The lawyer and long-time fixer who once declared he would “take a bullet” for Donald Trump confronted the former president in a New York court yesterday and said he had committed a series of crimes at his behest.
Michael Cohen, who was Trump’s personal lawyer and executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, also testified that he had falsely raised the value of the company’s assets by billions of dollars, on the orders of his boss.
Trump “would look at the total assets and he’d say, ‘I’m not actually worth four and a half billion dollars, I’m actually worth more like six’,” Cohen said.
He added that he and Trump’s chief financial officer would then go away and work on “reverse engineering” the valuations of his properties to achieve “whatever number Mr Trump told us to”.
Cohen is the star witness in a $250 million civil suit against Trump alleging that he inflated the value of his properties to secure better deals from lenders and insurance companies. Trump denies the claims. He has called his former lawyer “a rat” and a “serial liar”.
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When Cohen could not testify last week because of a medical matter, Trump told reporters that he “doesn’t have the guts”.
Cohen responded by declaring that if he “was afraid of Donald” he would not have “provided information to the New York attorney-general that is the basis of this trial”. He promoted his court date on social media over the weekend. “It appears that I will be reunited with my old client,” he wrote. “See you there!”
The two men had not met since 2018, when Cohen turned against Trump in spectacular fashion, co-operating with prosecutors and pleading guilty to charges relating to tax evasion, arranging a hush-money payment to a porn star and lying to Congress. “Was the alleged conduct performed in the course of your employment?” asked a lawyer for the New York attorney- general’s office, which is suing Trump for fraud. Cohen replied: “Yes.”
“And who was your employer?”
“Donald J Trump,” he replied.
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Cohen’s arrival on the witness stand had brought Trump back to Manhattan yesterday, plodding into court at 10am in a blue suit and tie, declaring at one point the proceeding was “a disgrace”.
Cohen breezed into court in a grey suit and a white shirt, tie-less. He gave the court his home address, remarking that he lived in the same Park Avenue building as Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.
No sooner had he taken the oath than he was asked if he had been convicted for lying to Congress. Cohen replied: “It’s impossible not to speak of the sentence and not say what that lie was.”
He had lied about how many times he had spoken to Trump about a Trump Tower project in Moscow, he added. “I had stated three. The true answer was ten. And I did that at the direction of, in concert with and for the benefit of, Mr Trump.”
He said “a whole group of people” including Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, “were involved in the formation of that statement. My complicity resulted from my reading it into the record” in his congressional testimony.
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Cohen said he had been introduced to Trump by his son, Donald Jr. He had been in Trump’s office in Trump Tower in March 2007, he said, when “he asked if I would like to leave that sleepy old firm” and move to the Trump Organization, becoming its executive vice-president and Trump’s personal lawyer, answering solely to him.
“Whatever issues he had ... he would bring it to me in order to resolve them,” Cohen said. One of those issues, he said, had to do with Trump’s net worth.
The civil trial continues.
Former fixer ready for revenge
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Michael Cohen once said he would “take a bullet” for Donald Trump (Hugh Tomlinson writes). Even when he was jailed in 2018 for making hush-money payments to conceal Trump’s alleged affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels, Cohen told the court: “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.”
However, like so many Trump subordinates before and since, Cohen, his long-time fixer, has realised only belatedly that the former president’s demand for absolute loyalty is a one-way street. Throughout his business and political careers, Trump has not hesitated to act when the time came to shift blame away from himself.
Other Trump aides mocked Cohen’s devotion. Roger Stone, his long-time confidant, said in 2018 that “Donald goes out of his way to treat [Cohen] like garbage”.
Since his release from prison, however, Cohen has dedicated himself to gaining revenge.
Other former aides are turning on Trump by the day. As he and Cohen arrived in court in New York, Jenna Ellis, a former lawyer for Trump’s 2020 election campaign, was pleading guilty in the racketeering case against the former president in Georgia.
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Ellis is the fourth of his co-defendants to cut a plea deal in Georgia and could now testify against him. Others may follow as prosecutors ratchet up the pressure on Trump’s inner circle.
Cut adrift by their former boss and faced with crippling legal fees, other defendants will be wondering if loyalty to Trump is worth a prison term.
