Disloyal: A Memoir

by Michael Cohen

  “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” Kelly said to Trump.

  Sure enough, Trump went nuts, displaying the temperament that now passes for presidential. The next day he told the press, “There was blood coming out her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,” obviously referring to her supposedly menstruating, though how that was relevant was one of the many mysteries of what came out of Trump’s mouth.

  The usual shit show ensued, or, I should say, the unusual Trump shit show. So I discovered that weekend when my phone vibrated and I looked down to see a familiar name: Sean Hannity.

  “What’s up?” I asked, stepping outside to the mansion’s basketball court for privacy.

  “It’s about Megyn Kelly,” Hannity said. “She’s in hiding.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And how does that involve me?”

  “Roger is going to call you,” he said, referring to the head of Fox, Roger Ailes, I knew immediately.

  “What does Roger have to do with this?” I asked.

  “Roger wants to talk to you,” Sean said.

  “He has my number,” I said. “What are you, his secretary now?”

  “He called me to call you to make sure you know the basics for his call,” Sean said.

  “Just have him call me,” I said. “I think the world of Roger Ailes.”

  “Roger tells me that the reason Megyn is in hiding is because of Mr. Trump,” Hannity said. “She’s with her family, hiding in a hotel. There are Trump supporters at the entrance to her apartment building. She’s got little kids. The Trump supporters are threatening her.”

  “Have Roger call and I’ll get Trump on the line and we’ll figure this all out,” I said.

  “Thanks,” Hannity said. “I really appreciate it.”

  A minute later, Roger Ailes’s name appeared on my phone. Again, I picked up, and discussed for fifteen minutes the backstory to the so-called feud between Megyn Kelly and Trump, when really it was more like a beatdown. Kelly had asked Trump pointed questions that were justified by his decades-long mistreatment of women; the fact that Trump was a sexist pig was beyond dispute. But so was Roger Ailes, I thought, listening to his complaint that Trump had crossed a line by frightening his star and highest-rated host.

  Trump had blown his temper, unsurprisingly, and he’d reacted the only way he knew how: destruction and total annihilation. What was I supposed to do about that, I asked?

  “She’s got small kids,” Ailes said. “This has got to stop.”

  “I agree,” I said. “Hold on.”

  I dialed Trump. He picked up first ring—because that’s how we worked: if one of us called the other, we answered immediately, like the inhalation and exhalation of breathing together, or conspiring, as I’ve said. Partners in crime, you might say.

  Joining up the calls, I oriented Trump.

  “I’ve got Roger on the line,” I told Trump, as greetings were exchanged.

  “Donald, we’ve got a problem,” Ailes said. “Megyn can’t come to the studio to do the show. She can’t go to her apartment. She’s got little kids. We can’t have this.”

  “She came after me,” Trump replied. “If you come after me, I come after you ten times harder.”

  A moment of silence hung in the air. Trump had been told that he’d terrified a woman and forced her into hiding. She had young children. She was a famous news anchor who’d challenged him on national television in a political debate with questions that he didn’t like, understandably, but that certainly fit well within the bounds of civil discourse. Roger Ailes was himself a sexual predator who’d harassed Megyn Kelly and countless other women, as would emerge when he met his own moment of disgrace and denouement.

  The notion that Trump might apologize or recognize the boundaries of decency never even arose; Ailes didn’t have the temerity or moral standing to glimpse that possibility. But the Fox head was able to perceive that there was something seriously wrong about terrorizing another person, let alone a woman and her vulnerable children. This was too much for Roger fucking Ailes, I thought, and Trump still can’t conceive of the idea that he’s going too far?

  “We’ve got to figure out a way to work this out,” Ailes said calmly, not wanting to rile the snarling pit bulls that were Trump and his attack-dog attorney in self-righteous, full Roy Cohn mode.

  Another silence descended.

  “We’ve got to have you come on Megyn’s show,” Ailes said awkwardly. “We’ll make it go the way you want it to.”

  Now Trump could be magnanimous, I thought, or fake it, at least. Going on the highest-rated show on Fox would now be doing Ailes a favor that Trump would call in, in due course, and of course he’d be the beneficiary of craven, Soviet-style fawning coverage on Fox—a hint of what has come to be our national disaster. All because Trump had bullied a journalist and incited violence as a routine part of his way of practicing politics.

  I had been pacing for more than an hour on the basketball court by now, getting sunburned in the searing August heat, but I was performing my loyal duty, as two old white male sexual predators decided how Megyn Kelly’s life would play out, or not, which personified so much of what was fundamentally wrong about the campaign that I was cheering for so ardently.

  Let me add this: there were three douchebags on that call, not two. I was enabling two fat, rich, old, disgusting creeps as surely as a drug dealer sliding a complimentary fix of heroin or Oxycodone across the bar to a drug addict would be. Complicity doesn’t really convey my role because I wasn’t passively observing events, I was shaping them.

  “You can figure this out with Michael,” Trump finally said, as always, leaving the dirty work to me, knowing that I’d know what he wanted without having to be told. “The show has to only ask the questions I want. It has to go the way I want.”

