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Courtesy of the Sunday Times.
“Are you a hero?” a television reporter shouted at Michael Cohen as he left his New York apartment last week. “I’ll leave that up to you,” Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer replied, before posing for a selfie. In his own eyes, the decision to spill his master’s secrets has assumed a noble tinge.
Friends claim it was Cohen’s father, a surgeon, who persuaded his son to flip, arguing that he had not survived the Holocaust to have his name besmirched by Trump. As ever in this tale, however, it is worth following the money.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the pitbull fixer who had promised to “take a bullet” for the president felt that the Trump family had not shown the same loyalty when they stopped paying his mounting legal bills. A rumoured job in the White House had also failed to materialise. Now Trump can only watch from the sidelines, tweeting furiously about treachery, as federal and state prosecutors close in on all the president’s men with links to Cohen after he admitted arranging “hush money” for Stormy Daniels, a porn star, and Karen McDougal, a Playboy model. It had been Cohen’s dream when he was in high school to work for the flash property tycoon. His legal skills impressed his future employer when he outmanoeuvred an awkward squad of residents in one of Trump’s apartment blocks.
Another hardboiled lawyer, Roy Cohn, notorious for pursuing communists in the McCarthy era, had already helped Trump to develop his empire. “All I can tell you is he has been vicious in his protection of me,” Trump told critics. He expected no less from Cohen, who went on to serve him zealously for a decade. Cohen, however, had money worries brought on by his investment in New York yellow taxi “medallions” whose value crashed after competition from Uber and Lyft. The actor Ben Stiller portrayed him on the satirical television show Saturday Night Live as an amateur mafioso. All the while FBI agents were turning the screw, rifling through his files in his home, office and hotel room. Cohen, seemingly with plenty to lose, went on television in July to say “my wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will”. He added: “I put family and country first.” Trump loyalists denounced him as a serial liar.
Last Monday he treated himself to a glass of Glenlivet 12 on the rocks before confessing to his crimes the next day. His lawyer, the equally pugnacious Lanny Davis, announced grandly: “Mr Cohen would never accept a pardon from a man he considers to be both corrupt and a dangerous person in the Oval Office.” Cohen was, Davis declared, “more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows”. He may not be able to avoid jail, but his winding road to rehabilitation has begun.