NEW YORK — He once said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump. Now, Michael Cohen is prosecutors’ biggest piece of legal ammunition in the former president’s secret trial.
But if the mediator-turned-Trump-foe is prepared to offer jurors this week an insider’s view of the negotiations at the heart of prosecutors’ case, he is also challenging a key witness.
There is his tortured history with Trump, for whom he served as personal lawyer and troubleshooter until his practices were the subject of federal investigation. That led to criminal convictions and Cohen’s arrest, but no charges against Trump, then in the White House.
Cohen, who is expected to take the stand on Monday, can address the jury as someone who has frankly considered his own mistakes and paid for them with his freedom. But jurors will likely also know that the now-disbarred lawyer not only pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and a bench, but also recently stated under oath that he was not truthful, even in admitting some of those falsehoods.
And there’s Cohen’s new persona — and podcasts, books and social media posts — as an unrelenting and sometimes rude critic of Trump.
As Trump’s trial began, prosecutors took pains to portray Cohen as just one piece of their evidence against Trump, telling jurors that corroboration would come through other witnesses, documents and the former president’s own recorded words. But Trump and his lawyers attacked Cohen as a self-confessed liar and a criminal who now makes a living destroying his former boss.
“What the defense will want the jury to focus on is the fact that he is a liar” with a tainted past and an irritable streak, said Richard Serafini, a Florida criminal defense attorney and former Manhattan and federal prosecutor. .
“What the prosecution will want to focus on is ‘everything he says is corroborated – you don’t have to like him,’” Serafini added. “And No. 2, this is the guy Trump picked.”
Cohen’s introduction to Trump in the early 2000s was a classic New York real estate story: Cohen was a board member of a condominium in a Trump building and became involved, on Trump’s side, in a dispute between residents and administration. The tycoon soon brought Cohen into his company.
Cohen, who declined to comment for this story, has had an eclectic career that spanned from practicing personal injury law to operating a fleet of taxis with his father-in-law. Ultimately, he served as Trump’s lawyer and shark-toothed loyalist.
He worked on some efforts to close deals, but also spent much of his time threatening lawsuits, berating reporters and maneuvering to neutralize potential damage to his boss’s reputation, according to congressional testimony Cohen gave after breaking with Trump in 2018. The break occurred after the FBI raided the house and Cohen’s office and Trump began to distance itself from the lawyer.
Cohen soon told a federal court that he helped candidate Trump use the National Enquirer tabloid as a kind of internal organ that flattered him, tried to flatten his opponents and suppressed sordid allegations about his personal life by buying stories or flagging them to Cohen for purchase. Trump says all the stories were false.
Those deals, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office portrays as a multifaceted scheme to hide information from voters, are now under a microscope in Trump’s hush money trial. He pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide reimbursements to Cohen for paying porn performer Stormy Daniels. She alleged a 2006 sexual encounter with the married Trump, which the former president denied.
Other witnesses testified about the secret negotiations, but Cohen remains key to unraveling a case that centers on how Trump’s company compensated him for his role in the Daniels bounty.
Trump’s defense maintains that Cohen was paid for legal work, not a cover-up, and that there was nothing illegal about the deals he facilitated with Daniels and others.
In criminal trials, many witnesses come to the stand with their own criminal records, relationships with defendants, contradictory previous statements, or anything else that could affect their credibility.
Cohen has a specific set of baggage.
On the stand, he will need to explain his previous rejections of key aspects of the silent agreements and convince jurors that this time he is telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Still in Trump’s camp when the Daniels deal came to light, he initially told The New York Times that he had not been reimbursed, later acknowledging the refund — as did Trump, who had previously said he didn’t even know about Daniels’ payment. .
Then, in the course of two federal guilty pleas, Cohen admitted to tax evasion, orchestrating illegal campaign contributions in the form of hush money payments and lying to Congress about his work on a possible Trump real estate project in Moscow. He also pleaded guilty to signing a home loan application that understated his financial responsibilities.
