How one-time Donald Trump fixer Michael Cohen helped get the former president convicted
Michael Cohen once said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump. But on Thursday, Trump was on felony charges based largely on the onetime loyal fixer's testimony against his former boss. Over four days earlier this month, Cohen took the witness stand as the star prosecution witness in the first-ever criminal trial of a U.S. president, past or present. He testified that Trump directed him to pay off a porn star before the 2016 election, and then approved a plan to falsify business records to cover it up.
The testimony in New York state court in Manhattan marked the culmination of a 15-year arc from a lawyer and fixer for the businessman-turned-politician to an outspoken antagonist.
«I'm the guy who would take a bullet for the president,» Cohen told Vanity Fair in 2017. Under cross-examination by Trump defense lawyer Todd Blanche at the New York trial, Cohen acknowledged expressing admiration for Trump in the past.
«I was knee-deep into the cult of Donald Trump,» Cohen, a top executive at Trump's real estate company before becoming his lawyer, testified on May 14.
The case against Trump stems from Cohen's $130,000 payment adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election for her silence about a sexual encounter she alleges to have had with Trump a decade earlier.
Now 57, Cohen spent more than a year in prison for crimes including a violation of federal election campaign finance laws with the payment to Daniels. In 2020 he published a book about
