LOYALIST HAS OFTEN TAKEN STEPS TO PROTECT TRUMP
2016 election to two women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Trump. The warrant executed Monday by the agents was striking in its breadth, according to people briefed on the matter. It also demanded documents related to the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump was heard making vulgar comments about women.
The investigation poses a legal threat to Cohen — and possibly his client. Few people closer to Trump have more knowledge of what the president has been involved with over the years.
“Michael Cohen would lay his life down for Donald Trump,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York political strategist who knows both men. “He is the ultimate Trump loyalist.”
On Twitter, Cohen regularly speaks up on his behalf and assails critics. On Sunday, the day before the FBI raid on his office, Cohen posted a quote about the importance of loyalty, adding: “I will always protect our @ POTUS.”
One such attempt at protection was his effort in July 2015 to quash a Daily Beast article about an old complaint that Trump’s first wife, Ivana, had made during their divorce, in which she claimed marital rape. She later withdrew the allegation. Cohen told a reporter for the website that marital rape was not legally possible and threatened the reporter if the story went forward.
Cohen’s efforts to silence pornographic actress Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, began as early as 2011, when he threatened legal action against a tabloid website that tried to publish her story. During the 2016 campaign, he says, he decided on his own to draw $130,000 from a home equity line of credit and pay Clifford to keep quiet, channeling the payment through a limited liability company.
Cohen has repeatedly denied any impropriety around the efforts to restrain Clifford from speaking out. And he has maintained that he was simply trying to deal with a potentially damaging story even though, he said, it was false.
What is more, Cohen has also insisted that he made the payment to Clifford without consulting Trump. Asked recently whether he knew about the payment, Trump told reporters he did not and referred questions to Cohen.
Still, Cohen’s claim that he struck a nondisclosure agreement with Clifford by himself, coupled with his effort to force her to comply with it, has exposed Trump to possibly having to testify about his knowledge of what his lawyer was up to. Clifford sued Trump last month, and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, has filed court papers seeking to depose the president.
“As we predicted and as the FBI raid shows,” Avenatti tweeted on Tuesday, “Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump are in a lot of trouble.”
In a text message Tuesday, Cohen said the investigation had been difficult.
“This has not been easy and has taken a terrible toll on me, my wife and children,” Cohen said.
Asked for comment on Wednesday, Stephen Ryan, a lawyer for Cohen, referred to his earlier description of the raids as “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” He has described the raids as an overreach by prosecutors into the privileged communications between Cohen and his client, Trump.
Another payment that the FBI is said to be investigating, for $150,000, was made by American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer. The tabloid business bought the rights to former Playboy model Karen Mcdougal’s story alleging an affair with Trump and never published it. David J. Pecker, now the chairman of AMI, was the chief executive of Hachette in the 1990s and for a time published Trump’s in-house hotel magazine.
Trump, who was from Queens, and the Bronx-born Pecker viewed themselves as outsiders looking in at an elitist Manhattan establishment. First at Hachette and, later, when he took over chairmanship of AMI, Pecker acquired a reputation for buying and burying stories in ways that protected associates like Trump.
Several people close to AMI and Cohen have said that the lawyer was in regular contact with company executives during the presidential campaign, when The Enquirer regularly heralded Trump and attacked his rivals. The New York Times reported in February that AMI had shared Mcdougal’s allegations with Cohen, although the company said it did so only as part of efforts to corroborate her story, which it said it could not do. Mcdougal’s lawyer at the time, Keith Davidson, and Cohen communicated around the time as she and AMI were finalizing their deal.
The agreements for McDougal’s and Clifford’s silence formed the basis of complaints by the public interest group Common Cause to the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission. The group claims the payments amounted to improper campaign contributions.
Trump’s long-held desire to build a Trump property in Russia found new life when Felix Sater, a friend of Cohen’s and a longtime associate of Trump’s, surfaced with a fresh proposal. He exchanged emails and phone calls with Cohen in late 2015 saying that he had a prospective developer lined up and that he could use his contacts in Russia to garner Kremlin support for the project.
Cohen wasted no time, arranging for Trump to sign a letter of intent for the Moscow tower deal. But the project seemed to stall in the coming months.
Rather than let it go, Cohen reached out directly to Putin’s press secretary in January 2016, asking for assistance. Later, he asserted that his effort was unsuccessful.
“I decided to abandon the proposal less than two weeks later for business reasons,” he said, “and do not recall any response to my email.”