The New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow was correct when he said Donald Trump was involved in as many as 60 “catch and kill” operations during the 2016 presidential election in which Trump first won power, former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said.
“I never actually added them up, but I wouldn't dispute what Ronan is saying,” Cohen told the Court of History podcast. “Every day, there was another story.”
Cohen said some stories that never saw the light of day concerned Trump and his third wife, Melania, while others concerned schemes such as Trump University or alleged connections to organized crime.
Trump entered the White House in 2017. In December 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, making false statements to a federally insured bank, and campaign finance violations. He also pled guilty to making false statements to Congress.
Cohen’s convictions arose from his role in paying the adult film star Stormy Daniels ($130,000) and Playboy model Karen McDougal ($150,000) “to ensure that they did not publicly disclose their alleged affairs with [Trump] in advance of the election”.
In 2019, Farrow published Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.
The book concerns the tabloid newspaper practice of paying for then killing stories alleging sexual misconduct by powerful men, prominently including the now disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Speaking to Late Show host Stephen Colbert, Farrow said he saw, for the first time "any journalist has seen it, a master list of all the historical dirt that was about Trump” in the archives of AMI, the National Enquirer publisher at the heart of the scandal.
Saying the list contained “about 60” stories, Farrow added: "Really the story here is that they made this list, that they were working with Trump, and that right before the election they actually shred a bunch of stuff on it. There's a shredding party.”
Trump vehemently denied (and denies) all wrongdoing, and has repeatedly called Cohen a “rat” and a “serial liar.”
In 2024 Trump was convicted in New York on 34 criminal counts arising from the payments to Daniels and McDougal.
The convictions did not stop him winning re-election, and he was subsequently sentenced to an unconditional discharge.
Having served his own sentence, Cohen became a prominent Trump critic, author and podcaster.
In an interview released late Friday, he appeared on the Court of History, hosted by the Clinton aide turned Lincoln biographer Sidney Blumenthal and the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz.
Asked if Farrow’s claim of “about 60” stories concerning Trump being subjected to “catch and kill” operations, Cohen said: “You know, I never actually added them up, but I wouldn't dispute what Ronan is saying. Every day, there was another story.
“In fact, sometimes the stories and the leaks were coming from people on the inside. I had never in my life seen more infighting, more backstabbing than what was going on during the … 2016 election.”
According to Cohen, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was a major source of such leaks, ending up having to be “sh––canned” by Cohen and Donald Trump Jr “because [Donald] Trump wouldn’t do it.
“So my job, along with some other people as well, but mostly on me, was catching and killing these stories,” Cohen said.
Asked what such stories concerned, Cohen said: “They were all over the board. I mean, they … had to deal with him [Trump] and Melania, they dealt with him and [the fraudulent] Trump University, they dealt with him and Stormy, him and Karen McDougal, him and the Mob, him and Ivana [Trump’s late first wife].
“I mean, you name it. It’s the same way today. There is no one singular story that you could point to and say that's really bad for Trump. They're all bad for him.”
Cohen said the only stories he was involved with that involved payments to sources were those concerning Daniels and McDougal.
A story about a Trump Tower doorman being paid off because Trump had a child with his wife was not true, Cohen said, though AMI boss David Pecker nonetheless paid to catch and kill it.
“That was the problem, too,” Cohen said. “You were dealing with so many fake stories, which is, again, all it does is enhance Trump's accuracy. [He] keep[s] saying, ‘Fake news. They're out to get me. They're out to get me.’”
Cohen also said he read Farrow’s book in prison, because “that's the one nice thing about prison. You have a lot of free time. So, you know, somebody who's an avid reader … I got a chance to read 97 books, you know, in my 13 months there, you know, while learning how to weld and do other sort of manual labor things.”
