost 4 million times more energy per kilogram of fuel than fossil fuels. Plus, it's carbon-free.

Significant challenges remain before that becomes a reality, which is where experimental reactors like WEST come in.

While WEST won't be used to generate fusion for electricity to power homes, it's critical for the research that's laying the groundwork for future commercial reactors.

WEST creates more energy and lays the groundwork for ITER

WEST has a lot in common with ITER, a nearby reactor being built in southern France, which will be the world's largest tokamak capable of self-sustaining burning plasmas when it's finished. Creating that self-heating mix is a crucial step to harnessing the power of fusion for commercial purposes.

However, due to cost and technology setbacks, it's unclear when ITER will be finished. In the meantime, other facilities are conducting experiments to figure out how best to operate the giant reactor. That includes WEST.

The two reactors are practically neighbors, Delgado-Aparicio said, and the experiments at WEST are directly applicable to ITER.

For fusion to happen on Earth, the fuel needs to reach at least 50 million degrees Celsius. One of the main obstacles fusion power faces is that it takes a tremendous amount of energy to generate those extreme temperatures, and, so far, reactors can't sustain a plasma long enough to gain an energy surplus that could be put toward commercial use. So, for now, fusion reactors typically consume more energy than they produce.

WEST's latest breakthrough was no exception. However, it did generate 15% more energy from fusion compared to earlier attempts, PPPL reported in a statement. Moreover, the plasma was twice as dense, another important component of creating more energy.

The key to WEST's record success: tungsten

WEST is helping scientists test the best materials for building the walls inside a fusion reactor, which isn't easy since these environments can reach temperatures more than three times hotter than the sun's center.

Originally, WEST contained carbon walls. While carbon is easy to work with, Delgado-Aparicio said, it also absorbs tritium, a rare hydrogen isotope that fuels the fusion reaction.

"Imagine you have a wall that is not only a wall, but it's some sort of a sponge," he said, "a sponge that absorbs your fuel."

So, in 2012, scientists decided to test a different material for the tokamak's walls, tungsten — the same material that ITER will use for some of its main components.

Because of tungsten's ability to withstand heat without absorbing tritium, Delgado-Aparicio believes it is the ideal material for tokamak walls.

That said, tungsten isn't perfect. One of its downfalls is it can melt and enter the plasma, contaminating it. In turn, this can counteract the process, radiating a lot of energy away and cooling the plasma.

Therefore, to optimize the system, scientists need to understand how exactly tungsten behaves and interacts with the plasma. That's what researchers are doing with WEST.

The team at PPPL, for example, modified a diagnostic tool that they used in this latest experiment from WEST. The tool helped the team accurately measure the plasma's temperature to better understand how tungsten migrates from the wall of the device to the plasma.

"We can detect how it moves inside, we can follow it, we can study its transport inside the machine," Delgadot-Aparicio said, which could help build future methods for keeping the plasma free of impurities like blobs of tungsten that cool it down.

"Now we understand how that cooling needs to be taken care of," he said, "and that experience is going to be exported next door to ITER."

WEST and ITER aren't the only reactors that use tungsten.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), for example, is using tungsten walls for SPARC, its demonstration fusion reactor. And Korea's KSTAR has a tungsten divertor and recently demonstrated a 30-second, 100-million-degree plasma.

Whether tungsten proves to be the key to unlocking commercial fusion energy remains to be seen.

Commercial fusion energy is still likely decades away, but Delgado-Aparicio thinks they're making steps toward "this big goal of giving energy to humankind."

PPPL said it will publish the results of its experiment in a peer-reviewed journal in a few weeks.

• Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas was indicted by federal prosecutors on Friday.
• He and his wife are accused of taking bribes from Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.
• The growing scandal is drawing some comparisons on the right to George Santos.

Rep. Henry Cuellar is in the midst of a growing bribery scandal involving Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank.

The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against the Texas Democrat and his wife on Friday, accusing the duo of accepting nearly $600,000 in bribes over the course of nearly seven years.

Cuellar is the third sitting lawmaker to be indicted this Congress, following former Republican Rep. George Santos of New York and Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New York.

Here's everything to know about the charges against Cuellar, who the Texas Democrat is, and why some on the right are comparing his situation to that of Santos.

Cuellar and his wife are accused of bribery, money laundering, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent

According to the 54-page indictment, Cuellar and his wife accepted bribes from both Azerbaijan and a Mexican bank from December 2014 to November 2021, doing so through a series of shell companies and intermediaries.

The indictment alleges that the couple collected roughly $600,000 in bribes — $360,000 from the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic and $236,390 from Banco Azteca.

In the case of Azerbaijan, Cuellar's been accused of using his position as a member of the House Appropriations Committee to influence legislation to the benefit of the oil-rich state.

With Banco Azteca, Cuellar has been accused pressuring officials in the executive branch to pursue policies favorable to the bank, as will as introducing legislation to shield the payday lending industry from federal regulation.

The criminal counts against Cuellar and his wife include:

• 2 counts of conspiracy to commit bribery of a federal official and to have a public official act as an agent of a foreign principal;

• 2 counts of bribery of a federal official;

• 2 counts of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud;

• 2 counts of violating the ban on public officials acting as agents of a foreign principal;

• 1 count of conspiracy to commit money laundering;

• 5 counts of money laundering.

Cuellar has denied any wrongdoing, saying in a statement that he and his wife are "innocent of these allegations" and that he still plans to seek reelection.

