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Mark and Jeff are joined by one of the most famous state’s witnesses in political history. Michael Cohen has gone from spending 12 years as Donald Trump’s “fixer” to being a key witness for multiple criminal investigations of the ex-President.
Cohen was a vice-president of the Trump Organization, and the personal counsel to Trump. He served as co-president of Trump Entertainment and was a board member of the Eric Trump Foundation, a children’s health charity. From 2017 to 2018, Cohen was deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Trump employed Cohen until May 2018, a year after the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections began. The investigation led Cohen to plead guilty on August 21, 2018, to eight counts including campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud. Cohen’s indictment cited an unindicted co-conspirator, “Individual-1”, who Cohen identified as Trump. Cohen said he violated campaign finance laws at the direction of Trump and “for the principal purpose of influencing” the 2016 presidential election. In November 2018, Cohen entered a second guilty plea for lying to a Senate committee about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
He was sentenced to three years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations. Cohen was released from prison early due to concerns regarding COVID-19, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest.
Cohen is author of the New York Times best-seller “Disloyal: A Memoir” and hosts the podcast “Mea Culpa.”
Cohen, a native New Yorker, is a graduate of Lansing’s Thomas M. Cooley School of Law (now WMU Cooley School of Law).