Michael Cohen once said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump. But on Thursday, Trump was convicted on felony charges based largely on the onetime loyal fixer’s testimony against his former boss.
Over four days earlier this month, Cohen took the witness stand as the star prosecution witness in the first-ever criminal trial of a U.S. president, past or present. He testified that Trump directed him to pay off a porn star before the 2016 election, and then approved a plan to falsify business records to cover it up.
The testimony in New York state court in Manhattan marked the culmination of a 15-year arc from a lawyer and fixer for the businessman-turned-politician to an outspoken antagonist.
“I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president,” Cohen told Vanity Fair in 2017.
Under cross-examination by Trump defense lawyer Todd Blanche at the New York trial, Cohen acknowledged expressing admiration for Trump in the past.
“I was knee-deep into the cult of Donald Trump,” Cohen, a top executive at Trump’s real estate company before becoming his lawyer, testified on May 14.
The case against Trump stems from Cohen’s $130,000 payment adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election for her silence about a sexual encounter she alleges to have had with Trump a decade earlier.
Now 57, Cohen spent more than a year in prison for crimes including a violation of federal election campaign finance laws with the payment to Daniels. In 2020 he published a book about his experience working with Trump called, “Disloyal: A Memoir.”
Trump, the Republican presidential candidate in the Nov. 5 election, pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsification of business records to conceal the payment and is expected to appeal the guilty verdict. He has also denied the encounter with Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford, and called Cohen a “serial liar.”
Cohen turned on Trump midway through his presidency, as federal investigators probed his role in the payment to Daniels and other matters.
“Today is an important day for accountability and the rule of law,” Cohen wrote in a post on X after the verdict on Thursday. “While it has been a difficult journey for me and my family, the truth always matters.”
The trial was not Cohen’s first time testifying in court against Trump. In a civil fraud case over the former president’s valuations of his real estate assets, Cohen said on the stand in October he had manipulated the values of Trump’s real estate properties to match “whatever number Mr. Trump told us.”
A judge in February ordered Trump to pay $454 million in penalties and interest after finding that he misled lenders and insurers about the Trump Organization’s property values. Trump is appealing.
THE ‘GLOAT’
Relying on Cohen’s testimony was not without risks for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, given the disbarred lawyer’s history of false statements.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for the payment and other crimes, including cheating on his personal taxes and lying under oath to Congress about when the Trump Organization stopped working on a proposed building project in Russia. At the civil trial, he said he lied to the federal judge who took his guilty plea in 2018 by admitting to tax fraud – a crime he now says he did not commit.
Cohen served more than a year in prison before being released.
“Michael Cohen is the GLOAT,” Blanche said in his closing statement on May 28. “He’s literally the greatest liar of all time.”
Blanche hammered Cohen on cross-examination about times he had been untruthful in the past. At one point, he showed Cohen a text message suggesting that he actually discussed how to handle a teenage prankster during an October 2016 phone call between Cohen and Trump’s bodyguard, during which Cohen had testified he spoke with Trump about the Daniels payment.
“That was a lie,” Blanche said while questioning Cohen on May 16. “You can admit it.”
But Cohen, known for tirades against Trump on podcasts, remained calm on the stand. Legal experts said Bragg’s office had plenty of other evidence to corroborate Cohen’s testimony.
‘I VIOLATED MY MORAL COMPASS’
Cohen testified that said much of his criminal conduct – including the lie to Congress and the Daniels payment – arose out of his blind loyalty to Trump.
Cohen, married with two children, was hired as the Trump Organization’s executive vice president and special counsel in 2007. Before that, the Long Island native and son of a Holocaust survivor worked as a malpractice lawyer and owned a fleet of yellow taxis.
He was hired after orchestrating the ouster of the board of directors of a condominium where he owned an apartment, which was trying to remove Trump’s name from the building’s exterior.
Cohen later advised Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and, as his personal lawyer, remained close to Trump once he became president, though he did not have an official White House job.
“I regret doing things for him that I should not have,” Cohen testified on May 14. “To keep the loyalty and to do the things that he asked me to do, I violated my moral compass. And I suffered the penalty.”