Michael Cohen Signals He’s Ready to Turn on Trump

Cohen is the personald attorney of Donaldl Trump.  He’s the attorney who has recently become subject to a criminal investigation after his home, hotel room, and office were raided.  FBI agents have suspected Cohen made or coordinated  payments ahead of the 2016 election to silence women with which Trump allegedly had affairs. Despite Cohen’s professed loyalty, Trump allies have expressed their concerns that Cohen will testify against Trump when he is faced with legal bills of his own, and with the prospect of spending decades in jail.

So, the burning question is who is Cohen; would he turn on Trump; and does he know enough to be the end of Trump?

Cohen described himself as:  “I’m the guy who protects the president and the family. I’m the guy who would take a bulletfor the president.”  He has established himself as a very aggressive and threatening advocate for Trump.  “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.”

“I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”

His profane threats to protect Trump are epic.  He calls himself the “fix-it guy.”

Cohen was born in 1966 in Long Island, New York, the son of an immigrant who escaped a Nazi concentration camp in Poland. He attended college at American University. Afterward, he got a law degree from the little-known Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan.  After a brief stint at a personal injury law firm, Cohen opened up a solo practice.

Cohen’s personal life and business interests are both enmeshed in a community of Ukrainian immigrants in New York City. Both Cohen and his brother Bryan married Ukrainian immigrants.  Both did business with their wives’ fathers. Cohen and a Ukrainian partner began buying up taxi medallions (the expensive city-issued permits necessary to operate taxis).

Cohen was involved in the negotiation of Trump Organization business deals with oligarchs in Russia and Kazakhstan. Even before he connected with Trump, Cohen had family ties to people in the Russian underworld. His uncle, Morton Levine, ran a Brooklyn social club that was a popular meeting place for Italian and Russian mobsters in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the headquarters of Boris Nayfeld, once the most feared Russian crime boss in the U.S.

Cohen is also a longtime friend of Trump business associate Felix Sater, who pleaded guilty to his involvement in a money-laundering scheme with the Russian mob before helping develop the Trump SoHo hotel. (According to the F.B.I., Sater’s father was a right-hand man of Russian mafia chieftain Semion Mogilevich, considered to be the “boss of bosses” overseeing Russian organized crime worldwide.)

Cohen legally represented something called the Ukrainian Capital Growth Fund.  Cohen and two Ukrainian partners made failed investments in a gambling cruise business.  He tried to entice US investors to fund a Ukrainian ethanol company controlled by an allegedly mob-connected oligarch.

Yet the occasional strange incident occurred along the way. At one point in 1999, Cohen cashed a $350,000 check an NHL player wrote as a loan for a Russian woman. But the woman never got the money, and in a later deposition, Cohen was unable to explain what happened to it, as Anthony Cormier of BuzzFeed News (who, along with his colleagues, has done a lot of great work reporting on Cohen’s past business ties) reported last year.

The Daily Beast prepared a story about an old Ivana Trump deposition in which she said Donald Trump had raped her. Asked to respond, Cohen (falsely) asserted that legally, “you cannot rape your spouse” under New York state law.  Cohen went on to profanely threaten the reporter who wrote the story saying:

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”

“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up … for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet … you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it.”