While many types of convictions can be used to question a witness’s credibility, when crimes involve dishonesty, “there’s a treasure trove of things for an interrogator,” Serafini said.
Additionally, Cohen raised new questions about his credibility when he testified last fall in Trump’s civil fraud trial. During an angry interrogation — he responded to some questions with a legal “objection” or “question and answer” — Cohen insisted that he was not entirely guilty of tax evasion or false loan application. deceased federal judge who accepted his appeal.
The judge in the fraud trial found Cohen’s testimony credible, noting that it was corroborated by other evidence. But a federal judge suggested that Cohen committed perjury in his testimony or his guilty plea.
Since splitting with Trump, Cohen has confronted the lies of his past head-on. The title of his podcast – “Mea Culpa” – points to a reckoning with his crimes, and he acknowledged in the preface to his 2020 memoir that some people see him as “the least reliable narrator on the planet”.
At his 2018 sentencing, he said his “blind loyalty” to Trump made him feel it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds, rather than listening to my own inner voice and moral compass.” Outside the courtroom, he presented himself as an avatar of anti-Trump sentiment. In social media salvos as the trial began, Cohen used a scatological nickname for Trump, provoking him to “keep whining and crying and violating the gag order, you petulant defendant!” and commented bitterly on his defense.
The posts could give Trump’s lawyers reason to paint Cohen as an agenda-driven witness seeking revenge. In a nod to this vulnerability, Cohen published two days after opening statements that he would stop commenting on Trump until after he testified, “out of respect” for the judge and prosecutors.
However, in a live TikTok last week, Cohen wore a shirt featuring a Trump-like figure with his hands cuffed, behind bars. After Trump’s lawyers complained, Judge Juan M. Merchan urged prosecutors on Friday to tell Cohen that the court was asking him to make no further statements about the case or about Trump.
For Jeremy Saland, a New York criminal defense lawyer and former Manhattan prosecutor, Cohen’s record does not present a major obstacle for prosecutors.
“Cohen’s problem is: He won’t shut up,” Saland said. “He just constantly attacks his own credibility.”
Prosecutors will need to persuade Cohen to be frank, acknowledge his past mistakes and control his out-of-control comments, Saland said, or the case could become “the Michael Cohen show.”
In fact, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche used his opening statement to hammer home Cohen’s “obsession” with Trump and his admitted past under oath.
“You cannot make a serious decision about President Trump by trusting the words of Michael Cohen,” Blanche told jurors.
But prosecutor Matthew Colangelo characterized Cohen as someone who made “mistakes,” telling jurors they might believe him anyway.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have pointed to comments Trump made about Cohen and others to accuse him of multiple violations of a gag order that bars him from commenting on witnesses, jurors and some other people connected to the case. The judge found Trump in contempt, fined him a total of $10,000 and warned that prison could follow if he violated the order again.
Prosecutors also did not shy away from offering testimony about Cohen’s combative personality. A banker testified that Cohen was seen as a “defiant” client who insisted everything was urgent. Daniels’ former lawyer, Keith Davidson, described his first phone call with Cohen as a screaming “barrage of insults, innuendos and allegations.”
While such episodes may not be flattering to Cohen, extracting them could be a way for prosecutors to subtly indicate that he is not his teammate but simply a person with information, said John Fishwick Jr., a former U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia. .
“It’s a way of trying to build his credibility while you distance yourself from him,” he suggested.
When Cohen takes the stand, prosecutors would be wise to address his troubled past before defense lawyers, said Anna Cominsky, a professor at New York Law School. She taught a course with Bragg before he became district attorney, but offered comments as a legal observer rather than as someone familiar with his office’s strategy.
“I imagine in his closing arguments,” Cominsky said, “that the prosecutor will look directly at the jury and say, ‘This isn’t a perfect witness, but none of us are.’”
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Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Michael R. Sisak and Jake Offenhartz in New York contributed to this report.
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