What Michael Cohen Knows

So Much Crime, So Little Time

Michael Cohen is the third act in the star triad of witnesses at Donald Trump’s first felony trial, and the link that connected the schemes. He negotiated the deal that Stormy Daniels talked about and he organized the National Enquirer’s catch and kill maneuver to hide Trump’s affair with a Playboy model. 

Prosecutors only needed Cohen to talk about that one job he did for the man he called The Boss. But Cohen knows so much more, and it’s a shame he couldn’t be fully debriefed.  Prosecutors in New York and Washington have neither the will nor resources to look into all the Trump criming. The epic mismatch between billionaire-subsidized lawyers and accountants behind lifetime shady business practices and the limits of publicly financed civil servants playing by the rules is why authorities in Washington, Georgia, and Florida took so long to get their act together in the face of blatant lawbreaking. 

It is why the American body politic has been unable so far to rid itself of the MAGA virus. 

Cohen’s testimony gave attentive court watchers a glimpse into the Trump business demimonde. The $130,000 payoff to a porn star was all in a day’s work and, as black bag jobs go, probably one of the less arduous. 

Cohen is a little grayer, a little more down at the mouth, than he was in his heyday when he was channeling The Boss, threatening and browbeating inconvenient women, journalists and creditors into submission. 

Trump first noticed Cohen when, as a Trump property condo owner and board member, the young lawyer fended off some pesky board members who were making trouble for Mr. Trump. Trump then asked Cohen to help him out with a “quite lengthy” case file related to one of his many bankruptcies. Cohen eagerly dove in, but when he finished and asked to be paid for this service, Trump balked. The businessman instead offered him a salaried job to report directly to him. And he warned Cohen that if he asked for his fee again, he’d be fired “on day one.” 

Cohen didn’t mind. He had his Dream Job. His first project was to try to get Trump involved in building a golf course over a mountain of New Jersey garbage. The “landfill mediation project” ultimately didn’t happen because the state decided not to invest in it. (Many of Trump’s projects have been publicly capitalized - as I’ve written before, he learned how to slurp the public trough from his father.)

The mountain of garbage underneath the golf course is, though, a fine metaphor for the Trump Organization. The enterprise was ever built on shady practice, and Cohen, flattered by the trust The Boss put in him, was eager to get down and dirty.. 

According to testimony prosecutors elicited, Cohen’s main job was helping The Boss save money by chiseling vendors and creditors. Whether lawyers, contractors, or service providers, Trump never paid full price. His business method was straightforward: to order services, products or work and then refuse to pay. 

Apparently the MAGA followers like this about their man of the people. Trump has been bragging about his shaft-the-little-guy strategy from the beginning of his political career. In his second Republican primary debate in 2015 he crowed about his Atlantic City bankruptcy debacle, as if it were a success. "Atlantic City is a disaster. And I did great in Atlantic City. I knew when to get out. My timing was great.” He claimed his multiple Chapter 11 filings were smart moves undertaken to ditch an American city that was “cratering.” 

Everyone in the mid-Atlantic region knew the man routinely failed to pay his bills. Atlantic City is still today home to many small vendors ruined by Trump’s business style.

Cohen was an integral part of this strategy. He testified that he would routinely “renegotiate” bills. Among his jobs, he crafted a plan to stiff vendors owed money by the legendary scam that was Trump University. Trump U, you’ll recall, was a pyramid scheme foisted on desperate Americans rendered jobless or houseless after the 2008 financial crash. “Students” were lured in by promises of learning the great businessman’s financial wizardry, upsold on higher levels of classes that were supposed to lead ultimately to the secrets of success. They “graduated” tens of thousands of dollars poorer, with a few three-ring binders of management platitudes and business porn cliches and a photo of themselves standing beside a life-size cardboard thumbs-upping Trump snapped in a dingy Marriott conference room. 

Prosecutors asked Cohen to briefly explain how he “renegotiated” the Trump U fiasco. Fifty vendors were unpaid, he said, and Donald had no intention of paying. “There was a sum certain in the bank,” Cohen said, about $2 million. “Unfortunately the bills far exceeded that. But Trump was not going to fund that balance.” 

Cohen decided to offer the vendors 20 percent of what they were owed. Forty-eight of them took the deal, and the two that refused were never paid. (Trump later agreed to fork over $25 million to settle a New York state civil fraud case against him on behalf of duped “students” after he got elected in 2016.)

Cohen testified that Trump Organization executive Allen Weisselberg, now spending a piece of his golden years in prison for doing funny-money work for The Boss, was the one who suggested that they camouflage cash to Stormy through a golf tournament or “somebody who was having a family affair,” such as a wedding or bar mitzvah. Eventually, Cohen testified, they came up with the arrangement that forms the basis for the charges of falsifying business records at the heart of the trial. Cohen would pay Stormy’s lawyer from his own accounts, and bill the Trump Organization for services. 

