Disloyal: A Memoir
Page 33
During these days, I truly did believe the President of the United States wanted me dead. It felt like I was receiving a death sentence, by proxy. A lot of the guards disliked me intensely, because they were big Trump supporters, and they followed his words when he attacked me on TV and Twitter, giving them license to be unusually cruel to me. As I tried to sleep, they’d flash a light in my eyes every half hour; they’d kick my door; they wouldn’t let me get hot water from the machine for my coffee. These might sound like petty things, but when you’re in solitary in a facility raging with COVID-19 it really is like psychological torture.
I was the last prisoner released from solitary, on May 21, 2020. Thirty-five very long and difficult days, being let out of the cell for a mere thirty minutes per day.
Remember at the beginning of this book, I told you that the President of the United States does not want you to read this book. Here’s your proof: as news leaked out that I was completing this book, my lawyer was served with a Cease and Desist letter from the Trump Organization, threatening a lawsuit should I decide to publish. The letter alleged that I had signed a confidentiality agreement with the Trump Organization, which explicitly prohibited me from writing this book. It also said that I was forbidden by attorney-client privilege to tell my story.
But this story is all I have left for my wife, my children, and the country I love so much.
As I write from my apartment in New York City, I can see his lawyers using the same old tricks I did on behalf of the Boss for all those years. He’s no different than the man on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, marching around like a robot imitating Barack Obama and mocking how easy it is to fake being presidential. No words ring more true for me than when Michelle Obama stated, “Being President doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are. . . .”
Please remember what I testified to Congress, the second time: There is a serious danger that Donald Trump will not leave office easily, and there is a real chance of not having a peaceful transition. When he jokes about running again in 2024 and gets a crowd of thousands to chant “Trump 2024,” he’s not joking. Trump never jokes.
You now have all the information you need to decide for yourself in November.
Epilogue: Retaliation
On the morning of Thursday, July 9, 2020, I reported to the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, as required by the Department of Probation. The appointment was supposedly to perform a technicality, changing the terms of my COVID-related release from Otisville prison in upstate New York from furlough to home confinement. The only meaningful difference would be that I would serve out the rest of my sentence wearing an ankle bracelet to allow the DOP to electronically monitor my whereabouts, or at least that was what I’d been told.
Earlier in the week, I had talked to my probation officer about the transition. I’d originally been scheduled to report to a halfway house in the Bronx to sign papers and then have an ankle monitor attached, like all the other prisoners who’d been released. But the probation office had changed their rules, telling me first that they would come to my apartment in Manhattan to do the paperwork and install the ankle bracelet. Two days later, they said that I now had to report to the federal courthouse, a development that seemed strange and suspicious and that the official with the ankle monitoring company said he’d never heard of after decades in the business.
Why was I being treated differently? I’d asked my probation officer, Adam Pakula. He’d said it was just a random circumstance, reassuring me that I hadn’t been singled out by the government.
“I hope I’ll be allowed to work,” I’d said. “I’m working on my book.”
“We encourage you to work,” Pakula had replied, reassuringly.
A few days before, I had appeared unexpectedly on the front page of the New York Post. The headline was “You Call This Hard Time?” and the paper reported that I had had dinner at a restaurant with another couple on the Upper East Side. The photograph showed me at a table, smiling, next to my wife Laura, as we had a quiet meal a block from our home. I was upset at the image in the Post, and the intrusion into my privacy, and I wondered if Le Bilboquet had called the tabloid, looking for a bit of free publicity for the restaurant, or if someone from the paper had been following me.
But I was also aware that I hadn’t broken the terms of my furlough release, so I’d shrugged off the press coverage as meaningless at the time. I knew it risked catching the attention of the President, but I was pretty sure I’d already attracted a serious amount of his interest after I’d announced on social media that I planned to publish a book that included my time with Donald Trump. In hindsight, I can now see how the report in the New York Post falsely claiming I was in breach of the terms of my home confinement by dining out, and the many subsequent reports on Fox News about my case, sowed just enough confusion about the pretext for what was about to unfold. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, despite working for more than a decade for the king of conspiracy theorists, but that is how propaganda is practiced by Trump-allied people like the Post’s owner, Rupert Murdoch. What followed had nothing to do with my meal at a restaurant, or any other bone-headed action on my part. I was ambushed, plain and simple.
