Michael Cohen, the former Trump fixer who is the key witness in former President Donald Trump’s criminal hush money case in New York, faced cross-examination Tuesday, with Trump attorneys quick to attack him and make the case the former Trump attorney cannot be trusted.
Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen testified that the Trump Organization falsely labeled former ... [+]
Cohen, a former personal injury attorney-turned Trump fixer who once said he would “take a bullet” for Trump, became distant with the then-president following a criminal investigation in 2018 into bank fraud and campaign finance violations.
Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts in August 2018, including charges of causing an unlawful campaign contribution, stemming from a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to hide an alleged affair with Trump before the 2016 presidential election.
Among the other charges were five counts of tax evasion and one count of false statements to a bank, over a scheme to hide more than $4 million in personal income from the Internal Revenue Service as well as a false report on a $500,000 home loan.
He was sentenced in December 2018 to three years in prison, and fined $50,000—Cohen was released from prison in November 2021, two-and-a-half years into his prison sentence.
Defense attorneys grilled Cohen in cross-examination Tuesday in Trump’s criminal hush money trial, where Trump faces 34 felony charges of falsifying business records over a reimbursement payment to Cohen for the hush money payment to Daniels. During his testimony, Cohen said he sent invoices to the Trump Organization for reimbursement checks, claiming they were falsely labeled as legal services, a key accusation made by prosecutors.
Analysts believe defense attorneys in the case will make Cohen’s guilty plea of lying to Congress a central part of their bid to make the case to the jury that Cohen cannot be trusted. During cross-examination, however, Trump attorney Todd Blanche immediately questioned Cohen on whether he took to TikTok before the trial, calling Blanche a “crying little s**t,” according to a transcription by The New York Times—Cohen said the post “sounds like something [he]
Cohen also pleaded guilty in a separate case in 2018 to lying to Congress following a letter he sent to the House and Senate intelligence committees in which he said a since-abandoned Trump real estate project in Moscow had been aborted years before it was actually dropped.