Michael Cohen told jurors how Donald Trump’s allies sent the message: “Don’t flip. Don’t speak.” Photo / AP
Michael Cohen’s story of an arrangement struck in the White House with Donald Trump was the only personal account tying the former president to falsified documents.
Little more than two weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, he and his personal lawyer met in the Oval Office for a private conversation about money.
“I was sitting with President Trump and he asked me if I was OK,” the lawyer, Michael Cohen, recalled Tuesday from the witness stand at Trump’s criminal trial. “He asked me if I needed money,” Cohen added, and volunteered that a check would be forthcoming.
When monthly checks started arriving — most bearing Trump’s signature — they disguised the nature of the payments, Cohen testified. The stubs described the checks as part of a legal “retainer” agreement, but they were in fact reimbursements for hush money that Cohen had paid to silence a porn actor’s story of sex with Trump. Cohen said that Trump was present when a plan to fictionalize the records was cooked up weeks earlier in New York.
The testimony marked a pivotal moment for prosecutors. They charged Trump with falsifying the checks and other records, and Cohen’s recounting drove those accusations home. It offered the jury its first and only personal account tying the former president to the documents at the crux of his case.
Trump has denied the allegations and the sex, and his legal team soon sought to sweep Cohen’s revelations aside in cross-examination. The lead defence lawyer, Todd Blanche, attacked Cohen’s credibility, portraying him as out of control and bent on exacting revenge on Trump after his patron abandoned him.
Blanche also emphasized Cohen’s voluminous television appearances and insult-slinging on social media — all of which Cohen did in defiance of the prosecution’s wishes and at Trump’s expense, Blanche suggested. And he noted that Cohen maintains a financial interest in attacking Trump, arguing that he cashed in on their feud with a podcast and a pair of books.
“Do you want President Trump to get convicted in this case?” Blanche asked.
“Sure,” Cohen replied smoothly, keeping his composure under fiery questioning about his falling out with Trump, who kept his eyes closed through much of the testimony.
Their near-filial relationship imploded when Cohen came under federal investigation for the hush money and other matters six years ago. Trump turned his back on Cohen, who then vowed to flip on the man he had once loyally protected and proudly called “boss.”
Cohen, who already served more than a year in federal prison, did not receive anything in return for his testimony against Trump, making him an unusual cooperating witness.
“I made a decision,” he said on the stand Tuesday, that “I would not lie for President Trump anymore.”
The case against Trump — the first criminal trial of an American president — stems from three hush-money deals that Cohen helped arrange before the 2016 presidential election. Two involved women shopping stories of sexual encounters with Trump, most notably, the porn actor, Stormy Daniels.
On Monday, Cohen testified how he had paid US$130,000 ($215,000) out of his own pocket to silence Daniels’ story on the eve of the election. Once Trump was sworn in as president, he repaid Cohen for the hush money, as well as another expenditure and an overdue bonus.
Trump, who faces probation or as long as four years in prison if he is convicted, is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to the payment of Cohen, one for each document involved: 11 checks to Cohen, 11 invoices from Cohen and 12 entries in Trump’s ledger.
All 34 records referred to the supposed retainer, while the ledger entries portrayed the payments to Cohen as an ordinary “legal expense.” But Cohen asserted that there was no retainer agreement, and he had not accrued any legal expenses, offering crucial testimony in the prosecution’s favour.
“In truth, was this invoice for any service you rendered in those two months pursuant to a retainer agreement?” a prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, asked Cohen on Tuesday.
“No, ma’am,” he replied.
“Was this invoice a false record?” she continued, underscoring the point for the jury.
“Yes, ma’am,” he confirmed, and added that the check stubs were false as well.
And asked the purpose of the checks, he explained, that in part they represented “the reimbursement to me for the hush-money fee.”
His account of the records — and description of his Oval Office meeting with Trump — marked a high point for the prosecution’s case.
Before he took the stand, the jury heard that Trump had wanted to cover up a series of sex scandals and was intimately involved in all matters of money. Witnesses said that Trump had an imperative political need to eliminate any trace of the hush-money deal with Daniels — but they had no direct knowledge of whether Trump falsified records to do so.
