He was the “guy who would take a bullet” for Donald Trump.
“If somebody does something Mr Trump doesn’t like … If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished,” Michael Cohen told ABC News in 2011.
This loyalty would ultimately land Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, in prison and turn him from trusted aide to mortal enemy. And on Tuesday, in his first public testimony in a trial of the former US president, Cohen aimed for the jugular.
Cohen testified that, under Trump’s direction, he regularly inflated the valuation of Trump’s assets to “whatever number Mr Trump told us to”. If the judge overseeing the case believes Cohen, the consequences for Trump will be severe.
Last month, New York judge Arthur Engoron found Trump guilty of skewing his net worth to broker deals. Trump’s team has appealed the ruling but, if it is left standing, Trump will be barred from running his New York real estate business that made his name. If found guilty of additional fraud charges after the trial, Trump will have to pay civil penalties of at least $250m.
A lawyer who was raised in Long Island and the son of a Holocaust survivor, Cohen, 57, spent over a decade as one of Trump’s closest employees. He started working for Trump in 2006 and quickly became one of his most loyal employees. Many who were close to Trump saw that he often turned to Cohen to help clean up messes.
“Time and time again, I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds,” Cohen would eventually say at his own sentencing.
The tides for Cohen turned in 2018, when the FBI raided his Rockefeller Center office after a referral from special counsel Robert Mueller, then investigating possible connections between Trump and Russian election interference.
Cohen’s lawyer at the time called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary”. Trump accused his own justice department of perpetrating “a total witch hunt” – a term he adopted a year earlier – and described the FBI raid as “a whole new level of unfairness”.
But then Cohen lost his employment with Trump, and in August that year pleaded guilty to campaign finance, tax and bank fraud charges.
Cohen admitted to violating campaign finance laws relating to a $130,000 pay-off to adult film star Stormy Daniels at Trump’s direction “for the principal purpose of influencing” the 2016 election. Several months later, he pleaded guilty to lying to US congressional committees about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. He was given a three-year prison sentence, which he mostly served in home confinement, dealt a $50,000 fine and disbarred from practicing law in New York for life for his part in the Stormy Daniels affair.
Since Cohen was released in November 2021, he has been a vocal critic of Trump on social media and has openly been hyping up his upcoming appearance in court.
“If you want to get to Donald, the way to do it is through his bank book,” Cohen said last week. “It’s not by saying he’s a narcissistic sociopath or that he’s definitely not 6ft 3in and he’s not 215 pounds. You go after the wallet … Once you start hitting that bank book, that’s what really gets to him.”
In an interview earlier this month, Cohen claimed that everything that happened at the Trump Organization was with the “direction of, and ultimately signed off by, Donald J Trump”.
Cohen has previously predicted that the civil fraud trial could mean the end of Trump’s businesses in the state and city where he made his name and fortune if they are placed in receivership.
He has also said that he is concerned about testifying at the fraud trial because of Trump’s incendiary stoking of his Maga supporters. If not for the subpoena, he said he considered not even showing up.
“I don’t have to put my life on the line simply because Donald Trump cannot control himself and the courts are not controlling him,” he told MSNBC in September.
But as the big day approached, the ever-combative Cohen seemed to be warming up for the event.
“It’s been five years since we have seen one another,” Cohen told NBC News. “I look forward to the reunion. I hope Donald does as well.”
