| Michael Cohen Walked Right into Trump’s Trap |
| Cohen was the key witness in the Manhattan criminal case against Trump. Now he’s sucking up to the president again and undermining the conviction. |
| Michael Cohen’s reunion with Donald Trump in an interview last week has been treated as an object of political amusement, and with good reason. The former lawyer/fixer for the president was obsequious and desperate for his old boss’s approval, but Trump barely played along. It was also the latest in a decade’s worth of striking reversals for Cohen — a diehard Trump loyalist who later turned on the president, railed against him for years, and then served as the key witness in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office prosecution against Trump. |
| The interview, however, was also a major development in the criminal case itself, and it significantly undermines the conviction both legally and politically. Cohen’s about-face creates a new opportunity for Trump, new legal risks for Cohen, and a fresh headache for the DA’s office. |
| Cohen had been building up to his reconciliation with Trump for months. In January, he wrote an essay in which he claimed that he “felt pressured and coerced” by Manhattan prosecutors and lawyers from the New York Attorney General’s Office “to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire to build the cases against and secure a judgment and convictions against President Trump.” |
| According to Cohen, prosecutors “were interested only in testimony from me that would enable them to convict President Trump.” “When my testimony was insufficient for a point the prosecution sought to make,” he continued, “prosecutors frequently asked inappropriate leading questions to elicit answers that supported their narrative.” That last bit lined up with accounts I heard from within the office in 2023. |
| It’s one thing for a prosecutor to pose leading questions, but it’s another entirely for a witness to claim that he was “pressured and coerced” to support the government’s theory of the case. That is about as close as you can get to claiming that you lied on the stand without saying explicitly that you are recanting your testimony — a development that, in extreme cases, can force prosecutors to move to vacate the underlying conviction and dismiss the case altogether. |
| Trump, of course, understands this, which is why he appears to have laid a trap for Cohen in the middle of their interview. |
| “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Trump told Cohen at one point, “and that’s a big thing that you did.” Midway through Trump’s statement, Cohen said “yeah.” He accepted Trump’s characterization and moved on. |
| To understand why this matters, it’s helpful to recall that Cohen was the key witness — and the only direct evidence — that prosecutors offered to establish one of the essential elements of the case. Trump was charged with falsifying his company’s internal business records in connection with hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election. Among other things, prosecutors had to prove to the jury that Trump falsified those records with the intent to conceal “another crime,” like election or tax crimes. |
| At the trial, Cohen testified that Trump was fully aware of the plan to pay off Daniels and knew that the convoluted structure of the payoff was designed to conceal the commission of “another crime” of some sort. He claimed that he had conversations with Trump on these points. |
| There were reasons to seriously question this account even at the time. Cohen was already a serial, unrepentant liar who had often lied in legal proceedings to advance his own interests. He lied to Congress, to the Justice Department, to his bank, and to the IRS. Cohen claimed that he lied to the federal judge who took his guilty plea on tax fraud charges — a point that he reiterated when he testified in the state AG’s civil fraud case against Trump. Cohen also appeared to lie on the stand during the criminal trial itself about a conversation that he claimed to have with Trump. |
| On top of all this, there was another readily available theory of the case: that Cohen committed the crimes, that Trump relied on Cohen as his lawyer to deal with the legal implications of the transaction and internal documentation, and that Cohen was implicating Trump to get back at him for not pardoning him during Trump’s first term. |
| Cohen’s remarkable about-face has several potential legal and political implications. For starters, although Trump’s case is already on appeal, will his lawyers move to vacate the conviction in light of Cohen’s recent comments? |
| That could be difficult given the very deferential standard of review on appeal, which requires the court to view the evidence in the light most favorable to the government. The government could argue that the jury could have convicted Trump based purely on circumstantial evidence — his involvement in the mechanics of the payments and his knowledge about how they were being recorded in his company’s books — even though, as a practical matter, it’s hard to believe that they would have. |
| In fact, it’s doubtful that the DA’s office would have charged the case at all without Cohen as their key witness. No sane prosecutor would want to use someone with as much baggage as Cohen as the key witness at a trial unless they thought it was absolutely necessary to secure a conviction. |
| This puts the DA’s office in a difficult position. Even if they can successfully defend the conviction on appeal, what are they going to do about Cohen? He has strongly implied that he perjured himself on the stand. Will they prosecute him over it? (The office did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Cohen.) |
| That seems unlikely, but whatever may happen, there is now another cloud hanging over the conviction in a case that was very shaky and very questionable from the start. |
| I’ve said before that I would not have voted to convict Trump if I had been on the jury. Cohen’s credibility problems and his testimony on the stand were, even at the time, enough for me to question the strength of the evidence and the wisdom of bringing the case in the first place. Many people were hungry to see Trump face some form of criminal justice after he left office in 2021, but the Manhattan DA’s prosecution was — for many reasons — not the right vehicle for it. |
| Of course, things worked out just fine for Trump in the end. He was never sentenced, was reelected, and is now wealthier than ever. In the grand scheme of things, he is not a sympathetic party, and this is not some tragic injustice. |
| As for Cohen, it’s tempting to pick and choose which statements to believe in a situation like this. Many people will be motivated to maintain that he was telling the truth on the stand and that he is lying to the public now — particularly the many political and media figures who embraced Cohen after his turn against Trump. Indeed, the one and only time I have seen Cohen in person was in 2024, when he attended the Democratic National Convention and was warmly welcomed by prominent Democrats. |
| I take no position on which of Cohen’s varying accounts is the truth at this point. When you’re dealing with an inveterate and shameless liar, it’s not worth the time and energy to figure out when they are being honest. |
| The smartest thing to do, if you can, is simply to ignore everything that they say. |
