Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen faces him down in court
The lawyer and long-time fixer tells a court in Manhattan he had committed a series of crimes at the behest of his former boss.
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 overnight and said he had committed a series of crimes at his behest.
Michael Cohen, who was Mr Trump’s personal lawyer and executive vice-president of the Trump Organisation, also testified that he had falsely raised the value of the company’s assets by billions of dollars, on the explicit orders of his boss.
Mr 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’,” Mr Cohen said.
He added that he and the Trump Organisation chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg would then go away and work on “reverse engineering” the valuations of his properties to achieve “whatever number Mr Trump told us to”.
Mr Cohen, 57, is the star witness in a $US250m ($391m) civil suit brought by New York Attorney-General Letitia James against Mr Trump alleging that he inflated the value of his properties to secure better deals from lenders and insurance companies.
The 77-year-old Mr Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, denounced Mr Cohen at the end of the day’s proceedings as a “disgraced felon”. “The witness is totally discredited,” Mr Trump said. “This is a case that should never have been brought.”
Mr Cohen was sentenced in 2018 to three years in prison for campaign finance violations, tax evasion and participating in a hush money case involving Mr Trump, but was released after a little over a year.
Mr Trump’s lawyers sought to undermine Mr Cohen’s credibility during cross-examination, with one attorney, Chris Kise, calling him a “serial liar”, “You understand what under oath means?” another Trump lawyer, Alina Habba, sarcastically asked Mr Cohen, who has been stripped of his law licence.
The two men had not met since 2018, when Mr Cohen turned against Mr Trump in spectacular fashion, co-operating with prosecutors and pleading guilty to charges relating to tax evasion, arranging a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels 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 Mr Trump for fraud. Mr Cohen replied: “Yes.”
“And who was your employer?”
“Donald J Trump,” he replied.
Mr Cohen’s arrival on the witness stand had brought Mr Trump back to Manhattan on Tuesday, local time, plodding into court at 10am in a blue suit and tie, declaring at one point the proceeding was “a disgrace”. Mr 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 Mr Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.
No sooner had he taken the oath than he was asked if he had been convicted for lying to congress. Mr 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 Mr Trump about a project in Moscow, he added. “I had stated three. The true answer was 10. 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.
Mr Cohen said he had been introduced to Mr Trump by his son, Donald Jr. He had been in Mr 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 Organisation, becoming its executive vice-president and Mr Trump’s personal lawyer.
“Whatever issues he had … he would bring it to me in order to resolve them,” Mr Cohen said. One of those issues, he said, had to do with Mr Trump’s net worth.
Mr Cohen is also expected to be a star witness in a criminal case facing Mr Trump in New York — for allegedly paying election-eve hush money to Ms Daniels.
The Times
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