Michael Cohen faced Donald Trump for the first time in five years at his Manhattan fraud trial Tuesday — where he told a judge in hotly-anticipated testimony that he ballooned his boss’s net worth to “whatever number” he wanted and faced a grilling from the former president’s lawyers about his history of lies.
Trump’s fixer-turned-foe, who used to say he’d “take a bullet” for his boss, took the stand shortly after noon in state Attorney General Tish James’ case against Trump and his adult children and top company lieutenants as the trial entered its fourth week in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Attending his trial for a sixth time, Trump sat back in his chair with his arms crossed, looking directly at his former right-hand man once he took his seat in the witness box.
The once-devoted Trump loyalist testified that Trump ordered him to increase the value of his assets based on “arbitrarily elected” numbers when presented with a copy of Trump’s 2011 financial statement. He told the court that his and convicted finance chief Allen Weisselberg’s jobs were “to reverse-engineer” Trump Organization asset classes to reach figures Trump wanted.
“I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets, based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected,” Cohen said, adding that he also worked on Trump’s statements from 2012 through 2015.
When AG lawyer Colleen Faherty asked Cohen what he altered the values to, he said, “Whatever number Mr. Trump told us to.”
Cohen said he was in a “gang of four” at the Trump Org — with execs Weisselberg, Rob Lieberman, and Matthew Calamari — tasked with overseeing Trump’s insurance program, its policy buying decisions, claims management, and risk protection protocols. He said Trump’s adult kids were in the know about his financial statements, providing data from various ventures they oversaw at the company.
Cohen said Trump’s marking-up process, which he worked on with Weisselberg, typically started with a phone call from his assistant, Rhona Graff, beckoning him to his desk at Trump Tower.
“I would come into the office,” Cohen said, adding that Weisselberg would go with him if not already there. “And the topic was the statement of financial condition. He would look at the total assets, and he would say, ‘I’m actually not worth $4.5 billion, I’m really worth more — like six.’ Okay. He would then direct Allen and I to go back to Allen’s office and return after we achieved the desired goal.”
Cohen said that Trump netted favorable premiums from insurance companies by falsely assigning “extremely” high values to his properties and low liabilities.
“[Trump was] the only one who could accept them,” Cohen said of the fraudulent numbers.
During another portion of his testimony, Cohen told the court Trump lied about his net worth by billions to try and secure a loan to buy the Buffalo Bills in 2014 for $1 billion. In trying to broker the sale, Trump told Morgan Stanley he was worth more than $8 billion — when the AG says he was really worth $2.3 billion.
In a fiery cross-examination, Trump lawyer Alina Habba zeroed in on Cohen’s record of lying. On direct, he denied committing tax evasion despite pleading guilty to it.
“You are admitting that you lied to Judge Pauley. Do you understand that, Mr. Cohen?”
“I’ve already stated that, yes.”
Cohen, who last saw Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2018 before he pleaded guilty and went to prison for arranging payoffs to porn star Stormy Daniels, tax evasion, and an assortment of unrelated crimes, was executive VP at the Trump Org and Trump’s “special counsel” for a decade, becoming Trump’s personal lawyer when he was elected president. He’s described himself overall as Trump’s fixer.
“Whatever issues he had, whatever created ire for him, he would bring it to me in order to resolve it,” Cohen said shortly after taking the stand.
After serving as Trump’s chief mouthpiece for a decade, Cohen changed his tune shortly after the feds raided his Manhattan residences in the spring of 2018.
In the ensuing months, Trump’s once-fiercely protective pitbull lawyer started spilling to authorities about how his boss ran his business and his presidential campaign. After previously lying for him under oath, Cohen that August told the feds he paid off women Trump slept with on his orders to silence them and secure him the White House, implicating the then-president as “Individual-1.”
The same summer, he began cooperating in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, later pleading guilty to lying to Congress about his dealings with the Kremlin and when negotiations to develop a Trump Hotel in Moscow stopped in 2016 as Trump sought the presidency.
Cohen served three years in custody for the hush money payoffs and other financial crimes in what late Manhattan federal court Judge William Pauley described as “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct.”
Before he went upstate, his February 2019 testimony before the House Oversight Committee about Trump’s habit of manipulating the value of his assets sparked James’ investigation, leading to the case now on trial. He was disbarred the same month.
Judge Arthur Engoron, in a pretrial ruling that stripped Trump, Weisselberg, and their co-defendants of their New York business licenses, found they committed fraud by using the fraudulent calculations — off by billions — in banking agreements and loan applications from 2014 to the final year of Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s fighting the remaining six claims at the trial set to last through December and still stands to lose $250 million and the power to run a company in the state where he crafted the billionaire businessman image he sold to voters.
The trial is one of many legal woes facing the former president, including 91 felonies in four criminal cases and a slew of lawsuits. In a major blow, his former campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis flipped in his Georgia case Tuesday, admitting her role in the alleged sprawling effort to steal the 2020 election. She followed two other one-time Trump lawyers to flip this week, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro.
In more bad news for Trump, ABC reported later Tuesday that his former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has been granted immunity in special counsel Jack Smith’s case into Trump and his allies’ alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Outside the courtroom, a deflated sounding Trump lambasted his once-trusted consigliere as a “disgraced felon” and said he wasn’t worried about his testimony.
“I haven’t seen him in years,” Trump said. “You know his record. It’s a horrible one. All you have to do is ask the Southern District of York.”
Cohen heeded the judge’s words and didn’t speak to reporters about his testimony, keeping it simple with a quip.
“Heck of a reunion!” Cohen said.
