Michael Cohen, former lawyer for Donald Trump, leaves after attending the Trump Organization’s civil fraud trial at New York State Supreme Court in the Manhattan borough of New York City on October 24, 2023.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
He once said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump. Currently, Michael Cohen is the biggest legal weapon of prosecutors in the trial of the former president for hush money.
But if Trump’s fixer-turned-nemesis is ready to give jurors this week an insider’s look at the deals at the heart of prosecutors’ case, he is also challenging Awake a star witness when they arrive.
There’s his tortured past with Trump, for whom he served as his personal lawyer and handler until his activities came under federal investigation. That led to Cohen being convicted of a felony and jailed but no charges were brought against Trump, who was at the White House at the time.
Cohen, who is scheduled to appear in court on Monday, can address the jury as someone who has candidly admitted his wrongdoings and paid for them with his freedom. me. But jurors will likely also learn that the now-disbarred lawyer not only pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and the bank, but recently asserted under oath that he was dishonest even when admit some of those wrongs.
And there’s Cohen’s new persona — and podcast, book and social media posts — as a relentless and sometimes rude Trump critic.
As Trump’s trial began, prosecutors tried to portray Cohen as just one piece of evidence against Trump, telling jurors that corroboration would come through other witnesses, documents and recorded words of the former president himself. But Trump and his lawyers have attacked Cohen as a liar and admitted criminal who now makes a living ousting his former boss.
“What the defense wants the jury to focus on is the fact that he was the one telling the story,” said Richard Serafini, a Florida criminal defense attorney and former Manhattan and federal prosecutor. lie” with a flawed past and hot-tempered personality.
“What the prosecution wanted to focus on was ‘everything he said was corroborated — you don’t have to like him,’” Serafini added. “And second, this is the person Trump chose.”
Loyalists become enemies
Cohen’s introduction to Trump in the early 2000s was a classic New York real estate story: Cohen was on the condominium board in a Trump building and took Trump’s side in a dispute between residents and management. The tycoon soon brought Cohen into his company.
Cohen, who declined to comment for this story, has had a varied career, moving from practicing personal injury law to running a taxi fleet with his father-in-law. Ultimately, he acted as both Trump’s lawyer and shark-toothed loyalist.
According to congressional testimony that Cohen gave after his split with Trump in 2018, he made some efforts to reach a deal but also spent much of his time threatening lawsuits, berating reporters and sought to neutralize any possible reputational damage to his boss. The FBI raided Cohen’s home and office and Trump began distancing himself from the lawyer.
Cohen quickly testified in federal court that he helped candidate Trump use the tabloid National Enquirer as an inside agency to flatter him, try to level opponents and make unspecified accusations. about his personal life by buying stories or informing Cohen. buy. Trump says all the stories are false.
Those deals, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office described as a multi-pronged scheme to keep information from voters, are now under the microscope at Trump’s hush money trial. He has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up reimbursements to Cohen for paying porn artist Stormy Daniels. She claimed to have had sex with the married Trump in 2006, something the former president has denied.
Other witnesses have testified about hush money transactions, but Cohen remains key to piecing together a case focused on how Trump’s company compensated him for his role in the payments for Daniels.
Trump’s defense maintains that Cohen was paid for legal work, not as a cover-up, and that there was nothing illegal in the deals he facilitated for Daniels and others.
A witness to history
In criminal trials, many witnesses come to court with their own criminal records, relationship to the defendant, previous conflicting statements, or something else that could affect their credibility.
Cohen has a specific set of baggage.
During testimony, he will need to explain his previous denials of key aspects of the hush money agreement and convince jurors that this time he is telling the truth, the entire truth. truth and nothing but the truth.
Still supportive of Trump when the deal with Daniels came to light, he initially told The New York Times that he had not been repaid, then acknowledged the repayment — as did Trump, who had previously said that he didn’t even know about Daniels’ payment.
