What Michael Cohenʼs Testimony Will Tell Us About Trumpʼs Business, Bluster, and Wealth | The New Yorker

03/03/2019, 6*27 PM

Swamp Chronicles

What Michael Cohen’s

Testimony Will Tell Us
About Trump’s Business,
Bluster, and Wealth
By Adam Davidson February 27, 2019

Donald
ichael Cohen is a bad man. He was a bad man before he met Donald
M Trump, he remained a bad man afterward, and he became, if anything,
Trump
even worse after Trump started running for President. Michael Cohen has—it
seems possible—become penitent and regretful about one aspect of his badness,
speci!cally the bad things that he did for Trump over the past twelve years. Yet
he has remained de!antly silent on the many, many other bad things he has
done. When he leaves prison (he is scheduled to start a three-year sentence in
May), he will remain a very rich man, wealthy from a decade of grifting.

On Wednesday, Cohen will try to be a hero of this age, in the Greek sense of the
hero: a "awed man with special powers, brought low by his own hubris, who
Donald
moves the plot forward. It could be his greatest act of heroism. During his
Trump
testimony, he will—he claims—lay bare many things that he knows about
Trump, and he will bring proof. He will bring receipts that show that Trump
knowingly reimbursed Cohen for his contribution to an illegal scheme to silence

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What Michael Cohenʼs Testimony Will Tell Us About Trumpʼs Business, Bluster, and Wealth | The New Yorker 03/03/2019, 6*27 PM

a woman with whom Trump had an affair. He will tell us, in detail, Trump’s view
of America, the Presidency, African-Americans, and how, Cohen says, Trump
said that running for President was the “greatest infomercial in political history.”
Most important, perhaps, Cohen will provide something that followers of the
special counsel’s
special counsel’s investigation have desperately wanted: actual !nancial
statements from 2011 to 2013, a period when the Trump Organization was
engaged in a range of suspicious business practices around the world.

Republicans are already seeking to impeach Cohen’s testimony, to reveal him to

be a liar and a criminal. That will be easy to do. Cohen went to one of the worst
law schools in America, and then spent years working alongside a string of
lawyers and others who would go on to be convicted of crimes. His !rst legal job
was with a lawyer who later pleaded guilty to bribing insurance adjusters. Later,
Cohen worked with a doctor convicted of insurance fraud. Cohen also worked
closely
special with taxicab moguls, including his father-in-law, who would be convicted
counsel’s
of crimes. Cohen himself remained unindicted. (His life story is told beautifully
in an episode of the podcast “Trump, Inc.”) And Cohen, surely, has lied
constantly, including before the very committee that hosts him today. Before his
"ip away from Trump, Cohen was a voluble but duplicitous source for countless
reporters, who knew that Cohen would always answer his phone and would
always talk (and always lie). But his mendacity was so obvious and easily proved
that the falsehoods acted, often, as con!rmations. And he is, of course, a
convicted felon going to prison. If the Republicans are wise—though they likely
won’t be—they could use some restraint, and let Cohen impeach himself.

Yet Cohen’s testimony is a de!ning moment, even if we dismiss every unveri!ed

claim—his accounts
episode of overhearing, from Trump, racist comments and a con
of the podcast
man’s disdain for his country—and consider only the documentary evidence.
Most telling of all, perhaps, is the fact that Cohen—this scheming, awful man—
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What Michael Cohenʼs Testimony Will Tell Us About Trumpʼs Business, Bluster, and Wealth | The New Yorker 03/03/2019, 6*27 PM

is the person the President retained as his private lawyer until just last year. This
is the company the President keeps; this is who he is.

There is a !nal fact about Cohen that should also be kept in mind. Cohen was
not a singular !gure in the Trump Organization. He doesn’t bring all the goods.
According to his publicly !led records, Trump has more than !ve hundred
separate lines of business, and Cohen, it seems, was involved in only a handful of
them. His testimony on Wednesday should not be thought of as the full
accounting of the inner workings of Trump’s world. Much of what Cohen has to
say he learned by overhearing a conversation or taking note of a brief aside. He
apparently has !nancial records from 2011 through 2013, but doesn’t, it appears,
have documents from any other year. (This is because Cohen played a role in an
application for a loan from Deutsche Bank.) He wasn’t a central player in the
business with access to all the documentation. The true insiders—Allen
Weisselberg, Jason Greenblatt, George Sorial, and the older Trump children—
know far more about every aspect of the Trump business than Cohen does.

Wednesday’s testimony is a huge moment in Trump’s Presidency. It is unlikely,

though, to diminish the country’s political chasm. Cohen will be dismissed by
the President and his allies as a liar trying to reduce his prison sentence. Trump’s
supporters will continue to back him. But it will be a kind of accounting, under
oath and before the world, from Cohen that we haven’t had yet. It is only a
beginning, a timid beginning, that both gives new information and is also a
crucial performance, a visual image of Trump’s indecency that will be
remembered for generations. It is unlikely to be the last.

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What Michael Cohenʼs Testimony Will Tell Us About Trumpʼs Business, Bluster, and Wealth | The New Yorker 03/03/2019, 6*27 PM

Adam Davidson is a staff writer at The New

Yorker. Read more »

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