How Trump paying Cohen and Weisselberg’s legal fees could lead to extortion problems: reporter

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Legendary reporter and Trump foe Kurt Eichenwald noted that one of the biggest mistakes Donald Trump made with Michael Cohen could come back to bite him.

When Cohen was first indicted, he recalls the Trump family wrapping their arms around him. He was promised that all of his legal fees would be taken care of. “You are family,” he was told. But after a while, Cohen realized it would come down to him or Trump and he abandoned the president. That’s when Trump stopped paying his legal fees. 

As Eichenwald explained, if Trump does the same thing with Weisselberg, it could add an extortion charge to Trump. Continue reading.

Trump’s taxes in hand, Manhattan DA’s probe heats up

NEW YORK — With former President Donald Trump’s tax returns finally in hand, a team of New York prosecutors led by a newly hired former mob-buster is sending out fresh subpoenas and meeting face-to-face with key witnesses, scrutinizing Trump’s business practices in granular detail.

Amid the swirl of activity, the Manhattan district attorney’s office is scheduled Friday to meet again with Trump’s longtime former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

It would be the eighth time he has spoken with investigators working for District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr., dating to Cohen’s time in federal prison for tax evasion and campaign finance violations. Continue reading.

Judge rejects Trump Organization’s claim of privilege to shield documents from New York attorney general

The related investigation stems from Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony.

A judge in New York on Tuesday rejected President Donald Trump’s claim of attorney-client privilege that could have shielded documents from the New York Attorney General’s office.

The Trump Organization was given until Friday to turn over documents from the engineer of its Seven Springs Estate, a property in Westchester County being investigated by Attorney General Tish James over how it was valued by the organization while seeking tax benefits from New York state.

At issue is whether the property’s conservation easement is legitimate. The president’s son, Eric, sat for a deposition. James’ office is looking into whether an improper valuation let the Trump Organization take a $21 million tax deduction. Continue reading.

Michael Cohen reveals the endgame of Trump’s post-election hysterics: ‘He can’t go back to real estate’

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President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, has had a lot to say about the president’s response to the 2020 election results — stressing, during an interview with New York Magazine’s Jeff Wise, that Trump’s bogus claims of widespread voter fraud are a cynical way for him to get supporters to donate money to him. And Cohen offered more insights on Trump’s post-election histrionics when he was interviewed for journalist Brian Karem’s “Just Ask the Question” podcast.

According to Cohen, Trump has “done the math” and realizes that there is still a lot of money to be made by firing up his MAGA supporters.

Trump’s former fixer told Karem, “He’s very bright when it comes to figuring out angles and money. But he knows he can’t go back to real estate, and he knows he has to leave the White House in January. But if he can get a large enough number of his supporters to send him money, then he’s set. That’s what he wants.” Continue reading.

Here’s why there was no mention of Russia or Michael Cohen in NYT tax bombshell: Trump biographer

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Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston has literally written the book on President Donald Trump and his finances. Trump’s supporters have already gone after the report saying that it vindicated the president because there was no mention of Michael Cohen or Russia anywhere in the New York Times bombshell report.

Breitbart editor-at-large Joel Pollak celebrated the news and claimed, without evidence, that the taxes must have come illegally from the IRS. The personal tax returns did show, however, that Trump made an absurdly large amount of money from handling the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

As Cay Johnston explained, those things wouldn’t be on Trump’s personal taxes; it would fall under the Trump Organization. Continue reading.

Trump detests Christians — and he deceived pastors and mocked them after they left Trump Tower: Michael Cohen’s ‘Disloyal’

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Michael Cohen’s book about his years as Donald Trump’s fixer is a clarion call to Christians to wake up and recognize that the man many of them revere as a heavenly agent is a religious fraud who loathes them and mocks their faith.

In Disloyal, published today, Cohen shows how Trump is a master deceiver. He quotes Trump calling Christianity and its religious practices “bullshit,” soon after he masterfully posed as a fervent believer. In truth, Cohen writes, Trump’s religion is unbridled lust for money and power at any cost to others.

“Can you believe that people believe that bullshit,” Trump said after pastors prayed over him.

Cohen’s insider stories add significant depth to my own documenting of Trump’s repeated and public denouncements of Christians as “fools,” “idiots,” and “schmucks.” Continue reading.

In new book, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen describes alleged episodes of racism and says president likes how Putin runs Russia

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President Trump’s longtime lawyer and personal fixer, Michael Cohen, alleges in a new book that Trump made “overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election” and that the future commander in chief was also well aware of Cohen’s hush-money payoff to adult-film star Stormy Daniels during that campaign.

In the book, “Disloyal: A Memoir,” which was obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its Tuesday publication date, Cohen lays out an alarming portrait of the constellation of characters orbiting around Trump, likening the arrangement to the mafia and calling himself “one of Trump’s bad guys.” He describes the president, meanwhile, as “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

The memoir also describes episodes of Trump’s alleged racism and his “hatred and contempt” of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s only African American president. Continue reading.

Michael Cohen’s Book Will Bare Trump’s ‘Steep Illegality,’ Vows Anthony Scaramucci

It’s all going to “come out in a waterfall” ahead of the election, said Trump’s short-time director of communications.

The soon-to-be-published book by President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, will reveal multiple cases of criminality, backed by “evidence,” longtime Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci said Saturday. 

Scaramucci, who served as White House director of communications for a week in 2017, said on MSNBC that Cohen’s book will expose Trump’s “rank criminality” and “steep, steep illegality and amorality.”

“It is not like Michael is going to say this and the White House is going to discredit him … He is going to back it up with documentary evidence to show the level of illegality, the repetitiveness of the illegality,” said Scaramucci. Continue reading.

Michael Cohen says he was ‘active and eager participant’ in ‘tax fraud’ in book

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In the 3,700-word foreword from his forthcoming memoir, “Disloyal,” Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer and “fixer” of President Donald Trump, describes his life working for his former client in terms of organized crime, comes clean about “screaming threats” on his client’s behalf and admits to being an “active and eager participant” in some of the most notorious and salacious episodes involving the future leader of the free world.

“From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise — I was an active and eager participant,” Cohen writes in the foreword, dated March 11, 2020, which he says he began penning on legal pads in the early morning hours at the white-collar Otisville Federal Prison located about an hour and a half drive from his former Manhattan high-rise apartment.

Cohen had earlier been furloughed from that prison amid concerns over the spread of COVID-19. However, he was soon remanded, apparently for writing this book. His book’s website directly quotes federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein: Continue reading.

‘I know where the skeletons are buried’: Michael Cohen releases blistering excerpt from his tell-all book about Trump

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Michael Cohen thinks he may know Donald Trump, who he worked with for more than ten years, even better than the president’s own family does. In the forward released Thursday to his forthcoming tell-all book, “Disloyal,”  Cohen explained that he saw a side of the president that his close relatives never saw.

“Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did,” he wrote. “In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”

He went on:

There are reasons why there has never been an intimate portrait of Donald Trump, the man. In part, it’s because he has a million acquaintances, pals and hangers on, but no real friends. He has no one he trusts to keep his secrets. For ten years, he certainly had me, and I was always there for him, and look what happened to me. I urge you to really consider that fact: Trump has no true friends. He has lived his entire life avoiding and evading taking responsibility for his actions. He crushed or cheated all who stood in his way, but I know where the skeletons are buried because I was the one who buried them.

Continue reading.