Trump's 'quest for payback' against Michael Cohen could blow up in his face: former prosecutor

Donald Trump's decision to sue former attorney Michael Cohen for $500 million could end up being a major misstep that the former president might regret, a former prosecutor says.

In Trump's suit, filed earlier in the week, the former president accuses Cohen of "multiple breaches of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, conversion, and breaches of contract by virtue of Defendant’s past service as Plaintiff’s employee and attorney."

Viewed as retaliation against the former Trump "fixer" over his part in providing testimony against the former president that led to a 34-count felony indictment in a Manhattan courtroom, former prosecutor Dennis Aftergut wrote for Slate that Trump's attorneys should have talked him out of it — but "vengeance is in Trump’s blood."

Where the lawsuit becomes tricky for the former president will come in the discovery stage which could, in turn, lead to even more legal problems for the former president.

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"Trump just opened a pathway to discover — and information for the public — that Cohen had sought in a different lawsuit which a judge reluctantly felt compelled to dismiss last November because of Supreme Court law limiting personal actions against government officials," the attorney wrote before adding, "In December 2021, Cohen sued Trump for orchestrating the [Cohen's] reincarceration. In November 2022, federal Judge Lewis Liman lamented that Trump’s status as a government official in 2020, when the reincarceration occurred, blocked courts from providing any relief against Trump."

Noting that Liman wrote of Cohen's lawsuit at the time, “alleges an egregious violation of constitutional rights by the executive branch — nothing short of the use of executive power to lock up the president’s political enemies for speaking critically of him,” Aftergut said Trump's new "quest for payback" is handing Cohen a weapon to come after Trump again.

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"Trump is giving Cohen a clean second shot at exposing the same truth through discovery. As a defendant in the new suit, Cohen should be entitled to subpoena documents and testimony to show a jury that the action against him is part of a pattern and practice on Trump’s part of silencing his enemies through misuse of the law," he wrote before adding, "Cohen may also have a countersuit to bring if he believes that Trump has retaliated against his right to voluntarily speak to prosecutors. In any case, neither party is likely to emerge unscathed in this latest legal battle between the two."

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