That morning, my son Jake drove me to the federal courthouse, the imposing home of the offices of the Southern District of New York, to meet with my probation officer, as directed. I was accompanied by a childhood friend, Jeff Levine, an attorney in New York with his own small firm; he was there because of the suspicious ways the probation office had kept changing the rules for me, and my belief that I might need a lawyer, even though Jeff doesn’t truly practice criminal law.
In the office, probation officer Pakula and a supervisor presented Jeff and me with a two-page document, consisting of the terms to have my status altered to home confinement, and assuring me it was the standard form for all released inmates.
I carefully read all eight provisions. The document was amateurish, with elisions and bad grammar, and it generally looked like it had been thrown together at the last moment. But it was the first provision which astounded me. This is exactly what the first paragraph required me to agree to:
“No engagement of any kind with the media, including print, tv, film, books, or any form of media/news. Prohibition from all social media platforms. No posting on social media and a requirement that you communicate with friends and family to exercise discretion in not posting on your behalf or posting any information about you. The purpose is to avoid glamorizing or bringing publicity to your status as a sentenced inmate serving a custodial term in the community.”
Looking up, I shook my head.
“I don’t know where to start,” I said. “The first term is overbroad and a violation of my First Amendment rights. It prohibits me from the work on the book I told Mr. Pakula about a few days ago.”
Jeff intervened, trying to keep the meeting on an even keel.
“Let me handle this,” he said to me.
Jeff politely pointed out that I couldn’t force my friends and family to not to talk to the press, and that I could be in breach of the agreement—and subject to being put back in prison—for things that I couldn’t control. Jeff asked if the language could be changed or modified to make it less broad and in line with the stated intention of not glamorizing my status as a prisoner, a promise I could easily agree to. The probation officers suggested we go through the remaining seven paragraphs of the document and they would take the request “up the chain of command” for a decision on the language designed to kill my book.
“Was the first provision drafted specifically for me?” I asked, finally.
The probation officers replied that it was standard.
“It looks like it was drafted specifically for me,” I said. “And it was probably drafted in Washington. The next time you speak to Attorney General Bill Barr, tell him I say hello.”
With that, the two
probation officers requested we leave their office and take a seat in the waiting room; which we did for more than an hour and a half. We watched the news, oblivious, and wondering what changes would be made to the document. But as time passed, I should have started to wonder what was going on behind those closed doors.
Consider the context. That same morning, New York City District Attorney Cy Vance had announced that the Supreme Court had ruled 7-2 that the President had absolutely no right to refuse to disclose his financial records to prosecutors looking into tax-fraud charges—precisely the kind of crimes I had been convicted of. It had been widely reported that I had met with prosecutors from Vance’s office, and there was a press gaggle outside the building waiting for my comment on the devastating Supreme Court decision.
“No citizen, not even the president, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.
Worse for Trump, even the two justices he had appointed agreed with Roberts. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “In our system of government, as this court has stated so often, no one is above the law. That principle applies, of course, to a president.”
Trump had reached for his Twitter, the one I used to post on for him all the time, to express his outrage. “This is all a political prosecution,” Trump wrote. “I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to the Presidency or Administration.”
In recent weeks, Attorney General Barr had also very publicly tried to fire the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, attempting to replace Geoffrey Berman with the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission—who, not coincidentally, was a golf buddy of the President and almost completely inexperienced in criminal law. Jay Clayton of the SEC was exactly what Trump and Barr wanted: a lackey. But Barr had failed, and Berman had relented, but only after an experienced and independent replacement prosecutor was named to the post.