  “Of course,” Ailes said. “We’ll do whatever you want. We just have to work this out.”

  Trump hung up and I proceeded to negotiate a forthcoming appearance on Kelly’s show. The questions would be pat and patently soft balls. Trump would have the forum to express his views on Mexicans and the wall and China, and in return Kelly would sit meekly in order to regain some personal security with Trump signaling to his rabid supporters that they can stand down—for the time being. But this feud was only beginning, I believed, and I knew Trump would be the one who eventually ended it, one way or another.

  As I’ve been saying since the beginning, Trump was a mobster, plain and simple, and I had just participated in political and personal blackmail.

  Chapter Twelve

  Russia (Part One)

  Felix Sater returned to the Trump Tower in the fall of 2015 to approach me about a project in Moscow—a subject that has attracted considerable attention in the years since. I knew Felix a little from my teenage years living on Long Island. Felix was a knock-around businessman who’d been involved in a pump-and-dump boiler-room stock market operation run by the mafia, I’d heard, and I knew that he had a criminal record dating back to a bar brawl in the early ’90s. The way I heard the story, Sater got in an argument in a bar called El Rio Grande, about a girl or something like that, and he threatened to kill some stranger, saying he was going rip his head off—then Felix smashed his margarita glass on the bar and stabbed the guy in the face and neck. He was convicted of felony assault in that case.

  A real charmer. Sater was well-known in the Trump Organ-ization, mostly for bad reasons. He’d worked on the Trump Soho deal, nearly a decade earlier, as well as a development in Florida. But the kids really didn’t like Sater and the negative publicity his felony assault conviction attracted, especially as it reflected on the Trump family associating with underworld figures. Ivanka and Don Jr. had been investigated for felony fraud over selling units in Trump Soho by, as alleged, falsely inflating the number of condos that had been purchased, so they were ha
rdly as pure as the driven snow.

  I know there’s been speculation that Sater was somehow the Whitey Bulger of New York City, a mob figure who was an informant for the FBI, giving him a free pass to continue committing crime. For all I know, that may be true. What I can say for sure is that Sater wasn’t some criminal genius conspiring with Russian oligarchs to launder vast sums of money through the Trump Organization. The Felix I knew had connections, but not at the high level imagined by liberal conspiracy theorists. Sater was a wannabe, for the most part, a hanger-on and fantasist.

  In other words, a perfect partner for Donald Trump. Which was how the Boss reacted when I took the deal to him. I explained that the idea was for a building of 120 stories in Red Square, the heart of Moscow. It would be by far the tallest building in Russia and one of the iconic developments in all of Eastern Europe or Asia. I’d tried to bring together other deals in Georgia and Kazakhstan, but this proposal was on another level altogether. The economics were incredible, at least superficially. Sater proposed that thirty floors would be for commercial office space. Another thirty would be dedicated to a five-star hotel, with an Ivanka Trump-branded spa and Trump restaurants. The top floors would consist of 250 high-end condominiums, aimed at the Russian ruling class. The residential condos would pay for the whole project, so in effect, it was like getting commercially leased office space and a luxury hotel for free and in perpetuity. The money was so favorable, according to Felix, we would be able to give the penthouse apartment to Russian President Vladimir Putin for free, partly as a marketing tool to attract other super-wealthy buyers and oligarchs, but also as a way to suck up to Putin. The genius part was that Trump wouldn’t have to invest a dime; he was purely selling his name to the project to give it the sheen of luxury and quality that the Boss supposedly exuded.

  Let me pause here to talk about Vladimir Putin. In the pages ahead, you will encounter overt and covert attempts to get Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, and I will elaborate on my insider knowledge about those efforts, but first, let me orient you on Donald Trump’s views on the Russian leader. I’ll start by saying that the answer is so simple and obvious that it still astounds me that no one has grasped the real attraction. Ask yourself this question: What does Trump most admire or worship? The answer is money. Now, ask yourself, who is the richest man in the world?

  “Putin is the richest man in the world by a multiple,” Trump often told me. “In fact, if you think about it, Putin controls twenty-five percent of the Russian economy, including every major business, like Gazprom. Imagine controlling twenty-five percent of the wealth of a country. Wouldn’t that be fucking amazing?”

  Trump held up a newspaper article about Gazprom, the giant Russian oil company. The photograph accompanying the story showed twenty-five trucks loaded with oil leaving a Gazprom facility. Twenty of the trucks were heading in one direction, while five were heading the opposite way.

  “Those five trucks are for Putin,” Trump said, with absolute certainty. “Putin isn’t president of Russia. He’s the ruler. He’s the dictator. The tsar. He can do whatever he wants. He’s going to be leader for the duration of his life.”

