We knew Michael Cohen was trouble when he walked in

Once upon a time, a few mistakes ago, Michael Cohen was a partner at a mid-sized New York law firm who had operated and then sold a taxi medallion business. But when he successfully handled a board dispute in his luxury apartment building, he caught the eye of its developer: Donald Trump.

Leave that “sleepy old firm,” Trump implored him, according to Cohen’s testimony before a New York court on Tuesday. And so in 2007, Cohen joined the Trump Organization as an executive vice president and “special counsel” to Trump personally, launching what we’ve come to know as the Michael Cohen/Donald Trump opera.

Of course, what happened over the next decade-plus is now the stuff of lore. Cohen, who was so loyal to Trump that he infamously boasted he would take a bullet for the man, was left lying on the cold, hard ground — ultimately going to prison and losing his law license — after participating in a variety of unlawful schemes to protect and promote Trump. 

But Cohen has never been charged, much less punished for his role in the scheme at issue at this trial. He not only readily admits his role in, but more importantly, he was the first to reveal the pattern of misrepresentations and exaggerations about Trump’s assets that lies at the center of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ ongoing civil fraud trial against Trump and others. Those claims — the most important of which the attorney general won before trial even started — could result in a range of dramatic penalties for Trump and his businesses, including their potential dissolution and sale.

And that’s why Cohen, who had not been in the same room with his former boss for more than five years, found himself in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday for what he jokingly described as a “heck of a reunion.” 

But before Cohen could testify to his own and Trump’s direct, knowing participation in inflating certain assets and minimizing liabilities for the sake of obtaining favorable bank loans and insurance policies, he first had to address what charitably could be called a credibility issue: His longstanding, public insistence that he did not actually commit some of the crimes, namely tax evasion and making false statements to a federally-insured bank, to which he pleaded guilty in 2018. 

When Colleen Faherty, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office, asked Cohen if he had “ever made public statements concerning the legitimacy of those convictions,” Cohen smilingly responded, “More than one,” before detailing why he maintains he did not, in fact, commit the tax evasion or make a false statement to a federally-insured bank that he publicly admitted in open court years ago

In essence, Cohen testified in a more gentle and subtle way to what Trump lawyer Alina Habba more dramatically and directly forced him to admit on cross: That, in pleading guilty in 2018, he testified under oath to conduct he now disavows. Habba then presented Cohen with the trial witness’s version of Sophie’s choice; either he was lying then, under oath, to a federal judge or he is lying now. Cohen, unabashed, confirmed that he lied then. And while the building blocks of that admission have been in the public domain for years, hearing Cohen unambiguously testify under oath in one court that he lied under oath to another court was nonetheless shocking. The experienced journalist sitting next to me even gasped aloud.

Given his messiness on the stand, something any watcher of cable news could have anticipated, why then would the attorney general call Cohen? That’s especially worth asking because Cohen is hardly the central witness Team Trump makes him out to be. Indeed, the attorney general already won before the trial even started on its core claim — that Trump, his former CFO Allen Weisselberg, former Trump Org comptroller Jeff McConney, Trump sons Eric and Don Jr., and various Trump companies engaged in a yearslong, persistent fraud through Trump’s statements of financial condition — by citing documents, not testimony, let alone Cohen’s testimony. 

But Cohen is important to the six claims that remain, each of which necessitate proof of the defendants’ intent. And given that Trump did not communicate over email, text, or even, for the most part, handwritten notes but through direct instructions only to a small inner circle, Cohen’s testimony matters. Specifically, Cohen’s account is that Trump himself not only intended to misrepresent his net worth, but was the architect of that fraud. Put another way, Cohen was in the rooms where it happened — and he might be the only person who will testify truthfully to what went down.

That’s why the AG’s office took the risk of offering Cohen, flaws and all, as a witness. On Tuesday, he methodically testified to his participation, over several years and at Trump’s express directive, in “reverse engineering” the value of Trump’s assets in order to meet Trump’s asserted net worth objective for each of those years. Weisselberg, for his part, denied those conversations took place or that Cohen played anything more than the most ancillary role in the statements of financial condition. Cohen also admitted that with Trump’s knowledge and on his behalf, Cohen and others, including Weisselberg, presented the resulting — and deceptive — statements of financial condition to insurance brokers and underwriters and at least two banks: Deutsche Bank, Trump’s longtime lender, and Morgan Stanley, which served as financial adviser to the NFL’s Buffalo Bills when Trump made his failed bid to buy that team in 2014.

Whether Cohen’s testimony is, on balance, credible once Habba is done with her cross-examination remains to be seen. With anywhere from a few hours to days left in Cohen’s star turn, watch this space.