Underneath my defiant stance lay the bedrock of what I had learned at the foot of Donald Trump when trouble arose: Just say . . . fuck you!
That cold February morning, I was waiting outside my place at the Trump Park Avenue to meet a wealthy businessman friend to fly to Nevada. My friend was going to Las Vegas to appraise a commercial property for sale, with a price in excess of $1 billion, and at the last moment he’d invited me to join him to solicit my opinion on the deal—and to give me a respite from the incessant swirl of scandal that had come to define my life. I had long inhabited the world of private jets, but as I sat in his SUV and looked over the prospectus for the property, my friend regaled me excitedly about features of his ultra-lush G550 Gulfstream.
Driving through light Saturday morning midtown traffic, we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel en route to Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey, when my cell phone rang. It was President Trump. I wasn’t surprised. He was the President, but we still spoke often, particularly lately, with the headlines crowded with salacious details about the President’s alleged affair with the porn star and my role in paying Daniels hush money. For more than a decade, I had been Trump’s fixer, through thick and thin, but this latest scandal was perhaps the hardest one I’d ever confronted, as it involved Trump as the leader of the United States government and all of the complications and jeopardies that included.
Over the years, I had become fluent in the language Trump used to communicate his desires and demands. He used inferences, nods, silences, euphemisms, signals. It was similar to how Trump never used email, for the simple reason that it created a digital fingerprint that would permanently record his words—and thus potentially ensnare him. Like a crime boss, Trump wanted no evidence that could connect him to any of his deeds, or deeds that he indirectly or directly ordered others to do. The same applied with conversations. If the President explicitly said what he wanted, or needed, it could potentially be used against him. Better to say nothing that could be held against you, but surround yourself with people who can translate your intentions. Trump’s mind was so permeated with deception and delusion—of others, but also of himself—that I had to be prepared to literally depart from reality and enter a kind of fantasyland when I spoke with the President.
“Michael, my man, how are you?” Trump asked.
“I’m well, Mr. President,” I replied, waiting to get the signals I was sure were coming. “How are things in DC?”
“Good, all good,” Trump said. “Listen, I have Melania on the line with us.”
“Hi Michael,” the First Lady said.
Melania Trump didn’t sound pleased to be on the phone. I knew Mrs. Trump well, and I could tell instantly from her tone of voice that she had been compelled to participate in the call. The reasons for her reluctance were understandable. In the press, I had claimed that I had paid Daniels from my own funds, as a way to protect Donald Trump—as a kind of selfless act meant to protect the then-candidate from a scurrilous and false accusation of sexual infidelity in the hothouse days before the election. My claim was risible on its face, but that was how the game was played, I knew: lies followed lies followed lies, a spiral of logic that inevitably sullied me and everyone else involved. But I sensed that the degrading process was about to hit yet another new low, and I was desperate to spare the First Lady from the humiliating charade that I could see was about to be played out.
To me, Melania was the epitome of class. Her life was dedicated to being a mother to Barron, and she was never shy about letting everyone know that, including DJT. That’s part of what made lying to her so difficult. Over the years, Mr. Trump would repeatedly have me call Melania to reaffirm his innocence when he was accused of cheating on her.
At the urging of the President, I started to recite the same story I’d told The New York Times. It was sickening that I was lying to another man’s wife about that man’s infidelity, crossing so many boundaries of basic decency it boggled the mind. The lies kept compounding, because I had been forced to lie to my wife about the funds, taking money out of our home equity line of credit on our Park Avenue apartment to disguise the use of the money; as I’ve said, Laura ran our family’s finances, and she wasn’t going to agree to spend a large amount of our money to cover up Donald Trump’s sexual escapades, whether I was going to be reimbursed or not, as I well knew.
As I talked, it seemed to me that it was almost like Trump believed the lies himself—as if he might actually believe that he hadn’t had sex with Stormy Daniels in 2006 and that he hadn’t repaid me the hush money. At the very least Trump didn’t care about the truth. If facts didn’t suit him, he denied them, changed them, invented them, and then seemingly believed them—to hell with reality—and I willingly played along. But that was only part of this strange marital dance. Like many wealthy women with unfaithful husbands, it appeared to me that Mrs. Trump preferred not to know what her partner really was up to, or to be forced to think about the implications of his behavior for their marriage and their son and her sense of dignity.
As I duly recited the lines about paying Daniels myself, at Trump’s prompting, speaking in the tone of a highly responsible attorney who had selflessly protected his client from the slings and arrows of vicious liars and scammers and their sleazy attorneys, Trump interrupted.
“Wait, are you telling me that you paid $130,000 from your own pocket?” he said to me, incredulously.
I again knew precisely what to say. “I did, sir,” I said, repeating again the lines about my sacrifice to protect the Trump campaign and my mentor’s reputation and marriage and good name.
Leading me on, Trump then asked a specific question about the Daniels accusations. Trump and I had been talking about the alleged affair since October of 2011, when the story about Daniels first surfaced in a blog called thedirty.com and a magazine called Life & Style. Now Trump asked about my first interactions with the attorney Keith Davidson, who then represented Ms. Daniels, so I dutifully recited how I had made the blog take down the report about Trump and the porn star years earlier, with signed denials from both parties. I explained how I had fought on Trump’s behalf to silence such a libelous and predatory fake story, feeling badly about baldly lying to Mrs. Trump, but also sure I had no choice.