He's the only anti-abortion House Democrat left — but party leadership helped save him two years ago

Aside from his bribery scandal, Cuellar has been a top target of progressives for years, owing to his relatively conservative politics. He is the only House Democrat who voted against a bill to protect abortion rights nationwide during the last Congress, and he has previously received an "A" rating from the National Rifle Association.

Cuellar faced a stiff challenge in 2022 from immigration lawyer Jessica Cisneros, who had the backing of progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Ultimately, Cuellar won his primary by less than 300 votes.

He was endorsed by the entirety of House Democratic leadership, who opted to endorse him again last year.

That's even after the congressman faced an FBI raid on his home in 2022.

The George Santos comparison

It's only been a few days, but so far, Democrats have largely held off on calling for Cuellar to resign.

A spokesperson for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Friday that Cuellar would "take leave" as the top Democrat on a key House subcommittee until the issue is resolved.

That's led some to point to an apparent hypocrisy between how they're handling this situation versus George Santos, who was indicted on several criminal charges but was not yet convicted when Democrats and nearly half of House Republicans voted to expel him in December.

Santos himself has made an issue out of it, claiming in a post on X that he's "ready to go to the Supreme Court to fight the constitutionality of my expulsion if the standard isn't maintained."

But it's more complicated than that.

For one, Republicans don't seem to be on the same page about this. While House Republicans' campaign arm has sought to tie other Democrats to Cuellar's scandal, former President Donald Trump has defended the congressman, argued that he's being targeted by President Joe Biden because of his conservative politics.

Additionally, the standard that lawmakers set for Santos's expulsion was the release of a House Ethics Committee report. Once that committee did so — revealing, among other things, that Santos had bilked his campaign donors to pay for Botox — a broad bipartisan majority of lawmakers opted to expel Santos.

• Marketing has long struggled to establish an standard measurement for brand value.
• Quantifying emotional impact in consumers using AI could be the next major marketing trend.
• Companies like Equinox have started leveraging emotion in their campaigns. 

The number one thing on the minds of CMOs in 2024 is proving measurable brand value.

There have been many ways of assessing brand value in the past including revenue, the value of future net earnings, and net promoter scores. But nothing has ever been precise enough to become a singular industry standard.

Net promoter score has come close, but having been invented over two decades ago, new times warrant additional methods of determining brand valuation. Gartner validated this shift in 2021 by predicting that NPS will be obsolete within 75% of organizations by 2025.

Recommending a brand is not a complex enough metric on its own to determine a brand's overall worth. Quantifiable brand trust and loyalty have been kicked around as more modernized ways to assess a brand's valuation, particularly as loyalty in particular dissipated during the COVID-19 pandemic, usurped by convenience. Meanwhile as the cost of acquisition continues to rise, retention is a new mandate.

Developing the means to quantify a brand's true value is the most important part of a marketing organization that needs to evolve.

Some new disruptive thinking on brand value deserves consideration — the power of emotion. While we all know a lot about how customers behave or act, we know little about how they feel.

The power of emotion — the Equinox example

Emotion is the new currency driving quantifiable brand growth. So, what is emotion exactly? It's often defined as instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge. Conventional wisdom holds that thought precedes emotion but in fact, science has consistently proven that emotion precedes thought.

Imagine if you could take this thinking even further to precisely score how trusting of and loyal your customers are to your brand to get to a precise total valuation, that is inarguable, no different than the accuracy of a stock's price. One can debate if a stock should trade higher or lower, but what it trades at on a given day based on how the markets are performing is an uncontested benchmark.

A great example of a company that reinvented largely around having a deeper emotional understanding of customer needs and loyalty is Equinox.

Equinox is built upon getting a consumer to subscribe to them holistically — to derive joy from the brand in some way every day versus just purchasing a membership. The brand has used a mix of innovation and unparalleled customer understanding to do so. As a result, it has become not just a stand-out in the luxury space, but among the most highly regarded brands related to emotional understanding, trust, and loyalty in the world.

"Equinox pioneered a membership model that is set up to drive loyalty and engagement," Julia Klim, Equinox's VP of strategic partnerships told me."This is done in two ways. A top-down approach enticing emotion via wholly aspirational campaigns."

Equinox's "Want It All" campaign exemplifies its emotional approach. "It sold the theme of desire as the engine that drives us all," Klim said.

"There was also a complementary bottom-down approach, via sophisticated customer segmentation, that allowed us to create a personalized and entirely intuitive customer experience once you join," Klim said. "Another great example of how this played out was using deeper emotional intelligence of customers to help reimagine our personal training offer earlier this year."

AI enables new tools, new ways to measure

AI-enabled tools can deliver actual quantifiable scores around brand trust and loyalty, if they are used in combination with data science and direct human input. This can be done by enriching datasets or creating emotional lookalikes that highlight the "why" that is missing from existing segmentation and most first-party data.

At Brandthro, we have created a Net Emotion Score tool using a proprietary AI and data science model to gauge how much brand love customers are feeling at any moment. This calculation is based off of emotional scores that tabulate brand trust and loyalty.

Look for emotion to emerge as one of the most vital currencies that can solve the most common CMO pain points: de-risking investment, doing more with less, elevating loyalty, lowering the cost of customer acquisition and generating quantifiable brand value.

Billee Howard is CEO of Brandthro.