'Get rid of them!' Donald Trump told security who attacked protesters, Michael Cohen swears in new deposition

• Donald Trump personally ordered his security to attack peaceful protesters in 2015, Michael Cohen swore in a deposition Monday.
• Cohen's deposition directly counters Trump's own sworn deposition denying any knowledge of the protest that day.

Seven months ago, former president Donald Trump swore in a deposition that he'd been completely in the dark on Sept. 3, 2015, when his security roughed up protesters on the sidewalk outside Trump Tower and took away their "Make America Racist Again" signs.

But on Monday, Trump's fixer-turned-critic Michael Cohen delivered his own deposition in the protesters' ongoing lawsuit against the former president. And Cohen swore that he personally witnessed Trump order his top security officer, Keith Schiller, to break up the peaceful demonstration.

Trump demanded, "Get rid of them!" Cohen told Insider, recounting a key moment in his 4-hour deposition in the case, a lawsuit scheduled for trial in the Bronx next month.

"He said, "Get rid of them!" Cohen repeated, after leaving law offices across from Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, where his deposition was taped before lawyers for Trump and the protesters.

Jurors in the protester-beatdown case will watch video of both Trump and Cohen's depositions in lieu of seeing their live testimony, and will have to choose between the conflicting accounts.

"Clearly, mine," Cohen had told Insider on his way inside Monday morning, when asked which deposition, his or Trump's, will prove the truthful one.

"I'm shocked he let this case go as far as it did," Cohen added of Trump, whose own deposition, taped for the case in October, was partially released in transcript form last month.

The released excerpts included Trump insisting under oath that he only heard about the protest "sometime after that day that this took place," not the day of.

Trump also said he did not direct his security to use force or to take the protesters' signs.

The former president's deposition also included Trump's bizarre tangent on what he perceived to be the very real danger that people would throw fruit at him — including tomatoes, pineapples and bananas — during events.

Trump attorney Alina Habba had some choice words to describe Cohen, who she alleged in court papers has been allowed to enter the case as a last-minute, self-avowed witness — and in what she called an "ambush."

"I think it's ironic that he's come out of the woodworks a few weeks before trial," she told reporters outside the deposition.

"And the truth will come out. This is news to me, but I actually look forward to questioning Mr. Cohen. I think it's about time."

Cohen had been a no-show in April, when Habba had subpoenaed him to give a deposition.

Cohen told Insider then that the deposition was "defective," and "I ignored it."

Before being deposed, Cohen stressed that he only gave the deposition because he was compelled to, under subpoena from the protesters' lawyers, Benjamin N. Dictor and Nathaniel K. Charny.

"Notwithstanding [Trump's] failure to disclose Mr. Cohen as a witness and their subsequent efforts to prevent him from testifying in this case, today Mr. Cohen voluntarily provided trial testimony by videotaped examination," Dictor told Insider.

"We look forward to presenting his testimony to a Bronx jury as expeditiously as possible."