Disloyal

by Michael Cohen

  The Russians bought the house from Trump for $95 million in 2008, an inflated price paid on the eve of the real estate collapse and global financial crisis, at the time the largest price ever paid for a private residence in the United States. Trump told me that the price hadn’t really been an issue. He explained that the Russians weren’t really spending their own money when they made their excessive purchases of European soccer teams and super yachts and Central Park South penthouses. The oligarchs could enjoy the assets, but always and forever at the pleasure of Vladimir Putin, the new tsar, and displeasing him meant risking their fortunes but also their lives.

  “The oligarchs are just fronts for Putin,” Trump told me. “He puts them into wealth to invest his money. That’s all they are doing—investing Putin’s money.”

  Trump was convinced the real buyer of Maison de l’Amitie was Vladimir Putin.

  “There’s a bank in Switzerland that’s got one and only one customer,” Trump told me.

  “There are rumors about that,” I replied.

  “I know it for a fact,” Trump replied. “Putin is worth more than a trillion dollars.”

  As the election wore on, I began to believe that Trump secretly wanted Putin’s kind of power for himself, which is part of why I’m convinced he won’t leave office voluntarily—but I will get to that subject in due course. To Trump, Putin was like the Saudi royal family, or Kim Jong-un in North Korea: the incarnation of dynastic wealth and the real ruling class of the planet. Everyone other than the ruling class on the earth was like an ant, to his way of thinking, their lives meaningless and always subject to the whims of the true rulers of the world. Murdering an American green-card-holding journalist of Saudi dissent writing for the Washington Post by luring him to an embassy in Turkey and butchering his body—that was just fine by Trump, as the world saw in the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a crime that has had precisely zero impact on American foreign policy with the Saudis. Here was what Trump would say when informed of the killing of a journalist: “What the fuck do I care? He shouldn’t have written what he did. He should have shut the fuck up.”

  The cosmic joke was that Trump convinced a vast swathe of working-class white folks in the Midwest that he cared about their well-being. The truth was that he couldn’t care less. I don’t mean that as speculation or an opinion. That was a stone-cold fact during the 2016 campaign and throughout Trump’s presidency to this very day. To Trump, his voters are his audience, his chumps, his patsies, his base. Guns, criminalizing abortion—Trump took up those conservative positions not because he believed in them but because they were his path to power. That was what I meant when I told Congress that Trump is a con man.

  Speaking of which, let me address my own credibility for a moment before I dive into the Russian idiocy. Because I’m so often portrayed as a serial liar and an unreliable narrator, please allow me to quote from the Mueller Report. The section I will cite only appeared in a footnote, which was the ultimate example of how an accusation always gets the front-page headline and the correction ends up in small print long after the damage has been done. Here is what Mueller and his team said about my cooperation after I agreed to proffer evidence to them, in particular regarding the Trump-Russia nexus and the Moscow Tower, buried in footnote 909 in Volume Two of the report—not exactly the front page of The New York Times.

  “The Office found Cohen’s testimony in these subsequent proffer sessions to be consistent with and corroborated by other information obtained in the course of the Office’s investigation. The Office sentencing submission in Cohen’s criminal case stated: ‘Starting with his second meeting with [the Special Counsel’s Office] in September, 2018, the defendant accepted responsibility not only for his false statements concerning the [Trump Tower] Moscow Project, but also in his broader efforts through false statement and testimony before Congress to minimize his role and what he knew about contacts between the [Trump Organization] and Russian interests during the course of the campaign . . . The defendant, without prompting by the [Special Counsel’s Office], also corrected other false and misleading statements that he had made concerning his outreach in and contacts with Russian officials during the course of the campaign.”

  Compare and contrast that with Trump’s insistent refrain that collusion with Russia was a “hoax” and he had “no business in Russia.” Who do you think you should believe? Remember, I was talking to Mueller’s lawyers under oath and on pain of perjury, perhaps an ironic statement given my present circumstances, but I can assure you that I was not going to lie or shade the truth when I cooperated with the authorities—and I won’t here, either. This is the straight-up truth, no ice, no mixer, just a shot of reality.

  To that end, let me clarify once and for all questions about my travels to Europe during the 2016 campaign, and in the years before. First, I have never been to Prague. Never, ever, not once. In 2002, I traveled to Ukraine with my brother to help him with a business opportunity he was pursuing with his father-in-law, but I was really there as support and comfort for him, not as a business principal, and I met precisely zero people involved in politics in any capacity. I also traveled to Zurich around the same time in 2002, as I told a New York Times journalist, Meghan Twohey, when the Russia story blew up and Christopher Steele’s dossier was published in the weeks after the election. Despite protestations to the Editor-in-Chief, the story was wrongly reported as an admission that I went to Prague—but again, I don’t want to rush ahead.

  The reason Felix Sater approached me in September was easy to understand: the Trump kids hated him, and he knew it. He’d brought terrible publicity to the Trump family through the Trump Soho project from the very start in 2007, when his criminal history was revealed in The New York Times, mortifying the supposedly aristocratic Trump children, who were in charge of the sales and marketing effort for the building. The kids had proceeded to pump sales of the condos in Trump Soho, after the global crash of 2008 blindsided the Trump Organization, by telling potential buyers that “more than half” of the units had been sold, when the truth was that fewer than twenty percent had been purchased—potentially committing fraud in the process.

