Michael Cohen, a former personal attorney for President Donald Trump, claimed that he was “coerced and pressured” by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James to flip on Trump as they launched investigations into him.
In a Substack article, Cohen revealed that “a federal appeals court” had revived “Trump’s effort to undo” his conviction from his business records trial. In May 2024, a jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree regarding payments made through Cohen to adult actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential election.
In his Substack article, Cohen added that a lower court was ordered “to reconsider whether the case belongs in state court or should be moved to federal court.”
Breitbart News reported at the time Cohen was “expected to testify about his role”:
Cohen was Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, who is expected to testify about his role in alleged crime Trump is being accused of — falsifying business records to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Specifically, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is accusing Trump of classifying payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels through Cohen as “legal” expenses, when he argues they should have been classified as “campaign” expenses and that the “crime” is that Trump knowingly did this to hide an illegal “conspiracy” to win the election. (Legal scholar Jonathan Turley and others have argued there is no crime in the case.) Trump has pleaded not guilty.
“From the time I first began meeting with lawyers from the Manhattan DA’s Office and the New York Attorney General’s Office in connection with their investigations of President Trump, and through the trials themselves, I felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire to build the cases against and secure a judgement and convictions against President Trump.”
Cohen continued to explain that his “perspective is not theoretical,” but rather that “it is lived” as he had “testified in two trials” against Trump.
“The first trial was a civil action brought by the New York State Attorney General’s Office alleging that President Trump fraudulently inflated his assets to obtain favorable loan terms,” Cohen continued. “The court found President Trump liable and ordered that he and other defendants pay a staggering $454 million penalty, which was later overturned on appeal.”
Cohen went on to explain that the second trial against Trump “was a criminal action brought by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office alleging that President Trump falsified business records in connection with hush money payments made to Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 presidential election.”
Cohen’s Substack article continued in part:
From the time I first began meeting with lawyers from the Manhattan DA’s Office and the New York Attorney General’s Office in connection with their investigations of President Trump, and through the trials themselves, I felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire to build the cases against and secure a judgement and convictions against President Trump.
My first meeting with prosecutors from the Manhattan DA’s Office was in August 2019, when I was a little over three months into serving a three-year prison sentence following my guilty plea to committing federal crimes. As later came out during President Trump’s criminal trial, one of the very first questions I asked those prosecutors was how I would benefit from cooperating. The reason was simple: I wanted to do whatever I could to obtain my Rule 35(b) motion, return home to my family and resume my fractured life.
Cohen went on to claim that during his time preparing for, and during the trials, “it was clear” that the prosecutors were only interested in testimony from him that “would enable them to convict President Trump.”
Breitbart News reported that in December 2018, Cohen was sentenced to serve a three-year prison sentence regarding “making hush-money payments, and lying to Congress about past business dealings in Russia.”
In July 2020, a federal judge ordered that Cohen be “released from prison and into home confinement.”
Read the full article here