Michael Cohen says there are more than enough low-level charges to go after Trump already — just like Al Capone
Former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen spoke with CNN's Jim Acosta Saturday in a wide-ranging interview about the recent guilty plea involving Trump Org. CEO Allen Weisselberg and the documents found at Trump's golf club.
Weisselberg, who has been with Trump for more than 40 years, pleaded guilty this week and agreed to spend 100 days in jail and testify against the Trump Organization, but not against the company's boss. While Weisselberg is going to the infamous Rikers Island prison, he'll only spend five months there. Cohen thinks he deserves much more.
Weisselberg will appear before the case in Oct. 2022. Cohen said that the most important question for the district attorneys team to ask is who directed him to do what he did.
"Every year, the personal financial statements increased, increased. Every year you had to file certain documents. Allen, you didn't make these decisions. You didn't have the authority, even as the CFO, to do anything without Donald Trump's approval, plain and simple."
As for Mar-a-Lago, Cohen wanted to remind people that it isn't Trump's personal home. It's a social club that Trump is using as his "home" instead of paying to buy his own property in Palm Beach.
"You may remember not too long ago, there was a Chinese dissident running around with a thumb drive and a bunch of other illegal things that they ended up taking her off the premise," Cohen recalled. "It's an unsecured location."
That fact is one of the many reasons that national security analysts have been concerned about Trump stealing classified documents and taking them back to Mar-a-Lago with him.
"I think he was going to use it as leverage," Cohen said, about why Trump stole the documents. "There's no other reason. Again, I could understand the love letters [from Kim Jong Un.] I could understand one day he wants — someone is there whom he thinks is impressive and he wants to impress that person, so he'll pull out a letter from the Queen or pull out a letter from [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan or from [Vladimir] Putin or Kim Jong-un like the love letters he kept talking about for months on months. Ok, he'll show those, oh, look what this person said about me. I'm really smart, really handsome, really rich. That's what he'd use those for."
The larger question, Cohen said is why Trump had classified documents.
"Think about what Donald does," he went on. "Donald turns around and says, No. 1, I don't have any more. We gave you the documents and we signed an affidavit, there are no more. Then, all of a sudden, of course, FBI raids. Now the documents are in possession of the government. So, instead, now he declassified everything. He's followed no protocol in terms of declassifying anything. And then, of course, he's allowed to have it, and then you have Rudy Giuliani and his other sycophantic fools, these acolytes that sit there and whatever it is that Donald Trump says, these people just repeat."
Recently, Trump claimed that he would release all of the security camera videos of the FBI search, but Cohen called his bluff on that too.
"If that footage, Jim, was beneficial to him, it would have already been released," he explained. "What he's doing right now, he's a greasy grifter. What he's doing is fundraising off of it. My understanding is he's already raised several millions of dollars. That's what this is all about. This isn't about anything other than fundraising and people have to remember, if they read the fine print, 90 percent of all money that goes into Donald Trump's super PAC or his account, he has full discretion over. You're basically handing him 90 cents of every dollar you send in for him to do whatever he wants. It's not political. It's all about himself."
Host Jim Acosta lamented that it seems like Trump has 9,000 lives and simply can't be taken down, but Cohen argued that there are plenty of things that Trump could be charged with.
"I think ultimately, what's happened now is time has gone on in and these investigations have advanced, and the information, the truth has come out, and the truth is never good for Donald Trump," he explained. "And in this specific case, yeah, he's had 9,000 lives. But at the end of the day, you have all of these people who have been brought in who provided testimony. You have documentary evidence like the evidence I provided to the House Oversight Committee, that implicates Donald Trump in a multitude of illegal or I should say improper actions, that he should be brought to court on. One of the biggest problems we have is they're afraid. I don't understand why. Now that's past."
He cited the Georgia case where Trump and his allies are facing off against country attorney Fani Willis in Fulton County, Georgia who is investigating Trump's demand for officials to "find 11,780 votes."
"The case going forward with New York Attorney General Tish James. You have the D.A. in Washington. There's a multitude of litigation that's come against this man. I also don't understand why we're so fixated on getting him for everything. You don't have to do that. Let's get him on the simple stuff — the stuff we already know which is tax evasion, misrepresentation to banks, lying on personal financial statements, like what they did to Al Capone. You don't have to get him on X, Y, Z. You don't have to get him on that to get him where he belongs."
Cohen's new book, Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the Department of Justice Against His Critics, will be out on Oct. 11 and can be purchased here.
Part 1:
Cohen interview 1 www.youtube.com
Part 2:
Cohen interview 2 youtu.be