Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, a self-described “pit bull” for Trump, is set to return to a courtroom in New York as the star witness in the former president’s $250 million civil fraud trial.
Mr. Cohen was initially scheduled to testify last week but postponed due to an ongoing medical issue.
Trump crowed to reporters that, “Cohen didn’t have the guts [to testify]”. Today Donald Trump will hear what Cohen has to say, and he may not be happy about it.
Cohen is the man who knows everything that Donald Trump wanted to keep secret.
He spent a decade in Trump’s inner circle guarding his secrets, but eventually, as a result of his own legal entanglements, he flipped and revealed what he knew of Trump’s alleged financial shenanigans.
It was Cohen’s 2019 congressional testimony claiming that Trump inflated his net worth that led New York attorney general Letitia James to open her investigation into the former president.
Cohen’s testimony was previewed as critical evidence during the state’s opening statement earlier this month.
“[Trump] wanted to be higher on the Forbes list, and he then said ‘I’m actually not worth $6 billion. I’m worth seven. In fact, I think it’s actually now worth eight, with everything that’s going on,'” Cohen said in a portion of his deposition that was played during the state’s opening statement.
“Allen and I were tasked with taking the assets, increasing each of those asset classes, in order to accommodate that $8 billion number,” Cohen said in his deposition, referring to then-Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges last year.
Cohen began working with Trump in 2007, eventually serving as a Trump Organization executive vice president, special counsel, and self-described legal “pit bull” for Trump.
“It means that if somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” Cohen told ABC News as far back as 2011. “If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”
Now the pit bull may have Donald Trump by the neck, possibly providing new incriminating evidence and corroborating the charges against his former master.
“It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed amongst the wealthiest people in Forbes, and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes,” Cohen testified before he reported to prison in 2019 before the House Oversight Committee that sparked James’ investigation into Trump’s finances.
“I look forward to testifying and correcting the record as to the multiple misstatements and responses by previous witnesses who stated … ‘I don’t recall.’ Unfortunately for them, I do,” Cohen told ABC News last week.