“Once I received the money back from Mr. Trump, I would deposit it and no one would be the wiser,” Mr. Cohen said.

Trump wanted Cohen to be a Roy Cohn, the ruthless mob lawyer and Joe McCarthy commie-hunter who served the Trump family. Cohn was closeted gay, drug-addicted, straight out of fascist central casting. He successfully defended the Trump company against federal charges of refusing to rent to African Americans and taught Boy Trump how to bend law to the breaking point. 

Cohen, with his puppy dog eyes and fifth tier law degree and seedy taxi medallion business, was never going to measure up to that cenobite. He could play the heavy with journalists and women who had become inconvenient for The Boss, but his form of menace lacked the malevolent efficiency of a true killer. 

In fact, Cohen had already failed to eradicate the threat of Stormy Daniels. Five years prior to the campaign, when she told her story to In Touch magazine, Cohen threatened the tabloid with legal action, and the editors killed the story. But Stormy popped up again weeks before the election, threatening to talk. 

“I thought you had this under control,” Trump fumed. Cohen testified that at this point Stormy was a “catastrophic” threat to the election, an incoming hurricane of bad press that no black marker on a map of the USA could fake-divert. 

Short of putting her in cement boots, the only solution was cash. 

“Just do it,” Trump said, Cohen testified. 

Trump’s defenders have claimed he paid off Stormy because he was worried about Melania’s feelings. Cohen dispatched this canard right away. "How long do you think I'm going to be on the market for?" he testified Trump said, during a discussion of whether Melania would leave him over the revelations. 

"He wasn't thinking about Melania. This was all about the campaign." Trump told him: “Just get past the election, because if I win, it will have no relevance, and if I lose, I don't even care." 

The Trump as family-man front is and always has been a joke, of course, and now the jury knows it even if his MAGA fans don’t. Stormy last week testified that he told her not to worry about an envious wife as they didn’t sleep in the same bed. 

Melania didn’t seem all that bothered about the fiascos in private. Cohen even gave her credit for helping the team’s sex scandal messaging strategy, including suggesting the phrase “locker-room talk” to explain the hot mic “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment. 

“Total disaster,” Cohen quoted Trump saying. “Women will hate me. Guys, they think it’s cool, but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.”

A significant number of women, though, did not and still don’t hate Trump. His appeal remains one of the great mysteries of human behavior, right up there with Freud’s What do Women Want? Apparently some American women do want Donald Trump. 

At a Trump Rally on the Jersey shore this weekend, Defendant Trump spewed his standard word salad of hate at migrants, prosecutors, judges, blamed Biden for his legal troubles, led the crowd in chants of “bullshit!” and slurred his words. Enthusiastic MAGA women turned out in force, including a female local official who claimed that a hundred thousand people came to the rally. (Drone images of the crowd suggest that was a lie.) A slice of the scene in the Wapo: one vendor in a blue sweatshirt that said “TRUMP STRONG” with red, white and blue rhinestone hoops to match, selling a white sweatshirt emblazoned with “This Jersey girl loves Trump, get over it” to another woman. 

The Washington Post talked to some of these female fans. Janet Spica, 64, called the trial a “waste of taxpayer dollars” and said she receives news about the trial through “either word of mouth or on the internet.” Another woman, Liz Crescibene, 55, drove three hours to see Trump for the third time, called the trial “a witch hunt” and said “I’m still waiting to see the evidence.”

Trump reportedly sat through Cohen’s testimony with his eyes closed, at least while prosecutors led his former lawyer through their side of the case. Meanwhile, a parade of MAGA politicians, from Ohio’s Sen, J.D. Vance to Alabama Sen Tommy Tiuberville and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Porn App., have skulked over to the scene of the trial. Some are eerily dressed just like their Dear Leader in red ties and blue suits, and have taken his place (as he is under threat of jail for contempt of court) trashing the judge and his family and blaming the trial on Joe Biden. 

This new batch of loyal consiglieri apparently don’t notice or care that the original consigliere on the witness stand has, like so many other Trumpers reduced to roadkill (Weisselberg, Giuliani, Eastman, Ellison, and the Kraken lady, to name a few), paid dearly for their devotion. 

Cohen has been convicted and imprisoned, and professionally destroyed. During the pandemic summer of 2020, Bill Barr’s Justice Department threw him back into prison for talking to the media and preparing to publish his book about his time with Trump. A federal judge a few months later ruled that the move violated Cohen’s First Amendment Rights. 

That kind of revenge imprisonment for speaking out will, of course, become common practice in a Trump 2.0 Justice Department operated by a weaponized executive branch bent on revenge for the Dear Leader.