Michael Cohen, during testimony at the hush money trial against his ex-longtime boss Donald Trump, admitted to a slew of lies he made to protect the former president.
Prosecutors questioned Cohen — their star witness — for about eight hours over Monday and Tuesday about helping Trump allegedly cover-up a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election season to keep her from going public about claims she slept with the married real estate mogul once in 2006.
During the testimony in Manhattan Supreme Court, prosecutors spent time painstakingly going over Cohen’s fibs and misdeeds — likely in a bid to get ahead of Trump’s attorneys trying to eviscerate the ex-con’s credibility by playing up his criminal past and his numerous admitted lies.
Here are some of the lies, deceptions and misleading statements Cohen copped to on the witness stand:
- Cohen testified that he lied to Congress about the ex-president’s role in the aborted project to build a Trump Tower in Moscow to corroborate Trump’s public messaging “that there was no Russia, Russia, Russia.”
- Cohen told the jury he used the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur as an excuse to push off paying Daniels in an Oct. 12, 2016 email to her lawyer — all because Trump was allegedly hoping to delay the payment past the election, and eventually stiff Daniels when her one-night-stand story would no longer be relevant.
- Cohen said he opened up a First Republic Bank account under false pretenses, describing the LLC the account was for as a management consulting company, rather than labeling it for its true purpose — an account “to pay off an adult film star for a nondisclosure agreement.”
- Cohen testified that he used a home equity loan to pay Daniels to avoid leaving a paper trail and to avoid angering his wife.
- Cohen described the nondisclosure agreement he helped Trump and Daniels reach in which the duo’s identities were masked with aliases — Trump was “David Dennison” in the document and Daniels was “Peggy Peterson.” While Daniels’ lawyer came up with the idea to mask their identities with aliases, Cohen went along with it.
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- Cohen said he fibbed on invoices he billed to the Trump Organization to get reimbursed for his payment to Daniels by labeling the $35,000 monthly fees as part of his retainer agreement.
- Cohen testified that his law firm in 2018 drafted a “misleading” letter to the Federal Election Commission, claiming that neither Trump Org. nor the Trump campaign were a party to the Daniels’ agreement. The letter “omitted” that it was the Donald J Trump revocable trust that reimbursed Cohen.
- Cohen claimed he secretly recorded Trump while they were discussing plans to have then-National Enquirer publisher David Pecker “catch-and-kill” Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal’s story that she had a month-long affair with Trump, by having her paid $150,000. In the recording, Trump allegedly said, “So, what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Cohen said he made the surreptitious recording to assure Pecker they were good for the money.
In 2018, Cohen finally decided with his family that he would stop lying for the real estate tycoon, a decision that culminated in Cohen taking two guilty pleas in connection to the deceptions he made for Trump.
He pleaded guilty to tax evasion, making false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations in August 2018 in connection to the hush money payment he made to Daniels. And he copped to lying to Congress in November 2018 for hiding Trump’s efforts for the development project in Moscow.
Cohen was sentenced in December that year to three years in prison and he served over a year before getting released in 2020 to home confinement due to the pandemic. He was freed altogether in November 2021.
He previously testified against Trump at a civil fraud trial last year where Trump’s lawyers sought to paint Cohen as a liar, and an ex-con whose testimony couldn’t be trusted.
Additional reporting by Ben Kochman and Kyle Schnitzer