As I droned on about the Daniels affair, I was interrupted by the First Lady.
“I know all of this,” she said curtly.
I stopped talking, shaking my head. It was evident to me that she didn’t believe the story, or want anything further to do with the transparent lies the President was childishly attempting to tell her via me. As usual with the Trumps when this kind of subject came up, in my experience, the First Lady changed the subject, this time to her son Barron and his new school in Washington. I was on the board of Barron’s school in Manhattan and I’d played an active role in making sure the youngest Trump had an excellent experience there, so the subject of education was safe territory for us. Mrs. Trump said that Barron loved his new school in DC, and I said how happy I was to hear that.
“I hope to see you the next time you’re at the White House,” Mrs. Trump said.
And with that she hung up, with the President remaining on the line. The President and I could have commiserated about how the attempt to fool the First Lady hadn’t worked, like a couple of frat bros lamenting the demands of women. We could have strategized about next steps in deceiving the nation about the true nature of the Daniels transaction. At the very least, we could have acknowledged the reality that two grown men—one the most powerful on the planet—had engaged in an inane and hopelessly inept attempt to lie. But that wasn’t how Trump operated. That would have required some self-awareness. He would have to say out loud that we both knew we were lying. Instead, as always, Trump insisted we keep up the charade, as if life itself was a vast, ongoing, never-ending game of deception.
“You’re the best, Michael,” Trump said. “Keep fighting this fight and I will be se
eing you soon.”
“Thank you for the call, Mr. President,” I said.
Hanging up, my friend turned to me. He had only heard one side of the conversation, but even to him it was obvious what had transpired.
“Do you think she believed you?” my friend asked.
“Not a chance,” I said. “Not a chance.”
* * *
Here’s an idea: why don’t I spare you all the nonsense involving Michael Avenatti and me? I hope the reviewers will take note of this tender mercy.
While Avenatti was taunting me on television and calling me an idiot, all leading to his own seemingly inevitable downfall, I was getting the best form of revenge possible: I was living well. After the election, I’d set myself up in the New York office of Squire Patton Boggs, a top-tier law firm located at Rockefeller Plaza, as a strategic alliance, which really meant the partners could brag to their clients that the personal attorney to the President of the United States was part of their outfit. I was also using my company, Essential Consultants, to take on clients like AT&T, Novartis, Columbus Nova, and BTA Bank—high-level companies desperate for insights and connections to the President and willing to pay for my assistance.
Was I cashing in on my relationship with Trump? Of course I was. What would you do? By March of 2018, to give but one example, I was brokering deals at the level of global, multi-billion-dollar transactions. Take the private dinner I had at Mar-a-Lago at the time, flying down to Florida in the private jet of Ben Ashkenazy, a real estate investor who runs a multi-billion-dollar fund with interests in the Plaza Hotel, Union Station in Washington, DC, and Faneuil Hall in Boston; he was the kind of dude who had Drake sing at his daughter’s bat mitzvah. Down in Palm Springs, I met with Franklin Haney, a Memphis businessman who’d long been a Democrat but who gave $1M to Trump’s inaugural committee and hired me to help finance a proposed nuclear power plant in Alabama. Haney also needed a ton of federal approvals to complete the project, which was where I came in to help and guide his attorneys greasing the wheels of commerce and government.
These were super-yacht types of people, and that constituted my reality under President Trump, so all the cable TV yapping from Avenatti and the tut-tuts on liberal cable networks were like water off a duck’s back. The real reason I’d come to Florida was to meet with Hamad bin Jassim, who had been the Prime Minister of Qatar from 2007 to 2013, the Foreign Minister from 1992 to 2013, and the CEO of the Qatar Investment Authority, or QIA, from 2005 to 2013. But those titles didn’t remotely describe his real authority, as the single person responsible for the disposition of the QIA’s $320 billion fund. That made him perhaps the only human being on the planet with power comparable to Vladimir Putin when it came to money and decision-making.
At the time, Qatar was being isolated by the Saudi Kingdom, and I was trying to put Hamad in the good graces of the President of the United States as a way for the tiny, mega-rich emirate to hedge their geopolitical risk. I knew Hamad from years earlier, when the Qataris had considering investing in a building in New York and I’d tried to broker the deal, but now I was treated entirely differently by the Emir and others as the lawyer for Donald Trump. Hamad was deferential and highly respectful of my role. When Hamad asked for a one-on-one sit down with Trump, I reached out to Jay Sekulow, a lawyer who’d represented Sean Hannity and whom I introduced to Trump, and had become his day-to-day point man for me in the White House.
There I was, going into Mar-a-Lago as the power broker who’d set up a meal between one of the richest men in the world and the President of the United States, and I’d done it with incredible ease. That was what I was talking about when I wrote about the mesmerizing effect of being around Trump: for all the bullshit and bluster, he really was running the world, and I really was an incredible, unbelievably, insanely powerful attorney and fixer, on an intergalactic plane of existence.
