Michael Cohen

Michael Cohen (born August 25, 1966, Lawrence, New York, U.S.) Michael Cohen is a disbarred American lawyer who served as a personal attorney, confidante, and informal problem solver, or “fixer,” for Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States (2017–21), from approximately 2006 to 2018. Cohen was also a senior executive of the Trump Organization, a private conglomerate of Trump-owned corporations and partnerships. In August 2018 Cohen pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges related to his involvement in hush money payments in 2016 to an adult film actress, Stormy Daniels, and a model, Karen McDougal, each of whom claimed to have had an affair with Trump some 10 years earlier. Cohen testified at his trial that Trump had directed him to make or arrange payments to Daniels and McDougal. In May 2024 Cohen was the star prosecution witness in Trump’s own trial in Manhattan on 34 state felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal his reimbursement of Cohen for the latter’s hush money payment to Daniels. On May 30, 2024, Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts.

Education and early career

Cohen grew up in Lawrence, New York, a largely Jewish community on the south shore of Long Island. Cohen’s mother, Sondra, was a nurse, and his father, Maurice, was a Polish-born surgeon who had survived the Holocaust. Classmates at the private school Cohen attended remembered him as an average but gregarious student.

In his teens, Cohen was heavily influenced by his uncle, Morty Levine, who owned hotels, restaurants, real estate, summer camps, and a number of luxury cars. Cohen worked as a lifeguard at the El Caribe Country Club in Brooklyn, one of his uncle’s businesses. After high school, Cohen left Long Island to attend American University in Washington, D.C. (B.A., 1988), and later the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan (Juris Doctor, 1991).

In 1992 Cohen moved to New York City and was hired by Melvyn Estrin, a personal injury lawyer in Manhattan. Less than three years after Cohen’s arrival, Estrin was indicted on charges of having bribed insurance adjusters to increase damage estimates and expedite claims (he eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree bribery). Cohen was not implicated in the crimes. In 1995 Cohen left Estrin’s firm and established his own personal injury practice.

From the late 1990s Cohen acquired a number of valuable taxicab medallions, or permits—some of which he owned jointly with his wife, the Soviet émigré Laura Shusterman, whom he had married in 1994. During this period Cohen used a taxicab garage in Queens as his law office.

Trump’s personal attorney

Cohen developed an association with Trump in the 2000s through real estate. He had begun using the money he had gained from taxicab medallions and his law practice to purchase apartments in various Trump-owned buildings, including Trump World Tower, Trump Palace, and Trump Park Avenue. In 2006, after Cohen helped Trump regain control of the condominium board at Trump World Tower, Trump offered him a job with the Trump Organization. Cohen became an executive vice president of the conglomerate and a special counsel—in practice, Trump’s personal attorney—with an office near that of his boss in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

In addition to helping with business transactions, Cohen spent much of his time aggressively confronting Trump’s rivals and critics, including reporters, and threatening them with lawsuits. In an interview with ABC News in 2011, Cohen famously declared:

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If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit. If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.

From 2010, Cohen also worked closely with the tabloid newspaper National Enquirer to protect and burnish Trump’s reputation and to promote Trump as a potential presidential candidate.

In 2016, when Trump ran for president, Cohen often appeared on television as his client’s spokesperson, though he was not officially involved in the campaign. That year he also made or arranged hush money payments to Daniels and McDougal, whose claims of having had affairs with Trump soon after he married Melania Knauss (the future first lady Melania Trump) in 2005 represented a serious threat to Trump’s campaign. Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 out of his own pocket, while McDougal was paid $150,000 by American Media, Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer.

Criminal conviction and break with Trump

In 2018 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Cohen’s properties, seizing business records and recordings of telephone conversations between Cohen and his clients, including Trump. Cohen was then being investigated on federal charges of tax evasion, bank fraud, and violating campaign finance law in connection with the hush money payments to Daniels and McDougal. Cohen’s guilty plea on eight criminal counts in August that year marked a definitive break with Trump: as part of his plea, Cohen implicated the president in his crimes, saying he had violated campaign finance laws “at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” In November Cohen also pleaded guilty to charges of lying to House and Senate committees when he testified that Trump’s efforts to build a skyscraper in Moscow had ended in January 2016, before the start of the Iowa presidential caucuses. In December Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison, and in February 2019 he was disbarred by the Supreme Court of New York. He began serving his sentence in May 2019 but was released to home confinement in the spring of 2020 because of concerns about the spread of COVID-19.

In October 2023 Cohen testified in Trump’s trial on civil charges of business fraud related to his misrepresentation of the value of his properties and other assets to secure favorable loan and insurance rates and to minimize his tax liabilities. Cohen said that he had helped to boost estimates of Trump’s assets to “whatever number Trump told us to.” Trump was found liable and was later ordered to pay more than $350 million in penalties and interest.

In May 2024, during the final days of Trump’s trial on criminal charges of falsifying business records related to the hush money payment to Daniels, Cohen described in detail Trump’s alleged involvement in the scheme to silence both Daniels and McDougal and to disguise his reimbursement of Cohen as the payment of a series of regular attorney’s fees by the Trump Organization. In response, Trump’s lawyers attempted to undermine Cohen’s testimony by pointing to his criminal record and casting him as a habitual liar. Their efforts were apparently unsuccessful, as the jury in the trial found Trump guilty.