Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen leaves after attending the Trump Organization’s civil fraud trial in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, New York, October 24, 2023.
Gina Moon | Reuters
He has said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump. Now, Michael Cohen is prosecutors’ biggest legal ammunition in the former president’s hush-money trial.
But if Trump’s fixer-turned-enemy prepares to give jurors this week an insider’s view of the dealings at the heart of prosecutors’ case, he will also challenge star witnesses.
He has a bitter history with Trump, serving as his personal attorney and troubleshooter until his conduct came under federal investigation. This resulted in Cohen being convicted of a felony and jailed, but Trump, who was in the White House at the time, was not charged with any charges.
Cohen, who is expected to testify on Monday, can address the jury and say he candidly confronted his misconduct and paid for it with his freedom. But jurors are also likely to learn that the now-disbarred attorney not only admitted lying to Congress and banks but also recently claimed under oath that he was dishonest even when he admitted to some of those lies.
Cohen’s new persona — as well as podcasts, books and social media posts — is that of a ruthless and sometimes crude critic of Trump.
As Trump’s trial began, prosecutors took pains to portray Cohen as one of the pieces of evidence against Trump, telling jurors they would be corroborated by other witnesses, documents and the former president’s own recordings. But Trump and his lawyers attacked Cohn as a proven liar and criminal who now makes a living by toppling his former boss.
“What the defense wants the jury to focus on is that he’s a liar” with a tainted past and a violent personality, said Richard Serafini, a Florida criminal defense attorney and former federal and Manhattan prosecutor.
“What the prosecution wants to focus on is ‘everything he said is corroborated – you don’t have to like him,'” Serafini added. “Second, this is the person Trump chose.”
Loyalists become enemies
Cohen’s introduction to Trump in the early 2000s is a classic New York real estate story: Cohen was a condominium board member in Trump Tower and sided with Trump in a dispute between residents and management. The tycoon quickly brought Cohen into his company.
Cohen, who declined to comment for this article, has had an eclectic career, moving from practicing personal injury law to running a taxi fleet with his father-in-law. He ended up serving as both Trump’s lawyer and shark-tooth loyalist.
According to testimony he gave before Congress after his 2018 break with Trump, Cohen worked on some dealmaking but also spent much of his time threatening lawsuits, berating reporters and otherwise defying potential reputational damage to his boss. After raiding Cohen’s home and office, Trump began to distance himself from the lawyer.
Cohen quickly told a federal court that he helped candidate Trump use the National Enquirer tabloid as a flattering internal organ to try to crush his opponents and cover up stories about him by buying stories or reporting them to Cohen. Sordid accusations of personal life. Trump says all stories are false.
The arrangements, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has described as a multi-pronged scheme to hide information from voters, are now under scrutiny in Trump’s hush-money trial. He has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up payments Cohen made to porn actor Stormy Daniels. She claimed to have had sex with Trump, who was married, in 2006, but the former president denied it.
Other witnesses also testified about hush-money deals, but Cohen remains key to piecing together a case that focuses on how Trump’s company compensated him for his role in Daniels’ bribery.
Trump’s defenders insist that Cohen was paid for legitimate work, not a cover-up, and that the deals he brokered with Daniels and others were not illegal.
witness to history
In a criminal trial, many witnesses come to court with their own criminal records, relationships with the defendant, previous conflicting statements, or other things that may affect their credibility.
Cohen comes with a special set of baggage.
When he testifies, he will need to explain his previous denials about key aspects of the hush-money arrangement and convince jurors that this time he is telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Daniels, who was still a Trump associate when his deal came to light, initially told the New York Times that he had not been reimbursed, later admitting that the money was repaid — as did Trump, who previously said he wasn’t even Know about Daniels’ payments.
Then, in the course of two federal guilty pleas, Cohen admitted to tax evasion, orchestrating illegal campaign contributions in the form of hush payments and lying to Congress about his work on possible Trump real estate projects in Moscow. He also admitted to signing a home equity loan application that understated his financial liabilities.
While many types of convictions can be used to question a witness’s credibility, when the crime involves dishonesty, “it’s a treasure trove for the cross-examiner,” Serafini said.
Additionally, Cohen raised new questions about his credibility when he testified at Trump’s civil fraud trial last fall. During a heated cross-examination – in which he answered some questions in a lawyerly “objection” or “ask and answer” manner – Cohen insisted he was not guilty of tax evasion or falsifying loan applications. Ultimately, he testified, he lied to the late federal judge who accepted his plea.
The fraud trial judge found Cohen’s testimony credible and noted that other evidence corroborated it. But a federal judge said Cohen committed perjury in his testimony or guilty plea.
Since splitting from Trump, Cohen has confronted his past lies. The title of his podcast, “Mea Culpa,” hints at a reckoning with his crimes, and he admitted in the foreword to his 2020 memoir that some considered him “the most unreliable narrator on the planet.”
At his 2018 sentencing, he said his “blind loyalty” to Trump made him feel it was my responsibility to cover up his dirty deeds, rather than listening to his own inner voice and moral compass. He has made his attitude clear. You grumpy defendant!
The posts could provide fodder for Trump’s lawyers to paint Cohen as a vindictive witness driven by an agenda. In acknowledgment of this vulnerability, Cohen issued a statement two days after his public statement saying that he would stop commenting on Trump before testifying “out of respect for the judge and prosecutors.”
However, during a TikTok live broadcast last week, Cohen wore a shirt with a Trump-like figure on it with his hands cuffed behind bars. After Trump’s lawyers filed a complaint, Judge Juan M. Merchant on Friday advised prosecutors to tell Cohen that he was ordered by the court not to make any further statements about the case or Trump.
For Jeremy Salander, a New York criminal defense attorney and former Manhattan prosecutor, Cohen’s background is not an obstacle for prosecutors.
“The problem with Cohen is this: He didn’t close his trap,” Salander said. “He just keeps attacking his own credibility.”
Salander said prosecutors need to convince Cohen to come clean, admit his past misconduct and rein in his freewheeling comments, or the case could become “The Michael Cohen Show.”
In fact, Trump’s lawyer Todd Branch used his opening statement to slam Cohen’s “obsession” with Trump and past lies he admitted under oath.
“You cannot make a serious decision about President Trump based on the words of Michael Cohen,” Branch told jurors.
But prosecutor Matthew Colangelo described Cohen as someone who made “mistakes” and told jurors they could still trust him.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, pointed to Trump’s comments about Cohen and others, accusing him of repeatedly violating a gag order that bars him from commenting on witnesses, jurors and others related to the case. The judge found Trump in contempt of court, fined him a total of $10,000, and warned that he could go to jail if he violates the order again.
Prosecutors also did not shy away from testimony about Cohen’s combative character. One banker testified that Cohen was viewed as a “challenging” client who insisted everything was urgent. Daniels’ former lawyer Keith Davidson described his first phone call with Cohen as “a barrage of insults, insinuations and accusations.”
John Fishwick Jr., the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said that while such incidents may not make Cohen happy, eliciting them could be a subtle way for prosecutors to show that he is not their teammate , but just a way for a person to master information.
“This is a way to try to establish his credibility while you distance yourself from him,” he suggests.
Anna Kominsky, a professor at New York Law School, said prosecutors would be wise to address Cohen’s problematic past before defense attorneys do so when he takes the stand. She taught a course for Bragg before he became district attorney, but she commented as a legal observer, not as someone familiar with Bragg’s office tactics.
“I imagine that in their closing arguments,” Kominsky said, “the prosecutor will look the jury in the eye and say, ‘This is not a perfect witness, but none of us are.'”
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