Trump's former lawyer says his testimony dooms ex-president: 'There's no way for him to escape'
Former President Donald Trump's one-time attorney and fixer Michael Cohen told CNN's Erin Burnett on Friday that he is prepared to give up the goods on his former boss at Trump's civil fraud trial in New York.
"You're likely to be a witness here," said Burnett. "You're on the list. They all want to hear from you. Are you confident that, from what you know and saw, that you can link Donald Trump directly to this very clearly established pattern that the judge has accepted, pattern of fraud, with your testimony?"
"The answer is yes," said Cohen, who previously served prison time over Trump's alleged hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels and has since been trying to blow the whistle on him. "I don't want to, at this point and time, go into how I will have that established, or the extent to which the attorney general's office will be questioning me, but I can assure you that as I had stated once again before the House Oversight Committee, everything that happened at the Trump Organization happened with the direct knowledge and at the direction of, and ultimately signed off by, Donald J. Trump. There's no way for him to escape this."
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"So you have more examples?" said Burnett. "You've got the receipts?"
"Yes," confirmed Cohen. "And, actually, the receipts are in the hands of the attorney general."
"We also learned late last night — I wanted to mention this lawsuit against you," said Burnett. "Donald Trump had this lawsuit against you, Michael, $500 million he was suing you for. He dropped it. He dropped it four days before he was scheduled to be deposed in the case. Now he had claimed you breached your obligations as his confidante and lawyer and by publishing your books and media appearances like this one, but, again, four days before his deposition, he drops his $500 million lawsuit against you. Why do you think he did that?"
"Well, he's certainly demonstrated that he didn't want to be deposed by Danya Perry, my attorney, or her team," said Cohen. "He certainly was concerned that some of the information he may have to testify to, because it was an expansive testimony, that it could ultimately implicate him in crimes and that he earlier needed Chris Kise to prevent him from implicating himself from being able to assert the Fifth Amendment. This is the craziest scenario. Everybody acknowledges that it was retaliatory for my participation with the Manhattan District Attorney case, it was done to harass me, it was done to financially harm me, and ultimately what we did is we decided that we were going to accept the complaint and we were going to press him for his deposition."
"As we expected, he certainly didn't want to do that, because the second Donald Trump opens his mouth, he implicates himself in something," Cohen added. "He's not a good witness by any stretch of the imagination, and he had no interest whatsoever in being deposed by myself or by my counsel."
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