  Trump didn’t say that disapprovingly, or with any emotion other than admiration bordering on awe. His impulses weren’t democratic, in any sense of the word. Trump loved Putin because the Russian had the balls to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company—like the Trump Organization, in fact. In Russia, no one questioned or doubted Putin, just as no one called out Trump on the 26th floor of Trump Tower. Putin’s ability to bring the press to heel, the media’s throat under his jackboot, was also an attraction to Trump, not a bad thing. The same was true for the banks and Russia’s industrial complex; an entire society and civilization bent to the will of a single man was how Trump viewed the ideal historical form of government—with him as the man in charge, of course. Locking up your political enemies, criminalizing dissent, terrifying or bankrupting the free press through libel lawsuits—Trump’s all-encompassing vision wasn’t evident to me before he began to run for president. I honestly believe the most extreme ideas about power and its uses only really took shape as he began to seriously contemplate the implications of taking power and how he could leverage it to the absolute maximum level possible.

  I should add here that this was generally true of Trump throughout the campaign and now during his Presidency. Trump didn’t run for office with a coherent ideology, other than his Archie Bunker-like Queens reactionary worldview and a will to power, but as he got further and further into the process of becoming a politician, the implications began to emerge for him. One thing that was definitely true about Trump was that he was constantly calculating and assessing how to take maximum advantage of every situation. That was one of the reasons he and I got along so well: we both have a shark-like cunning that is constantly in motion and always looking for prey. Russia was the perfect example; Trump had been trying to get a project built in Moscow since the 1980s, just as he’d been contemplating running for president, but that was about prestige and spreading his name all over the world like a modern-day Pharaoh.

  As the campaign went along, as Trump started to see ways to cheat and lie to win, he came to see that Russia could potentially be a great ally—not for the United States, but for him personally, a distinction that was starting to blur. The equation was as simple as it was treasonous: Hillary Clinton had criticized Russia’s parliamentary elections in 2011, enraging Putin, the onset of a downward-spiraling relationship that hardened into hatred. That was an emotion Trump was a master at manipulating and encouraging, especially when it was useful to his purposes. If Trump could successfully encourage Putin’s hatred of Clinton, the dictator might be inclined to come to the assistance of her opponent, on the theory of the ancient proverb that the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

  That was the true nature of Trump’s collusion with Putin, despite all the hype and speculation. The Trump campaign wasn’t organized enough to have secure back channels to the Kremlin, and people like Corey Lewandowski wouldn’t have a clue how to pull off such an operation. Steven Bannon loved to portray himself as an evil genius—and he truly was an evil, racist human being, like the character Al Pacino played in The Devil’s Advocate who was actually the antichrist—but he wasn’t going to try something as fraught and potentially destructive as contacting the Russians. What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election—a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease.

  Always open to moral equivalence when defining good behavior, Trump told me that America intervenes in other country’s elections all the time, even overthrowing regimes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, so what was wrong with the Russians trying to influence the American election? That was Trump’s rationale, so long as the cheating was done in his favor. If it had gone the other way, he would have screamed murder and threatened war with Russia, I’m sure. That was the nature and extent of Trump’s patriotism as he came to see what he could potentially harness.

  All of that mostly seemed moot at the time. Because we all expected Trump to lose, including the Boss himself, a large part of the posturing and praising of Putin was a way to keep the Trump Organization’s options open with the Russian leader. American banks had long since given up on lending to Trump, and the German Deutsche Bank was also shrinking the level of financing they were willing to provide to him, making liquidity a serious problem. When Trump lost the election, he would have many options, including starting a TV network to rival Fox, but he wanted to do all he could to enable him to be able to borrow money from people in Putin’s circle, and that meant sucking up to the Russians. Calling Putin smart and successful and all the other sycophantic things Trump said wasn’t collusion so much as business as usual. Trump didn’t care about American national security, or the plight of Ukraine figh
ting a hot war with an invading power, or that Putin and the Russian oligarchs were mobsters stealing their nation’s wealth blind. Criminally robbing Russia made them smart, to Trump’s way of thinking, and he was more than happy to take their money.

  Trump had long experience benefitting from ill-gotten Russian largesse, selling luxury condos to many oligarchs and their minions. A decade earlier, Trump had bought a Palm Beach monstrosity called the Maison de l’Amitie, a 66,000-square-foot architectural nightmare built by a terrible-taste tycoon who moved to Florida from Massachusetts to become a philanthropist and socialite only to declare bankruptcy. The mansion was gaudy, over the top, a sprawl of rambling and disconnected styles and an eye sore. Right up Trump’s alley, in other words, with the added benefit of the deal offering him the chance to prey on the remains of the formerly super-rich estate.

  Trump paid just over $40 million, put a few licks of paint on the mansion—no doubt third-rate Super Hide from Benjamin Moore, like at Doral—and then listed it for $125 million. It was the jet-set version of Flip This House.

  The house sat on the market for more than a year until a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev came along and Trump knew he had a live one on the hook. Rybolovlev was known as the “fertilizer king” of Russia, worth $10 billion, and he and his daughter bought the world’s most expensive real estate the way others might splurge on a pair of shoes. Rybolovlev’s tastes and appetites matched the Boss in their shameless conspicuous consumption; there was no question that the Russian’s wealth had been obtained in dubious ways, if not outright theft. Collapsing mines, murder plots, polluted Russian rivers, embezzlement scandals—Rybolovlev and his daughter Ekaterina were what Trump would call “real beauties.”