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Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen as he leaves the courtroom in New York on Tuesday.
1 / 2Photo: Stefan Jeremiah/AP/TT
Donald Trump ordered his associates to falsely inflate the value of his assets.
This is stated by the ex-president’s former personal lawyer and “fixer”, now an adversary, Michael Cohen in court.
Cohen was there to testify in the fraud case against his former boss. He, Trump, was also in the courtroom at Tuesday’s hearing. It was the first time the two met face to face since Cohen was sentenced to prison in 2018.
The pair avoided eye contact during most of Cohen’s questioning in the civil case in New York, where a judge has already found Trump guilty. Both Donald Trump and his two eldest sons have been declared to have exaggerated the value of their real estate assets in order to obtain more favorable loans and insurance contracts.
– I was instructed by Mr. Trump to increase the total value of the assets based on a figure he arbitrarily chose, Cohen said during the hearing.
Trump: “Disgraced criminal”
Cohen, who admitted that he himself was complicit in the alleged fraud, also stated that Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg was.
Trump leads. amid several pending lawsuits, the battle within the Republican Party to become the party’s presidential nominee. He dismissed his former confidant as negotiations drew to a close, calling him a “disgraced criminal”.
Lawyer Cohen worked for Trump for twelve years, until 2018, and was for a long time one of Trump’s most loyal associates. But after serving a prison sentence for tax evasion and lying to Congress, he switched sides. He became something of a star witness against his old boss.
Called Trump a con man
Among other things, Cohen has called Donald Trump a fraud and a racist. Cohen claims that before the 2016 election, Trump instructed him to pay women who alleged they had affairs with then-businessman Trump to keep quiet. Trump also allegedly ordered Cohen to lie and say the president knew nothing about the payments.
Now there is a civil trial in which Judge Arthur Engoron has previously ruled that Donald Trump and his sons are guilty: By boasting and outright lying about their assets, including the value of real estate, they have obtained favorable contracts, lower interest on loans and lower insurance premiums for their companies.
Trump not yet questioned
What must now be decided is how, among other things, how large the fine will be and whether members of the Trump family will be charged with a form of food ban in New York.
Trump himself has not yet testified in the trial. But he has appeared in court and raged against prosecutor Letitia James and the process.
– A scam and a shame, he said of it at the beginning of October.
Letitia James has claimed that the Trumps put the overvaluations of their own assets into the system between 2011 and 2021, thereby greatly enriching themselves and their business operations. She believes that the fine amount for this should be at least 250 million dollars, i.e. around 2.6 billion kroner.
FACT Michael Cohen
57-year-old Michael Cohen is a trained lawyer, but after admitting to crimes, is suspended from working as a lawyer.
From 2006 to the spring of 2018, Cohen worked for the businessman, later the president, Donald Trump. The two men had a very close collaboration, and Cohen became known as Trump’s “fixer”.
In August 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to several crimes related to working for Trump, including tax evasion and violating campaign finance laws.
Cohen was sentenced in December 2018 to three years in prison. Due to the covid pandemic, parts of the sentence were converted to house arrest.
In 2019, Michael Cohen turned himself in and began cooperating with investigators. Among other things, he has testified about ex-president Trump’s actions before the election in 2016. He and Trump have sued each other and Cohen has also written a book, “Disloyal” (Disloyal) about his time with Donald Trump.
Sources: NBC, CNBC and others
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