The reason the President wanted a new head prosecutor in the Southern District, I knew better than anyone, was so that while in office, he could arrange to be federally indicted. In the event he loses the election in November, he could then pardon himself, as he’s long claimed to be his right. The reason behind that unprecedented and serpentine thinking was that Trump knows perfectly well that he is guilty of the same crimes that resulted in my conviction and incarceration. He also knows that I would be a star witness in that case, and my book a fundamental piece of evidence for his guilt.
Without the immunity from prosecution granted to the president, Trump will also almost certainly face New York State criminal charges. He would likely be convicted on both the Federal and State charges and face serious prison time. That is Donald Trump’s greatest fear in life, believe me, and if he fails to get reelected, that will be his fate—and he knows it—so silencing me was an essential part of his overall plan to evade the law and avoid that outcome.
Sitting in the waiting room, three United States Marshalls entered, carrying handcuffs and shackles.
“Mr. Cohen, please stand up and face the wall,” the lead Marshall said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
The two probation officers then walked in and issued me with a remand document, stating that I had refused to sign the home confinement release and was therefore being taken back into custody. They seemed delighted, even thrilled, despite the fact that the document was premised on false information.
“I never refused to sign the document; we are waiting for their superior’s determination,” I said. “I’ll sign it right now.”
“This is ridiculous,” Jeff sighed.
“It’s out of our hands,” probation officer Pakula said with evident pleasure. “We’re not involved anymore.”
“This cannot be happening,” I said.
But it was. I was handcuffed and shackled and taken to the bowels of the building, where I was stripped naked and issued a brown jumpsuit. Within hours, I was returned to prison in upstate New York, placed in solitary confinement, and left to the mercy of the raging COVID-19 and the possibility of dying behind bars with my underlying heart and respiratory health issues.
Let me say for the record: I was never really given the chance to sign the home-confinement document. I was imprisoned because I refused to sign away my rights under the Constitution of the United States. It was a surprise attack. By presenting me with terms they knew would be impossible for me to agree to, they were springing a trap, as might happen in any authoritarian country, a country where individuals lack the rights of due process and freedom of speech.
Within days, my wife found Danya Perry, a former prosecutor and a true criminal lawyer. Danya filed a writ of habeas corpus and an emergency restraining order, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union. At a hearing ten days later, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein had little patience for the case made by the Southern District prosecutors. He asked if I’d been given the opportunity to negotiate the terms of the home-confinement document I’d been presented, dismissing the idea I’d been “combative.” The judge said he’d never seen any clause that matched the first provision, taking away my First Amendment rights. The naked attempt to silence me in a gulag in Trump’s America had failed.
“I make the finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough to home confinement to jail is retaliatory,” the judge said. “And it is retaliatory because of his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book and to discuss anything about that book or anything else he wants on social media and with others.”
In the beginning of this book, which I publish in full and with a full heart, I wrote that the President of the United States doesn’t want you to read my story. Now I have actual proof of how desperate he is to silence me and prevent the world from hearing this story and the truth about Donald J. Trump—the real real Donald Trump.
Michael Cohen
New York, New York
August, 2020
Appendix: Documents, Tweets, and Photos
Injunction order from Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein.
Letter from Guy Petrillo to the Deputy U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
letter ordering me to prison.
The Sentencing Memorandum for my case.
The Steele Dossier.
Kremlin-Alpha Group Cooperation Section deleted on purpose
An email from a New York Post journalist shows how widely Trump’s birtherism claims spread. © 2020 Michael Cohen
“YOU NEED THE BLACK VOTE . . . BEN IS YOUR GUY!” © 2020 Michael Cohen
A selection of Trump’s tweets about me, showing his changing opinion.
Trump and me with the Falwells. © 2020 Michael Cohen
Me with Trump. © 2020 Michael Cohen
Me at the White House. © 2020 Michael Cohen
Trump at my son’s bar mitzvah. © 2020 Michael Cohen
Rubio gave Trump an award. You’ve read how we repaid him. © 2020 Michael Cohen