Later, in two federal guilty pleas, Cohen admitted to tax evasion, arranging illegal campaign contributions in the form of hush money payments and lying to Congress about his employment in a potential Trump real estate project in Moscow. He also pleaded guilty to signing a home loan application that underestimated his financial liabilities.
While many types of verdicts can be used to call into question the credibility of a witness, when the crime involves dishonesty, “there is a treasure trove of content there for,” Serafini said. cross-examiner”.
Furthermore, Cohen raised new questions about his credibility when he testified last fall in Trump’s civil fraud trial. During a testy cross-examination – he answered some questions by “objection” or “question and answer” according to his lawyer – Cohen insisted he was not guilty of tax evasion or fraud on the application ask for a loan. He eventually testified that he lied to the deceased federal judge who took his plea.
The fraud trial judge found Cohen’s testimony credible and noted that it was corroborated by other evidence. But a federal judge found that Cohen had perjured himself in his testimony or guilty plea.
Since breaking up with Trump, Cohen has had to confront his past lies head-on. The title of his podcast — “Mea Culpa” — signals his crimes, and he admits in the foreword to his 2020 memoir that some people consider him a “poor storyteller most trusted on the planet.”
At his 2018 sentencing, he said his “blind loyalty” to Trump made him feel it was his duty to cover up his dirty deeds, rather than listen to his voice. my own inner self and moral compass.” Outside court, he cast himself as a representative of anti-Trump sentiment. In social media attacks as the trial began, Cohen used a sarcastic nickname for Trump, mocking him as “just whining, crying and violating the gag order, you petty defendant!”
The posts could give Trump’s lawyers more ammunition to paint Cohen as a witness with a revenge agenda. To accommodate that loophole, Cohen posted two days after opening a statement that he would stop commenting on Trump until after he testified, “out of respect” for the judge and prosecutors.
However, during a TikTok live broadcast last week, Cohen wore a shirt depicting Trump with his hands cuffed, behind bars. After Trump’s lawyers complained, Judge Juan M. Mercan on Friday urged prosecutors to tell Cohen that the court was ordering him not to make any further statements about the case or about Trump.
For Jeremy Saland, a New York criminal defense attorney and former Manhattan prosecutor, Cohen’s background is not an obstacle for prosecutors.
“Cohen’s problem is this: He doesn’t close his trap,” Saland said. “He just kept making shots to his credit.”
Prosecutors will need to persuade Cohen to come clean, admit his past wrongdoing and rein in his freewheeling comments, Saland said, or the case could become “show by Michael Cohen”.
Indeed, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche used his opening statement to attack Cohen’s “obsession” with Trump and his admitted past under oath.
“You cannot make a serious decision about President Trump based on the words of Michael Cohen,” Blanche told the jury.
But prosecutor Matthew Colangelo described Cohen as someone who made a “mistake,” telling the jury they could believe him anyway.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have pointed to comments Trump made about Cohen and others to accuse him of repeatedly violating a gag order that prohibits him from commenting on witnesses, jurors and a number of other people involved in the case. The judge held Trump in contempt, fined him a total of $10,000 and warned that he could face jail time if he violated the order again.
Prosecutors also did not shy away from testimony about Cohen’s aggressive personality. A banker testified that Cohen was considered a “challenging” customer who insisted everything was urgent. Daniels’s former lawyer, Keith Davidson, described his first phone call with Cohen as a “series of insults, innuendos and accusations.”
John Fishwick Jr., a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said that while such details might not satisfy Cohen, dredging them up could be a way for prosecutors to tactfully point the finger at them. it turns out that he is not their comrade but simply someone with information. .
“It’s a way to try to build his credibility while you keep him at arm’s length,” he suggests.
When Cohen takes the stand, prosecutors would be wise to address his troubled past before defense attorneys do, said New York Law School professor Anna Cominsky. She taught a course with Bragg before he became district attorney, but she offered her comments as a legal observer, not someone familiar with his office’s strategy.
“I imagine in their closing arguments,” Cominsky said, “that the prosecutor will look directly at the jury and say, ‘This is not a perfect witness, but none of us are. that’s all.'”
