Defense attorneys for former President Donald Trump cross-examined former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on Oct. 25, seeking to establish a pattern of Mr. Cohen lying under oath to discredit him as a witness, a day after Mr. Cohen had testified that the former president had him inflate asset values on the Trump Organization’s statements of financial condition (SFC).
Mr. Cohen, a key witness for New York state in its civil fraud trial against the former president, eventually backtracked on his claim and said that he couldn’t “recall” President Trump “overtly” asking him to inflate numbers.
Mr. Cohen served as President Trump’s personal attorney for 12 years, during which time he gave many interviews to reporters about his boss’s track record as a leader and businessman. Then, in 2018, after getting swept up in an FBI investigation into associates of President Trump, Mr. Cohen broke from his former employer publicly, attacking him in the media and making claims that led to a criminal and civil suit against President Trump in New York.
The current trial deals with one of the allegations made by Mr. Cohen that the Trump Organization’s SFCs were artificially inflated to garner better deals from insurers and banks.
New York Attorney General Letitia James investigated the Trump Organization for three years after Mr. Cohen had made those claims in testimony before Congress. She’s suing President Trump for fraud, asking for $250 million in damages and to bar him and other Trump Organization executives, including his adult sons, from holding executive business posts in New York.
New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron had already ruled in a pretrial summary judgment that President Trump is liable for fraud, canceling his business certificates and ordering the dissolution of the Trump Organization and related limited liability companies. The trial will deal with how much President Trump owes in penalties, although the dissolution of his businesses has been paused pending appeal.
On Oct. 25, Justice Engoron also warned President Trump over a gag order that the judge had issued on Oct. 3 prohibiting both parties from making statements about Justice Engoron’s staff. During a break in the trial, President Trump had made remarks about “a person who is very partisan sitting alongside him, perhaps even more partisan than he is.” His attorney said that President Trump had been speaking about Mr. Cohen, and the judge said that didn’t seem to be the case but that he would take it under advisement.
Testimony
Prosecutors questioned Mr. Cohen on Oct. 24, and he testified that he had worked on the SFCs for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.“I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected,” he testified on Oct. 24. “And my responsibility, along with Allen Weisselberg predominantly, was to reverse-engineer the various asset classes, increase those assets in order to achieve the number that Mr. Trump had tasked us, whatever number Mr. Trump told us.”
Mr. Cohen testified that President Trump would say in meetings something such as “I’m actually not worth $4 billion, I’m worth 6 [billion dollars],” directing Mr. Cohen and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg to revise the SFCs accordingly.
He and Mr. Weisselberg would then “inflate” the values of various assets until they hit the total figure President Trump had requested, he said.
The assets included Trump Tower, Trump Park Avenue, Seven Springs, the Miss Universe Pageant, and sometimes other properties.
Mr. Cohen claimed that Trump Organization comptroller Jeff McConney would sometimes be involved, as well as President Trump’s three adult children, to the extent that they had spearheaded the development of some of these properties and may have been asked about their values. Defense attorneys objected, pointing out that Mr. Cohen was attributing these claims to conversations that they had had with Mr. Weisselberg, not with him.
Backtracking
When Mr. Cohen was cross-examined on Oct. 25, he contradicted his Oct. 24 testimony a number of times. For instance, when defense attorney Alina Habba asked whether Mr. Cohen took pen to paper to make the changes to the SFCs instead of doing it on a computer, he said, “No.” After she pulled up the transcript of his Oct. 24 testimony, Mr. Cohen backtracked, saying that wasn’t what he understood her question to be,Mr. Cohen appeared to be an evasive witness, often answering Ms. Habba’s questions with questions of his own, refusals to answer, or statements that didn’t answer the question. That held up the cross-examination, and irritated the judge.
During the cross-examination, Mr. Cohen admitted that he had lied several times while under oath beyond his pleading guilty to lying to Congress.
He said that he had pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges to take a plea but that he didn’t believe he was guilty of those charges. He also said that he had lied to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2019, when he had said that he “did not recall” President Trump or Mr. Weisselberg asking him to inflate numbers in the SFCs.
He also said during a deposition that Mazars accountant Donald Bender was “continuously” at Trump Tower offices, and then denied during the cross-examination that he had said it.
“There’s nothing wrong with calling a liar a liar,” Trump attorney Christopher Kise said. “Perjury is perjury. The attorney general is trying to cover for a defective witness.”
Ms. Habba then pulled up several interviews that Mr. Cohen had given to the media over the years, which spanned from glowing endorsements of President Trump when Mr. Cohen was his personal attorney, to attacks from 2018 onward.
Mr. Cohen also testified that the majority of his income now comes from his podcast, books, and media interviews, which currently all focus on President Trump and the trial.
“Mr. Cohen, you have a financial incentive to criticize President Trump, don’t you?” Ms. Habba asked.
“Yes,” he answered.
President Trump later spoke to reporters, saying that Mr. Cohen had been “discredited” as a witness.