  To say that Felix had an unusual resume would be an understatement. His attorney provided me with a five-page letter describing his accomplishments as a cooperating witness for the federal government and an international man of mystery. He’d thwarted an assassination attempt on former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and he’d testified to Congress during Condoleeza Rice’s confirmation hearings, but the most incredible was the claim that he’d located Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attack hiding in a cave in the mountains of Tora Bora. That’s correct, as crazy as it sounds, but that was Felix, a kind of global grifter trying to convince billionaires to do deals with him, for a commission.

  The Trump kids wouldn’t deal with Sater, but the Boss had no compunction about working with a man with a felony assault conviction and extremely dubious track record, back channeling to shady Russian oligarchs, in the middle of a presidential campaign, no less. Trump just wanted to know the terms of the deal and how much money he could make, risk free. The answer was a lot. The Russian deal started with a Letter of Intent, signed in September of 2015, which laid out the benefits for Trump, no money down. LOIs, as Letters of Intent are known, really amounted to a statement of hope, rather than a binding legal agreement. Trump was to receive a payment of $4 million up front under the LOI, and, in addition, a cut of the revenues worth hundreds of millions of dollars. More importantly, Trump would finally achieve his dream of a branded skyscraper in the capital city of the former Soviet Union.

  “Just make sure his name doesn’t show up anywhere in the documents,” Trump told me regarding Sater.

  I went down to the 25th floor to discuss the proposed deal with Don Jr. The three children had identical offices in a row, ranked by seniority of age, with Don Jr. first, Ivanka in the middle, and Eric at the end of the line. The
offices were furnished identically, with modern minimalist design and views of Fifth Avenue.

  “Felix Sater brought me the deal,” I told Don Jr. “I’ve already spoken with your Dad and he says it’s okay as long as Sater’s name doesn’t show up anywhere.”

  “Okay,” Don Jr. said. “I don’t have a problem with Felix but I agree his name shouldn’t be anywhere.”

  “We’re going to go over to Russia,” I said. “Think about how great it’s going to be running off to Moscow on a multi-year deal.”

  “I love it,” Don Jr. said. “Keep me in the loop.”

  Don Jr. said he’d let Ivanka and Eric know about the Moscow Tower at their next weekly meeting. I made five copies of the LOI, one on the Trump letterhead for execution, and walked the documents to each of the Trump family principals. Ivanka was the least positive about the potential deal, with nothing good to say about doing business with Sater.

  “I don’t like him,” she told me. “I don’t trust him. He’s just a bad guy.”

  “The economics of the deal are very favorable,” I said. “The LOI is non-binding and we have full termination rights at any time. I’ll keep you updated on the location of the proposed site.”

  “As long as it’s non-binding,” Ivanka said. “I want this terminated at the first inkling of trouble.”

  Ivanka kept a hands-off policy at first, until she found out there was a plan to include a 20,000-square-foot health-and-wellness center called the Ivanka Spa. She started to want to work on the design, not just for the spa but for the whole building, rejecting the drawings I’d had a New York City architect work up for a tower that looked like the Washington Monument obelisk, only in dark glass. Ivanka wanted to hire Zaha Hadid, the British starchitect famous for her curved structures, and Trump’s elder daughter was soon working on the interior design following a spare modern look. Trump hated modern architecture, preferring his gilded aesthetic. With the Trump Organization being paid an escalating commission based on the costs of the project, and always with an eye trained on making more money, Ivanka was soon adding expensive details like high-end glass finishes.

  A mockup of Trump Tower Moscow. © 2020 Michael Cohen

  I liked Ivanka, but she has always been very cautious and protective of her image and appearance, and even more so in recent years. Before Ivanka married Jared Kushner, she’d been a much more approachable and down-to-earth person and we’d had a good relationship. I was MC to her, my initials her shorthand way of addressing me a method of expressing affection, and the feeling was mutual. I remember being in a Trump corporate helicopter with Ivanka one day, flying over Manhattan after she’d broken up with Kushner, or I should say he’d broken up with her, or more correctly, he’d ended the relationship because his mother wanted him to marry an Orthodox Jewish woman. She was sitting quietly in the helicopter with a real sadness in her manner, like she was in mourning.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Jared and I broke up, MC,” she said. “His mother wants him to marry an Orthodox girl.”

  There were now tears in her eyes.

  “He’s a fool to lose you,” I said. “I’ll bet you ten bucks he’ll be back.”

  Ivanka laughed through her tears.

  “I hope you’re right, MC,” she said. “I really do love him.”

