WASHINGTON – The addresses and phone numbers of family members of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen were published on a doxing website after presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies related to a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 elections.
Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, played a key role in the plot to keep adult film actress Stormy Daniels quiet during the 2016 election and testified against Trump at trial. According to Cohen, Trump said revealing Daniels’ story about a previous affair would be a “total disaster” and “catastrophic” for his 2016 campaign.
Trump denied the affair but was convicted of falsifying business records related to Cohen’s secret payment to prevent Daniels from telling her story. “What I was doing was at the direction and for the benefit of Mr. Trump,” Cohen, who served time in prison, said at trial.
The phone numbers and addresses of Cohen’s wife and children were published Monday morning on a website that has been used to target other figures involved in Trump’s various legal matters, according to Advance Democracy, a group non-profit research firm.
“What sad times we are living in when people resort to this kind of doxxing stupidity to redress their grievances,” Cohen said in a statement to NBC News about attempts to release his family’s personal information.
Trump supporters attempted to dox jurors last week following the former president’s conviction, and also attacked prosecutors and the judge in the case with threats. During the trial, the mother of a former police officer who was nearly killed on January 6, 2021, by protesters who believed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, was reprimanded after her son called Trump “an authoritarian” with “a fetish for violence”.
“Our investigators regularly look for potential threats and instigations of political violence,” said Daniel J. Jones, president of Advance Democracy, in a statement. “During our most recent scan, we identified online personal details – doxxing – of Michael Cohen, his wife and their children. The individual who shared the information online, on a website known for doxxing, likely intended to harm Cohen – by providing these personal details about the Cohen family in the context of calling Cohen a ‘lying bastard’ and identifying him as someone who ‘betrayed Trump,’ presumably for testifying for the prosecution in former President Trump’s criminal trial in New York.”
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