The dining room was packed with billionaires, like Nelson Peltz and Ike Perlmutter, but in that crowd, Trump was a God amongst Gods. In the middle of the room there was a single table, surrounded by red velvet rope to isolate it from the others, and there were three places set at the table—one for the President, one for Hamad, and one for me. The most powerful, the richest, and yours truly, a reality that I still can’t quite fathom to this day. Trump was likewise in a fantasyland, I could tell; he always had rich people floating around him, but now he was literally the center of attention, as he’d always wanted to be. The truth was that I felt like a billion dollars. I was unstoppable, I figured; all I had to do was ask, and there I was with one of the richest men in the world, deferentially awaiting the leader of the free world.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States,” one of the staff members announced, and in came Trump to a standing ovation. The only thing I can compare the rapturous reception to was the way North Koreans bow and scrape at the sight of Kim Jong-un.
“Hamad, you are one of the richest men in the world,” Trump said by way of introduction as he reached the table, “and you know my lawyer, Michael.”
The acknowledgement made me feel special, for sure. The conversation ranged from Middle East geopolitics to the economy, a level of abstraction about the world’s most important questions I’d only ever witnessed when I met Henry Kissinger. Hamad bin Jassim had deep knowledge about the needs of the region and the underlying reasons for the Sunni-Shiite division and the war in Yemen. The Emir talked about ISIS and Hezbollah and Iran and the justness of the cause of the Houthi insurgents in Yemen. Jared Kushner was working on a plan for an overall peace in the Middle East, at least in theory, but here the Emir was going directly to Trump to ensure that his views on the most pressing existential questions facing his nation were heard. He had good reason to want the meeting. Trump was close with the young Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, and the Saudis hated the Qataris, so Hamad meeting with Trump was an opportunity of infinite value.
Trump with Hamad bin Jassim. © 2020 Michael Cohen
Shrimp cocktail, steak, grilled salmon—the food was always excellent at Trump’s properties, and the dinner went on for a couple of hours, with my opinion sought on various questions by the President and Hamad. I could feel everyone in the room staring at the three of us at the table reverentially. So you think Avenatti and the porn star were on my mind? You think that nitwit calling me an idiot had any impact? I mean, who was the real idiot? I felt like I was staring at a Power Ball ticket and I had all the correct numbers and the jackpot was $700M. I was sure that Donald Trump had my back and in the end the whole Stormy Daniels mess would be a storm in a teacup. Nothing would happen to me, I was sure, no matter what.
As Trump, Hamad, and I made our way through the room after eating, I made sure to introduce him to Franklin Haney, the developer who was going to pay me a broker fee of $10M, plus a sizable fifteen percent interest in the company, if I assisted him in getting money for his nuclear plant. Hamad bin Jassim had just undertaken to invest up to $45 billion in the United States, so a simple $2 billion in Haney’s project seemed not only reasonable but highly likely.
A few days later, I was back in Manhattan, at the hotel rooms I’d taken for the family while we fixed up our apartment in Trump Park Avenue after a broken pipe in a neighbor’s place had burst. I wasn’t on the lam, as some have suggested, and my wife and I weren’t estranged, when I woke early on the morning of April 9, 2018, and roused my son Jake at six a.m. with a mixture of a kiss and WWE wrestling moves. I made coffee and oatmeal and turned on the TV and started to flip through The New York Times. By seven, Jake had gone to school, and I was walking around in Nike shorts and Laura was in her dressing gown when there was a knock on the door. I looked through the peep-hole and saw a crowd of men in the hallway holding up badges.
“FBI, Mr. Cohen,” one of them said. “Please open the door.”
Stepping inside as I obliged, two of the men grabbed me at my waist, to immob
ilize me.
“It’s okay,” the lead agent said. “Everything is fine.”
The lead agent explained that they had a warrant for the three hotel rooms my family occupied, along with my cell phones, office, safe deposit box, law office, and apartment.
“We know you have firearms,” the lead agent said to me. “How many?”
“Two,” I said.
“Loaded?”
“Yes,” I replied. “But not chambered.”
I showed them to the nightstand, where I kept both Glocks, the .40 caliber and 9mm.
To say I was in shock would be a huge understatement. I had no clue I was the target of an investigation, or that the Mueller Special Counsel had taken an interest in me. I was still in regular contact with President Trump, and in his good graces, and the attorney we had retained for our joint defense in case an issue came up had assured me that I wasn’t on the agenda for the prosecutions then being conducted in secret. The Avenatti nonsense was going full throttle, I knew, but it was all white noise to me. I’d just had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with the President and one of the richest men in the world; I was bulletproof, I thought.
There were now dozens of agents swarming the hotel and pulling all my books and records off the shelves, downloading my computers, going through my drawers shooting photographs and taking personal items. My first thought as I watched in disbelief was simple: What the fuck, am I El Chapo all of a sudden, some narcotrafficker outlaw on the Most Wanted List? Laura and I just sat on the bed and watched the news on TV, where talking heads were holding forth on Stormy Daniels and me—oblivious to the raid and what was about to become the single biggest story in the world.
Disloyal: A Memoir Page 31