Donald Trump and Michael Cohen come face-to-face at NYC fraud trial as former fixer testifies

Donald Trump faced Michael Cohen on Tuesday for the first time since declaring his longtime lawyer a “rat” after their fallout more than five years ago.

Trump’s fixer-turned-foe took the witness stand shortly after noon in state Attorney General Tish James’ case against Trump and his adult children and top Trump Organization lieutenants as the trial enters its fourth week in Manhattan Supreme Court. Trump, attending his trial again this week, sat back with his arms crossed looking directly at his former right-hand man who used to say he’d “take a bullet” for his boss.

The once-devoted Trump loyalist faced questions about conversations with his former boss and CFO Allen Weisselberg at Trump Tower about the fraudulent annual statements tallying Trump’s net worth central to the case and how they came together.

Cohen said Trump ordered him to increase the value of his assets based on “arbitrarily selected” numbers. He said the job Trump gave him and his convicted finance chief Allen Weisselberg “was to reverse-engineer” asset classes, ballooning them to reach figures Trump wanted.

He said it usually started with a phone call from Trump’s assistant, Rhona Graff, beckoning Cohen to his office at Trump Tower.

“I would come into the office,” Cohen said, adding that Weisselberg would go with him if not already there. “And the topic was the statement of financial condition. He would look at the total assets, and he would say, ‘I’m actually not worth $4.5 billion, I’m really worth more — six.’ Okay. Then he would direct Allen and I to go back to Allen’s office and return after we achieved the desired goal.”

Cohen said he and Weisselberg photocopied the docs after making the changes Trump wanted and brought them back to him usually within days.

“[Trump was] the only one who could accept them,” Cohen said of the fraudulent numbers.

Cohen says he last saw Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2018 before he pleaded guilty and went to prison for doing his dirty work. He was executive VP at the Trump Org and Trump’s “special counsel” for a decade, becoming Trump’s personal lawyer when he was elected president. He’s described himself overall as Trump’s fixer.

“I was his special counsel. Whatever issues he had, whatever created ire for him, he would bring it to me in order to resolve it,” Cohen said on the stand.

After serving as Trump’s chief mouthpiece for a decade, Cohen changed his tune shortly after the feds raided his Manhattan residences in spring 2018.

In the ensuing months, he started spilling to authorities about how his boss ran his business and his presidential campaign. After previously lying for him under oath, Cohen that August told the feds he paid off women Trump slept with on his orders to silence them and secure him the White House, implicating the then-president as “Individual-1.”

The same summer, he began cooperating in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, later pleading guilty to lying to Congress about his dealings with the Kremlin and when negotiations to develop a Trump Hotel in Moscow stopped in 2016 as Trump sought the presidency.

Cohen served three years in custody for the hush money payoffs, the lying, taxi medallion fraud, and related financial crimes in what late Manhattan federal court Judge William Pauley described as “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct.”

Before he went upstate, his February 2019 testimony before the House Oversight Committee about Trump’s habit of manipulating the value of his assets sparked James’ investigation leading to the case now on trial. He told Congress that Trump ballooned the value of his properties to rank high on the Forbes rich list and reduced them to save on taxes. Cohen was disbarred the same month.

Judge Arthur Engoron, in a pretrial ruling that stripped Trump, Weisselberg, and their co-defendants of their New York business licenses, found they committed fraud by using the fraudulent calculations — off by billions — in banking agreements and loan applications from 2014 to the final year of Trump’s presidency.

Trump’s fighting the remaining six claims at the trial set to last through December and still stands to lose $250 million and the power to run a company in the state where he crafted the billionaire businessman image he sold to voters.

Before becoming tangled up in Trump’s legal woes and assuming the role of his chief antagonist, Cohen played a leading role in boosting his boss’s image.

Ahead of promoting a potential presidential bid for Trump in Iowa in 2011, Cohen lauded Trump as “one of the richest men in the world, [with] the most prolific name on the planet” and “negotiation skills” second to none.

Over the years, Cohen’s defense of his client sounded indistinguishable to the former president nowadays. In 2015, he questioned whether a “Democratic plot to keep [Trump] off the campaign trail” was behind Trump being fined for ignoring jury summonses. When former state AG Eric Schneiderman sued Trump for duping 5,000 people into enrolling for bogus seminars at the fake Trump University, Cohen in 2013 decried the AG as jealous of Trump and the suit as “politically motivated” extortion.

Trump’s fiercely protective pitbull lawyer had a notorious reputation for sometimes viciously protecting his boss from bad press.

When the Daily Beast reported on Ivanka Trump’s decades-old spousal rape allegations against Trump in 2015, Cohen threatened the reporter, “I’m warning you, tread very f—–g lightly. Because what I’m going to do to you is going to be f—–g disgusting. You understand me?”

Trump’s former henchman is expected to face a rare public grilling on cross-examination after years of divulging dirt on his former boss. On top of cooperating extensively with law enforcement, Cohen has published two books about his work for Trump, produces and hosts a twice-weekly podcast, and is a permanent fixture on cable TV.

Trump and his lawyers have condemned Cohen as a liar, pointing to his perjury conviction and otherwise woeful track record. When he pleaded guilty in his federal case, prosecutors in Manhattan didn’t consider Cohen as having flipped because he kept lying in cooperation sessions requiring him to divulge any crime he’d witnessed in his life.

After Cohen bailed on his testimony the week before last citing a medical issue, Trump jabbed that he “didn’t have the guts” to face him.

Early Tuesday, Cohen said he was ready — and feeling “confident.”

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