President Donald Trump's former longtime confidant and personal attorney recently went into detail about an ordeal he endured during Trump's first term when he was incarcerated in federal prison.
In a Monday episode of the Jim Acosta Show on Substack, Acosta — a former CNN reporter — spoke with Michael Cohen, who was known until 2024 as Trump's personal "fixer" before he became the prosecution's star witness against Trump in his New York criminal trial. Acosta reminded viewers that Trump has repeatedly promised to go after his political enemies, and to use the apparatus of the federal government to do so. Cohen corroborated that threat by describing what he went through after he agreed to plead guilty and serve a three-year federal prison sentence between 2018 and 2021.
"I have been beseeching people to please listen, listen to what I'm trying to say," Cohen said. "I lived it. And I am only speaking from experience. When [former Attorney General] Bill Barr unconstitutionally had me removed from my federal location monitoring agreement program and re-incarcerated and put back into solitary confinement, making it a total of 51 days of abuse and torture. They handcuffed and shackled me. They put me into a freezer ... My fear is, what they did to me, they will do to you."
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Acosta called Trump's treatment of Cohen "sick," and then pivoted to how he believed Trump was "whining" when declaring that former President Joe Biden's preemptive pardons of January 6 committee members like former Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) were invalid due to the "autopen" process.
"He wants to give Liz Cheney, he wants to give Adam Kinzinger, he wants to give Alvin Bragg, and Jim Comey, he wants to give them the Michael Cohen treatment," Acosta said. "Full stop."
Cohen then expressed alarm that the man he knew and worked with as a member of his "inner sanctum" for nearly two decades had allegedly undergone a complete transformation to someone now unrecognizable to him. The former Trump fixer attributed the president's personality change to the far-right Heritage Foundation's authoritarian Project 2025 playbook and its authors now serving as his primary advisors.
"I've known Trump since 2005. This is not the Trump that I knew. This is a completely unhinged, a completely radicalized Donald J. Trump," Cohen said. "The extremist position is a result of Project 2025 and these enablers that are now surrounding him. And I don't know why he's doing it.
Watch the segment below, or by clicking this link.