Former President Donald Trump’s lawyer-turned-accuser, Michael Cohen, says the guilty verdict against his former boss is about “accountability” and he’s swiping back at the defense attorney who dubbed him the “greatest liar of all time” during the trial.

Mr. Cohen, speaking to MSNBC late Thursday, said the New York hush money case does not carry the same weight as federal cases against Mr. Trump that involve national secrets and efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. And he would have liked to see Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg bring the case a year earlier.

But Mr. Cohen, who served as the prosecution’s star witness, called it a “legitimate” case.

“It’s an important case. It’s a relevant case. It is an illegal act that any one of us would have already been prosecuted for,” he told host Rachel Maddow.

Mr. Cohen was the central figure in the trial against Mr. Trump, who was found guilty Thursday of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison.

“It’s accountability. It’s exactly what America needs right now,” Mr. Cohen said. “We need for accountability to be had by all those that break the law. Because, as we like to continuously state, no one is above the law, and today’s verdict demonstrates that.”

Prosecutors successfully argued that Mr. Trump, using Mr. Cohen, paid hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels near the 2016 election to bury the news of a purported affair and criminally concealed the payment through reimbursement checks to Mr. Cohen in 2017, logging them as payments for legal services.

Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump approved the plan, which prosecutors said amounted to a conspiracy against 2016 voters.

Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, worked to eviscerate Mr. Cohen’s credibility on the witness stand. He pointed to Mr. Cohen’s lies to Congress and got the witness to admit he pilfered $30,000 from the Trump Organization instead of paying it forward to a vendor.

In his closing argument, Mr. Blanche dubbed Mr. Cohen the “GLOAT,” or greatest liar of all time.

“The term ‘GLOAT,’ it’s a Donald Trump fourth-grade playground bullying type of tactic,” Mr. Cohen said. “I was going to call [Mr. Blanche] a ‘SLOAT,’ which is the ‘stupidest lawyer of all time.’”

• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.