That earlier testimony was building to this — the moment when Cohen could offer a firsthand account of his dealings with Trump and bring the interwoven strands of the case into focus.
The first crucial moment came Monday, when prosecutors delved into a January 2017 meeting in New York among Cohen, Trump and the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg.
Although Trump did not personally falsify records, or explicitly instruct anyone to do so, Cohen testified that the former president knew that Cohen and Weisselberg would obscure the purpose of the reimbursement.
“Did Mr. Weisselberg say in front of Mr. Trump that those monthly payments would be, you know, like a retainer for legal services?” Hoffinger asked Cohen.
“Yes,” he said.
On Tuesday, when he retook the stand, Cohen detailed the Oval Office meeting the following month, at which, he said, Trump confirmed he would pay him back.
Under New York law, prosecutors need only show that Trump “aided” a crime, or “caused” his company to file false records. Armed with Cohen’s testimony, prosecutors can argue that Trump broke the law even if he merely knew about the records and did not stop the fakery.
Cohen, of course, does not make a perfect prosecution witness.
Over the decade he worked for Trump, he behaved like a bully and a harried errand boy, threatening Trump’s enemies and carrying out his every wish, he has said. Their roles were symbiotic, with Trump acting as the mercurial boss and Cohen his ruthless enforcer.
But Trump’s lawyers argue that he caused more problems than he fixed, and that the jury cannot trust him. They have noted that Cohen is a convicted liar, though he argues he lied out of loyalty to Trump.
On cross-examination, Blanche seized on Cohen’s criminal record, implying that he had initially sought some benefit from prosecutors in exchange for his cooperation. He also suggested that Cohen’s self-interest — he sells T-shirts with an image of Trump behind bars — tainted his testimony.
Cohen remained mostly calm during questioning, speaking slowly as if he were retraining himself from an outburst, including when Blanche sought to grill him over colourful insults he has lobbed at the former president. They included “boorish cartoon misogynist” and “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain.”
Cohen responded to both questions with a version of “sounds like something I would say.”
When Blanche confronted Cohen with his past praise of his boss, he shot back, “At that time, I was knee-deep into the cult of Donald Trump.”
Under questioning from prosecutors, Cohen recounted his gradual falling out with Trump, tracing it to the spring of 2018, when federal authorities were bearing down on him.
Soon after the FBI searched Cohen’s home and office, he received a call from Trump, he recalled.
“He said to me, ‘Don’t worry. I’m the president of the United States. There’s nothing here. Everything’s going to be OK. Stay tough.’”
The call, Cohen explained, “reinforced my loyalty and my intention to stay in the fold.”
Cohen also developed a relationship with Robert J. Costello, a Republican lawyer who served as a back channel to Trump’s legal team. In one email to Cohen, Costello wrote, “Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.”
Cohen would soon lose that sense of security, as Trump stopped calling and the Trump Organization began to balk at some of Cohen’s legal bills.
The message from Trump’s universe, he came to believe, was: “Don’t flip. Don’t speak.” Trump, Cohen suspected, wanted his embattled fixer to remain under his thumb.
By summer 2018, he no longer was, he said. On Tuesday, Cohen considered a prosecutor’s question: To whom had he decided to be loyal, instead of Trump?
As he thought about it, a parade of Trump’s Republican allies streamed into the courtroom.
Cohen was unfazed. “To my wife, my daughter, my son, and the country,” he said.
When Cohen pleaded guilty in August 2018 to federal campaign-finance violations over the hush-money deals, he pointed the finger at his former boss, saying he acted at his direction. Cohen, who also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and another personal financial crime unrelated to Trump, called it the “worst day of my life.”
He eventually served more than a year in prison, including a stint in solitary confinement.
But his testimony this week offered him a shot at public redemption, and perhaps, personal revenge.
“I regret doing things for him that I should not have, lying, bullying people in order to effectuate the goal,” Cohen said on the stand, adding that he “violated my moral compass and I suffered the penalty. That is my failure.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Ben Protess, Jonah E. Bromwich and Maggie Haberman
Photographs by: Todd Heisler
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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