Disloyal

by Michael Cohen

  Which was why my jaw dropped when I heard about the so-called Steele Dossier. I was in Florida, watching my son Jake pitch against the IMG Academy baseball team, likely the finest high-school outfit in the country, when my phone rang and it was a Wall Street Journal reporter who started asking me questions about the dossier. I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I asked her to email the story in Buzzfeed that published the dossier to my phone. As I scanned the pages, I was astounded to see my name repeated again and again, as if I were some demented, evil mastermind secretly and mostly single-handedly brokering the worst case of treason in the history of the United States. I had supposedly clandestinely traveled to Prague to meet with Russian officials aiming to intervene in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump, a story so ridiculous I couldn’t believe what I was seeing with my own two eyes—and remember, I not only had seen news I knew to be fake, I’d also manufactured it.

  Because here’s the thing: I’ve never been to Prague. Never, ever. But that didn’t stop the Wall Street Journal reporter from haranguing me about my fictional voyage to the capital of the Czech Republic or demanding answers about my connections to Paul Manafort and my father-in-law’s nonexistent best-friend relationship with Putin. On and on the reporter went, like I actually did own a dacha in Sochi, in Krasnodar Krai province. I thought it was a joke. It had to be a joke—the karmic reply to the bullshit about Ted Cruz’s father being involved in the assassination of JFK. I was mentioned more than ten times, and each allegation was crazier than the last. But still they came: did I pay hackers? My father-in-law was supposedly a tycoon in Russia, but the problem was, he was Ukrainian, and he’d only been in the Russian capital once, as a teenager in the military of the Soviet Union.

  I was pacing up and down behind the dugout, yelling on my phone, getting angrier and angrier, and my son was on the mound pitching against some of the top baseball prospects in the world, and he was severely distracted by the sight of his father going ballistic. Of course, he got hit up that day as I completely threw him off his game.

  Thousands upon thousands of articles appeared in the press all over the planet that day, as I went from a loud and brash advocate for Donald Trump on cable television, to Public Enemy Number One because of the horseshit report of some washed-up former MI-6 intelligence operative in England who I knew for a fact didn’t have his facts straight. Not a single one! This was not the kind of celebrity anyone would want, with half the nation seeing me as a traitor, and the other half eagerly awaiting the Inauguration. One thing I knew for sure: the Boss wouldn’t like all the attention I was getting, not because I was dominating news cycles, but because it was distracting from his pending presidency.

  Sure enough, as soon as I got back to New York, my phone rang. It was the president-elect.

  “What the fuck?” Trump said. “What’s this about?”

  “What?” I replied.

  “You going to Prague,” Trump said. “This is very bad. It’s blowing up on the Internet.”

  “Hold on a second, Mr. Trump,” I said. “It’s complete bullshit. I have no idea where it’s coming from. I’ve never been to Prague. I never worked with Russian kompromats. Would you like to see my passport?”

  Trump yelled out to the people in the room and they all agreed that they wanted to see my passport in person. Trump ordered me to come to the office, so I took the five-minute walk west across midtown Manhattan to the 26th floor of Trump Tower. There were a bunch of people in Trump’s office: Jared Kushner, Steven Bannon, Reince Priebus, Hope Hicks.

  I handed Trump my passport and he started to flick through the pages.

  “I’m really disappointed you don’t believe me,” I said. “I believe everything you tell me.”

  Which wasn’t true, of course, but I was trying to make a point. Trump continued to silently page through my passport, which was filled with stamps, mainly from island nations in the Caribbean. Trump handed the passport to Bannon, who looked through it, and they passed it all around the room. There was no mark from the Czech Republic, of course, as they all acknowledged with nods.

  “I told you so,” I said to Trump.

  “Do you have any other passports?” Priebus asked.

  “Nope,” I said. “Only this one.”

  “I believe you,” Trump said finally.

  “We should take a picture of his passport and post it and tweet it out, to show he’s never been to Prague,” Priebus said to Trump.

  “Great idea,” said Trump.

  Thus was born a meme and a million conspiracy theories and wrongly reported articles and news reports. I’d been to many countries, including Britain and Italy during a vacation to the island of Capri, but the lack of a Czech stamp only made reporters speculate on possible explanations. Italy was in the Schengen Area, for example, the twenty-six nations of continental Europe where visas and passport stamps aren’t needed once an entry into any member country has been stamped. Or there was the possibility that I had another passport I was hiding, but I reassured reporters that I only had the one—and I can reassure you that was all I have ever had.

  To this day, there are reporters who insist that I went to Prague, despite the denial from the FBI and a complete absence of any evidence. Nevertheless, people like Christopher Steele continue this charade and insist that I’m hiding some nefarious plot hatched in the Czech city.

  What’s behind this insistence? Or madness? The fact of the matter was that the FBI investigated this allegation and called it garbage. But this nonexistent element of the Steele Dossier was only part of the larger narrative that Trump had used me as his covert connection to Putin and the Kremlin, like the plot of a third-rate thriller. But if my highly believable explanation was accepted, then the entire logic of the Russia-Trump conspiracy theory fell apart. The Russia connection had to be true because it had to be true, circular thinking that in its way provided the perfect counterpoint to the idol worship of Trump dead enders willing to justify, or ignore, or rationalize, or simply lie about the worst excesses of Donald Trump.