  I tell you that story because here’s the thing about the Trump kids: they’re human beings. The truth was that they loved and hurt and yearned just like everyone else, at least in those days, before the kids entirely vanished into their father’s hellish nightmare vision of life. Don Jr. aspired to be a better father than the Boss, even if he didn’t deliver by staying in his marriage to Vanessa. The truth was that all three kids were starved for their father’s love. They’d received no love from their father as children, abandoned by their egomaniacal Dad and humiliated when he openly cheated on their mother, and now all three are forever trapped in a cycle of seeking his approval. The impact can be seen in how the children remained quiet when their father acted out in racist or bigoted or bullying ways, behavior they used to know was wrong, and it can be seen in how Don Jr. more and more resembles his father. The same was true for Trump’s lies: the kids knew he was lying, but they went along out of fear and misplaced loyalty, though I do wonder now if they still understand the harm they’re perpetuating on society, especially children, by slavishly enabling their father, or if they’ve stopped caring and are intent only on accumulating as much power and wealth as possible while they can.

  Trump Moscow wasn’t Ivanka’s deal per se, but she was kept aware of all the details and specifications, as were Don Jr. and the Boss. In a way, the Moscow project was like the Doral deal a few years earlier, with Ivanka granting herself control over the fun aspects of the deal while I was left with the miserable work of trying to get Felix Sater to deliver. I had to listen to Sater boast about getting Ivanka into Vladimir Putin’s office to sit in his chair during a trip to Moscow and read his rah-rah emails as he tried to inveigle his way into the campaign. “Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it,” he wrote to me in an email on November 3rd. “I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this. I will manage the process . . . Michael, Putin gets on a stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the nomination. And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in.”

  I liked Sater’s enthusiasm, and I really hoped to pull off a deal Trump had been chasing for decades. But I was skeptical. Felix kept trying to convince me to travel to Russia, to meet with his connections there. He asked for a copy of my passport, and he pushed for a copy of Trump’s passport as well. I kept playing for time, demanding that Sater first accomplish three things: one, obtain proof of ownership or control of the site for the property; two, display the ability to get the necessary licensing and zoning permissions; and three, provide proof that he had the financing in place. Until then, I turned down the free first-class trips to Moscow.

  We all knew that a project on the scale proposed would have to be approved by Putin. I knew that was partly why Trump was praising the Russian president to the heavens—as a way of insinuating himself with the strongman. That was the true nature of the “collusion” with Russia. By ingratiating himself with Putin, and hinting at changes in American sanctions policy against the country under a Trump Presidency, the Boss was trying to nudge the Moscow Trump Tower project along. The campaign was far too chaotic and incompetent to actually conspire with the Russian government. The reality was that Trump saw politics as an opportunity to make money, and he had no hesitation in bending American foreign policy to his personal financial benefit. Worse, he didn’t do it openly, but in his perverse combination of working in broad daylight—praising Putin—while his real motivations and alliances were hidden from the public. In this way, the whole idea of patriotism and treason became irrelevant, in his mind. Trump was using the campaign to make money for himself: of course he was.

  On December 10th, a story appeared on ABC’s website that sunk Felix Sater’s chances of dealing with the Trump Organization. The article was just awful for Felix. The headline said, “Memory Lapse? Trump Seeks Distance from ‘Advisor’ With Past Ties to Mafia.” Citing an unnamed source, the journalist Matt Mosk described Trump likely committing perjury during sworn testimony when he had been asked under oath if he knew Sater. Trump testified that he wouldn’t recognize Sater if he saw him—a ridiculous lie. There was an image of Sater’s Trump Organization business card, identifying him as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump,” and reference to boasts on Felix’s company’s website about Trump Soho being his “most prized project.”

  Trump denied any connection to Sater, but that didn’t stop Felix from trying to convince me to work with him. We discussed how we could get the Kremlin to approve the deal, and the Russian billionaires Sater could get to finance the building, and, as I’ve said before, he suggested we include a free
condo worth $50 million to Putin personally as a sweetener. Sater wanted to arrange for Trump to travel to Moscow in the middle of the presidential campaign, and the idea was floated with Lewandowski and Trump, with the Boss agreeing to go sometime in the future if it would get the deal done. But no dates were ever agreed upon. Nevertheless, there were signs that Trump’s efforts to flatter Putin into supporting the Moscow Tower were working, as the Russian dictator was quoted in the press calling the Boss “talented” and “colorful,” a story I forwarded to Sater.

  Two weeks later, another story appeared that outraged Trump. This time Don Jr. was the subject of his fury. I knew the kids were always walking a tightrope with their father, fearing his temper and rage. I witnessed this at close quarters when photographs of the Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric turned up on social media in late December of 2015. The photos had been taken years earlier, appearing in an article with the headline “Donald Trump’s Sons Awesome at Killing Elephants and Other Wildlife.” The images were brutal. In one, Don Jr. was holding a knife and a dead elephant’s tail; in another, Eric held the limp body of a lioness as the pair grinned for the camera, looking for all the world like a couple of soulless morons. A dead crocodile in a noose, civet cat, kudu, waterbuck . . . the pair had been a two-man murder squad on their visit to Zimbabwe, but it was worse than that. Social media exploded with Don Jr.’s old tweets that bragged about how he loved to “HUNT & EAT” wild game because “I AM A HUNTER,” as a way to troll the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.