Inside Team Trump’s Plan To Use Michael Cohen To Go After Trump’s Enemies

By Asawin Suebsaeng

Photos: YouTube|Wikimedia Commons

When I was working at the Daily Beast’s Washington bureau in 2015, future President Donald Trump, via his attorney Michael Cohen, threatened to destroy my best friend and colleague, Tim Mak. I vividly recall the moment Tim stepped out of our mini conference room, clicking his little recorder and telling us as he chuckled: You gotta hear this…

Tim had just reached out to the 2016 Trump campaign for comment for a story that would soon be headlined: “Ex-Wife: Donald Trump Made Me Feel ‘Violated’ During Sex.” Trump did not appreciate it, so he sicced Cohen on my future best man. The Trump attorney shouted and swore, vowing to sue Tim and the Beast into oblivion. (You can listen to some of the hilarious audio here, of a reporter standing his ground and of a small man trying to make himself sound big.)

The Beast published the story, Cohen made an ass out of himself by spouting borderline-illiterate bullshit about spousal rape, and his promised world-altering lawsuit didn’t happen. In the years that followed, Cohen got raided by the feds, very publicly fell out with President Trump, cuddled up to the anti-MAGA “resistance,” and became a key witness in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s civil fraud case against Trump, as well as in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal hush-money case against Trump. Bragg’s case, of course, is the reason Trump became America’s first felon president, a label Trump bitterly resents.

In all those years of Cohen claiming he’d seen the light and had made an anti-Trump turnaround, I never once bought it. You can scroll through my public output and social media posts. It was always clear to me (not just as a close friend of someone he profanely threatened with financial ruin, but as a political reporter employing a shred of common sense and instinct) that Cohen was still the same guy: a gross habitual liar. It was just that his circumstances and benefactors changed.

Now Cohen – who is seeking a federal pardon, which Trump has the power to grant – has switched sides again. And the Trump-Vance administration has taken notice.

“Hello, Michael. How are you, Michael?” Trump said to his former attorney and “fixer” on Cohen’s New York radio show last week. “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said.”

When Bragg and James came up, Trump said: “They threatened you with everything if you didn’t go against Trump, and you took it back. I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now if you didn’t.”

Cohen had previously posted on Substack that he felt “pressured and coerced” to be those prosecutors’ star witness against Trump, though Cohen has been publicly very coy about claiming whether he was “coerced” to give false testimony. (The Justice Department has the authority to charge local and state prosecutors for coercing false testimony, though such prosecutions are vanishingly rare.) That, however, is a distinction that doesn’t seem to matter to the president and his lieutenants.

Well before Cohen and Trump’s radio reconciliation, several sources with direct knowledge of the matter – in and close to the Justice Department – started telling me that some appointees in the Trump White House and DOJ had discussed the prospect of using Cohen as a witness if the feds criminally charge James and Bragg for, among other things, supposed civil rights violations against Trump. As early as 2023, policy advisers and lawyers close to Trump, as I reported at the time, were busy drawing up different plans for how a second Trump administration could use the DOJ to go after James, Bragg, and others on MAGA’s enemies list.

Team Trump’s interest in possibly weaponizing Cohen underscores this authoritarian government’s myriad corrupt efforts to harass and try to jail Trump’s handpicked haters and adversaries. A primary function of the federal government right now isn’t to seek justice or even to pretend to, really – it’s to clamp down on people who piss off the president, even if those people committed no crime or misdemeanor.

However, it’s unclear if Cohen will get the opportunity to dance for the president yet again, this time in a Trumpified kangaroo court. Even some of the Trump advisers I spoke to who are in favor of criminal charges against James and Bragg (and would like to see Cohen flipped on them) admit such a prosecution would likely be a steeply uphill battle. (On the other hand, it often appears that the point of Trump-direct investigations and prosecutions isn’t necessarily to imprison, but to torment targets and to drain their resources.)

For starters, the second Trump administration has acted in such a bumbling way in its efforts to vindictively and selectively prosecute and imprison the president’s political foes that some of those attempted prosecutions – including of Letitia James – are getting torn apart in the courts. Moreover, several senior Trump advisers simply do not trust Cohen and view him as having negative credibility as a witness or an ally. Trump’s attorney general, Todd Blanche, was Trump’s private defense lawyer back when his job was to highlight how much of a liar and unreliable narrator Cohen was.

We’ll see what happens. But keep an eye out for moves Team Trump makes regarding the president’s former henchman. If this rancidly corrupt Justice Department goes forward with the ultra-MAGA fantasy of exploiting Cohen to punish Trump’s foes, it will stand as yet another indicator of how far our republic has fallen. Today, there isn’t even a patina of independence enjoyed by federal law enforcement. It proudly acts as the spiteful enforcer of the president’s political whims, of one man’s constant thirst for seeing opponents in pain.

The ongoing mini-saga of Michael Cohen’s crawl back to The Donald doubles as a warning for those in the press and elsewhere who sadly need it: Don’t be an easy mark. Show some self-respect in these miserable times. If an idiot like me was able to figure this one out, practically no one has an excuse anymore.