  In this way, I became the personification of all that was wrong and terrible about Donald Trump’s victory. Russian interference, the nonstop lying and racism and nativism, the outrageous, over-the-top gloating, the schadenfreude, the Electoral College, the tax cuts for the rich, the Supreme Court justices, the constant, unceasing bullying, all the outrages.

  I became the lightning rod.

  In the summer before the election, I told a reporter for Vanity Fair, Emily Jane Fox, that I’d take a bullet for Trump, and I meant it.

  But not if Donald Trump pulled the trigger.

  In time, this fact would turn me into the lightning rod for the other half of America, as I discovered soon enough.

  In early February, I went to DC to meet with the President on some legal matters. I can’t remember the details—another of the law suits from women he’d allegedly tried to force himself on, no doubt—but I do remember the trip very well. I stayed at the Trump International Hotel, in the old Post Office, and took a limo to the White House. It was like the first day I went to see the Boss in Trump Tower, with my name left at security as confirmation that I really wasn’t dreaming. Only now it was the freaking White House. I was shown into the West Wing, walking along a corridor and saying a polite hello to Jared Kushner, who had a small office down the hall from the Oval.

  Trump was expecting me and he saw me in the ante-room, hollering to me.

  “Get in here!”

  Trump cleared out the Oval.

  “I need Michael alone,” he said, as the aides filed out.

  He turned to me. “Is this place unbelievable or what?”

  He swept his arms to show off the majesty of the space, as if he were displaying his booty of gold pieces of eight from a pirate’s raid, giddy at the sight of his treasure. He showed me the oil painting of George Washington, with a wide grin.

&n
bsp; “Can you believe this?” Trump said. “From 2011 to today. The history. The desk. Everything.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, he gave me a tour of his space, with the Resolute Desk and the Winston Churchill bust on display. Trump showed me the gold drapes he’d installed, along with the portrait of Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, the charismatic 1830s president that Steve Bannon had convinced the historically ignorant Trump he most resembled for his populism and bluster.

  “What did you think about the travel ban?” Trump asked.

  “No, you mean the Muslim ban,” I replied. “I hate it. It’s disgraceful. I thought your first policy roll out was going to be infrastructure.”

  “That was Bannon and [Stephen] Miller,” Trump said. “They’ll fix it the next time around.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Typhoon Stormy (Part Three)

  The Wall Street Journal story in early January of 2018 caused a shitstorm of biblical proportions, even by the Trump Presidency standards. It was reported that I had paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 through a Delaware company called Essential Consulting, LLC, in the days before the 2016 election. That was perfectly true, as the world now knows, but at the time I was fully dedicated to enforcing the NDA with Daniels and making sure she was silenced in order to protect Trump.

  I will spare you, gentle reader, all the tawdry details of the ensuing weeks, as I started legal proceedings against Daniels and her attorney, a charmer named Michael Avenatti, who rolled out their campaign to make money from the porn star’s encounter with Trump more than a decade earlier. As the cable news talking heads exploded, and I went from being Trump’s personal attorney to a household name, events started to move incredibly quickly. Stormy Daniels went from being a small-time porn impresario to the most famous adult actress in history, thanks to a coordinated and sophisticated media campaign with her teasing the nation on 60 Minutes and slyly hinting about her knowledge of the President’s genitals, a swirl of news that remains hard to believe actually happened in the real world, but remember, this was the real real—Trump’s reality.

  The simultaneous nature of the ensuing chaos can be shown best by way of example. Around the same time, the book Fire and Fury was published, and immediately it went to number one on the bestseller lists, triggering a series of events that upended the nation’s politics and resulted in yours truly writing this account from the sewage treatment plant in a federal prison camp. I read the book and was unimpressed. The author captured some of the chaos around Trump, I could see, but he was barely even an outsider. Some schlub reporter sitting on a couch in the hallway of the White House was suddenly the author with the best access to Donald Trump? The whole idea seemed preposterous to me, giving me the inspiration to write my own book about me and the Boss—one that would be far more intimate. The idea was to portray Trump’s real estate deals, and the genius he’d displayed, as a companion to The Art of the Deal.

  The story about Trump’s acquisition of 40 Wall Street in the 1990s showed how incredibly smart he could be in real estate, despite his many failings and weaknesses in other areas of life. For years, Trump claimed to have purchased the landmark downtown skyscraper for $1M, boasting repeatedly on The Apprentice that it was worth hundreds of millions. Whatever the truth of the purchase price, it was indisputable that he’d cleaned up on the deal by buying the seventy story neo-gothic 1920s skyscraper in a real estate slump for pennies on the dollar. The Kluge estate, Doral, Mar-a-Lago, the Grand Hyatt in the 80s—for all the frantic and nonstop news that always surrounded Trump, it was clear that when it came to real estate, his father had taught him well.

  “There truly is a method to his madness,” I wrote in the book proposal, “and people who think otherwise can quickly get buried.”

