Cohen says he’d lie, bully and threaten people for Trump
More than six years after his conviction for doing Donald Trump’s dirty work – cementing a bitter rivalry with the man he once said he’d “take a bullet” for – Michael Cohen testified Monday at the former president’s hush money trial.
Prosecutors called Trump’s former personal lawyer to the stand as the Manhattan Supreme Court trial passes the monthlong mark.
“Just be prepared, there’s gonna be a lot of women coming forward,” Cohen, then a surrogate on Trump’s campaign, said the future president warned him as he embarked on his 2016 run for the White House.
The lawyer testified about the August 2015 Trump tower meeting where Cohen, Trump and supermarket tabloid publisher David Pecker allegedly hatched a plan to boost Trump’s candidacy by planting positive stories about Trump and suppressing negative ones.
“What was discussed is the power of the National Enquirer in terms of it being located at the cash register of so many supermarkets and bodegas – that if we could place positive stories about Mr. Trump that would be beneficial, that if we could place negative stories about some of the other candid, that would also be beneficial,” Cohen testified.
Cohen walked the jury through how he allegedly carried out that scheme and how Trump told him to “handle” a story from a Trump Tower doorman that he’d had a love child, and how he believed Playboy model Karen McDou
gal’s story of their nearly yearlong affair would have a “significant” impact on the campaign.
Cohen learned of McDougal’s claims in the summer of 2016 from American Media Inc., the Enquirer’s parent company, and told Trump.
“I went to the office, knocked on it,” Cohen recalled in court. “Boss, I gotta talk to you … went in, talked to him about what I had just learned. I asked him if he knew who Karen McDougal was …
“His response was, ‘She’s really beautiful.’ I said, ‘OK, but there’s a story that’s right now being shopped.”
The former fixer, who said that label was “fair,” testified that he’d lie, bully people and sometimes take a threatening tone – all to carry out his business for Trump.
Trump offered Cohen a job as his executive vice president and special counsel in 2007, where he would “only answer to him and I [would] work on issues that were of concern to him,” he said in response to questions from Hoffinger.
They communicated every day, several times a day in person or by phone. Trump didn’t use email: “He knows too many people who have gone down as a direct result of having emails that prosecutors can use in a case,” Cohen said in court.
Trump’s lawyer took notes on a pad of paper when Cohen testified that he sometimes lied when it seemed necessary: “I wanted to accomplish the task. The only thing that was on my mind was to accomplish a task to make him happy.”
Cohen said he felt “on top of the world” one time when Trump told him his work was “fantastic” and “great.”
“It was an amazing experience in many, many ways,” he said of working for the former president.
“There were great times; there were less than great times. But for the most part, I enjoyed the responsibility that was given to me.”
Cohen, 57, served three years in federal custody – half of it behind bars upstate – after pleading guilty in 2018 to paying off porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 11 days before the 2016 election at Trump’s direction in violation of campaign finance laws, lying to Congress about Trump’s business dealings with Moscow, and other crimes.
The 34 felony counts of falsification of business records facing Trump, 77, are each tied to his alleged reimbursement to Cohen in 2017, which prosecutors say came as the final stage of a scheme to influence the presidential election devised at the August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower attended by Trump, Cohen and Pecker.