Once the blindfold fell off and he saw who Donald Trump was, lawyer Michael Cohen became a free verse. There were no more secrets.
In February 2019, freed from bondage after his arrest and sentenced to three years in prison, when his former employer was president of the United States, Cohen appeared in Congress and unleashed.
Under oath he told lawmakers that Trump was a racist and a pathological liar in politics, in business or in his sexual relationships.
Among these, the alleged one with the porn actress Stormy Daniels, a case of alleged bribery with the payment of $130,000 for her silence that is now being considered may mean the criminal prosecution of a former president for the first time in US history.
As an illustrative matter, the lawyer (today disqualified) confessed that his former boss had admitted to him that he never had problems with spurs on his feet, the excuse he used to avoid going to the Vietnam War. “Do you think I’m an idiot?” was the question with which he mocked his refusal to enlist.
This led to a journalistic investigation in which the daughters of the Queens doctor (Trump’s hometown) who signed the diagnosis assured that their father did it as a favor to Fred, father of what was then known as Cadet Espolones.
That young man who did not want to go to the front threatens to turn his country into a war scene. Since he baselessly proclaimed a week ago that he would be arrested on Tuesday, Trump has escalated his rhetoric inciting violence, encouraging “death and destruction” if he is charged. Do not forget what happened with his call for a coup on January 6, 2021, when his hordes took over the Capitol to perpetuate him in power.
In his outburst, Daniels is a “horse”, while Alvin Bragg, the chief prosecutor in Manhattan who is investigating him, a “racist” (the first African-American in office), the stamp of evil and “an animal”, a very insult in the line of slaveholders and white supremacists who deny humanity to black citizens.
and cohen? Well, he’s a convict and a liar. He doesn’t deny it, but maintains that if he picked up on the falsehoods it was because of his work with Trump.
To understand who Cohen was and what he was doing at the service of the former president, it is perfectly helpful to know the character of Señor Lobo played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino’s masterful film. Lobo is dedicated to solving problems for the mafia boss.
He was the fixer and that is the position that Cohen, 56, held for Trump from 2006 to 2018. It was his turn to fix the wrongs of the leader of the family business and later candidate for the White House. “Over and over again I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds,” he said at the court hearing the day the judge sentenced him, at the end of 2018.
In requesting benevolence, he stressed that he had done everything under the influence of one person: Donald Trump.
This is how in 2016, close to the elections and faced with the threat of Daniels to air his adventure on television, Cohen got down to work. He got a home equity loan to pay for the $130,000 that sealed the woman’s mouth. Once installed in the White House, Trump paid him the money.
But Cohen felt himself thrown at the foot of the horses. He served thirteen months behind bars and, due to the impact of the pandemic, he spent more than a year in home confinement.
From that 2016 operation in which he closed the mouth of the porn actress to the present, Cohen has undergone a radical transformation, from fixer to informer, to main prosecution witness against the former president.
That lawyer who proclaimed that he would be willing to take a bullet for Trump has become his antagonist. Whoever wants to listen to him tells of the bad deeds he developed to cover up for that boss he adored. He has written books, they welcome him on the sets (not on Fox, of course) and he has the Mea Culpa podcast.
He has testified about 20 times in the prosecution and lately before the grand jury that has to decide. Some believe that this Monday she will appear again due to possible gaps in his story that could derail the investigation. But Cohen perseveres that Trump is just as guilty as he is, if not more so. “He will end up in jail”, he dreams.