  Trump Revolution: From the Tower to the White House, Understanding Donald J. Trump was the title I was thinking about. I had a ghostwriter and fancy agent to represent the project, and we drew up a proposal that outlined the basic approach. Unlike others writing about Trump, I wrote, I really had known the man for a decade. I promised to write about the Russia investigation and my role, continuing to lie about the Moscow Tower deal, of course, and I was going to seek revenge on reporters I thought had dealt unfairly with the Boss and me.

  But I couldn’t leave sleeping dogs alone, of course, so I also promised to clear up the “unfortunate saga” of Stormy Daniels and the $130,000 I had paid her in the week before the 2016 election. I wasn’t going to reveal the fact that I had been repaid the money by Trump, in the form of fake legal fees, or that I had done everything at the direction of the President of the United States, needless to say. The proposal was twenty pages long and really didn’t amount to much, at least to my thinking. The White House let it be known that the President preferred that I didn’t write a book, without saying why; I figured it was because of my role as his longtime attorney and the Stormy Daniels story and the risk of further fanning those flames.

  To sell the book, I did a road show with my agent, meeting with the top editors for the five largest publishing houses in New York, and the feedback was very good. There was a lot of interest in a book that portrayed Trump in a new way, even if I was going to pull many, many, many punches. I was going to be truthful, but I also had good reason to be economical with the truth. Because here is the thing: I care for Donald Trump, even to this day, and I had and still have a lot of affection for him.

  In any event, there was a handshake deal with the publisher Hachette, as I hit pause to think through the reaction of the White House and to decide if, given the complexities, I really wanted to go through with a book, even a limited portrait that didn’t show Trump screwing vendors or taking advantage of old friends in a cutthroat way.

  Then the book proposal leaked to the Daily Beast and all hell broke loose. I don’t know exactly who leaked the proposal, but I have a pretty good idea that it was one of the publishing houses that didn’t acquire the title, a petty act of petulance that had mind-bending consequences. The root of all that followed lay in the simple fact that Stormy Daniels wanted to sell her story, and she didn’t want me to beat her to the payday. At least, that’s my best guess, because her reaction came as soon as the story ran and the media madness began to show the first signs of emerging. The true genesis of all that ensued lay in the revelation of the amount of money that I would receive as an advance for the book: $500,000.

  In the days that followed, I screamed and bullied and misled reporters I’d known for years, all in the service of trying to stop the truth from emerging. The long and the short of it all was that Daniels wanted to cash in, and after she fired Keith Davidson and took up with the charming—I’m being sarcastic, of course—Michael Avenatti, the outcome was inevitable, at least in hindsight. There was never going to be any Trump book, of course, and the only thing I was going to author was catastrophe.

  Statements of denial were issued, legal proceedings were brought to get a restraining order, but Daniels was clearly going to talk at some point. The Karen McDougal story also surfaced, to the fury of David Pecker, but that story didn’t excite and titillate the imagination of the nation in quite the same way as the Daniels story. In the end, there was no way to stop the “sources” leaking to the major newspapers and networks about the payment to Daniels, and once I was forced to admit to it, I issued a statement to The New York Times. The headline appeared on page twelve of the Times on the morning of February 14, 2018. It succinctly summarized my role in the latest twist in the tawdry tale of Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels: “Trump’s Longtime Lawyer Says He Paid Actress Out of His Own Pocket.”

  “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” my statement said. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”

  I added the bromide I’d us
ed to convince Trump to make the payment in the first place: “Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage.”

  Of course, as you know, I was lying. I had been reimbursed for the payments, plus money for income tax on the sum, plus a bonus, but that was no one’s business, as far as I was concerned. The Times reporter was Maggie Haberman. As I’ve mentioned, Maggie and I often exchanged information and gossip and tips, but this latest conversation verged on the absurd. Was I really expecting the world to believe I’d spent $130,000 of my own money to hide the sexual past of Donald Trump? After issuing the statement, I refused to answer follow-up questions, apart from saying it was a “private transaction” and that Trump had no knowledge of the payment. Maggie noted in her piece that I had relied on the same seemingly true aphorism during the campaign to explain why I’d supposedly made the payment to Daniels: even false information about Trump could cause him harm if it were published.

  But the premise of my explanation left obvious questions: why would a lawyer, any lawyer, pay a client’s expenses, without their knowledge? Was that legal? Ethical? Rational? Cable television lit up in response, as usual, with liberal TV attorneys shaking their heads in disbelief, and conservatives claiming yet again that Trump had been exonerated, willfully ignoring the vast holes in my story. This was the pattern that I had grown accustomed to, not just since Trump entered politics, but in all the years I had represented the Boss. If you’re caught in a lie, double and triple down. It was the opposite of Occam’s Razor: instead of the simplest explanation being the likeliest, this strategy involved complicating the narrative, throwing sand in the eyes of the onlooker, claiming that transparently implausible stories were true unless proven otherwise, and even then denying the obvious truth. It was a variation of the old joke: Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes? It was surprisingly effective over time, if you’re willing to be brazen and relentless. It helped if you never truly thought about the past, or the consequences of lying, and if you always lived in the present tense, like a shark swimming through water, only able to survive through constant motion.