Trump trial nears final phase with key witness: confidant-turned-nemesis Michael Cohen
CBC
Donald Trump's criminal trial has just heard its most salacious testimony. Now, with the trial nearing a conclusion, it will hear its most substantive.
With the prosecution hinting it might rest its case within days, it's about to call upon a man who went from being the former U.S. president's closest consigliere to his arch adversary.
It expects Michael Cohen to bolster the three pillars of its case: that Trump personally arranged hush-money payments to last week's witness, his paramour Stormy Daniels; that Trump was intentionally deceitful, attempting to cover it up; and that Trump did this to get elected to the White House.
We already know what Cohen will likely say when he's called to the witness stand as early as Monday. Because he's written it down.
Trump's former lawyer and personal counsel wrote his memoir from prison that charted the quasi-operatic collapse of their relationship, a falling-out so severe that his book starts with Cohen opining that Trump probably wishes he were assassinated.
"The President of the United States wanted me dead," Cohen writes in his memoir, Disloyal, in reaction to Trump's public references to Cohen as "a rat," an informant, starting in 2018.
"Or, let me say it the way Donald Trump would: He wouldn't mind if I were dead. That was how Trump talked. Like a mob boss, using language carefully calibrated to convey his desires ... [but] to insulate himself."
In that courtroom, they will meet again for the first time in years. Back in the very town where they originally met, in 2006: their home of New York City.
Cohen was enamoured with Trump. He'd read his book The Art of the Deal — twice. He deemed it a masterpiece, a term the book's actual ghostwriter wouldn't use.
Cohen was a graduate of what he's called perhaps the least-prestigious law school in America and made most of his income in the taxi business.
"I was incredulous, excited, overwhelmed," he said, describing the meeting where he, a tenant in one of Trump's buildings, was introduced by Donald Trump Jr. to his dad. "[He] was even larger in life than he appeared on television. His presence filled the room."
Trump needed a pit bull, not sophisticated legal expertise, and Cohen eagerly fit the role. Trump was enraged that board members of the local Trump World Tower wanted his name stripped off as they feared it damaged the property's value.
Cohen advocated, and won, on Trump's behalf. And that was the beginning of a decade-long relationship. Cohen called Trump a paternal figure and said he wound up closer to Trump than anyone beyond his immediate family.
In retrospect, he says, Trump lied to him within seconds of their first meeting — an easily provable lie about a real estate valuation. In refusing to call him on it, Cohen says, he immediately set a pattern that would define their relationship.
