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| The cover of Michael Cohen's book Revenge |
This book is a meandering rant. It seems to be a first-draft that lacked a professional editor. The book does not show at all the "Donald Trump weaponized the US Department of Justice against his critics". In particular, the book does not show that President Trump had anything at all to do with that search of Cohen's apartment.
On April 9, Cohen and his wife were staying in a nearby hotel room, because water was leaking from apartment above their own apartment. At 7 a.m., about "two dozen" men and women in black suits" crowded into the hallway outside their hotel room. There was a knock on the hotel room's door. Cohen, dressed only in shorts and a t-shirt, looked through the door's peephole.
... I had no idea what they wanted. So, I opened the door and said, "Can I help you?"
The lead agent was central casting: standing about six foot two, broad-shouldered, well-manicured. Over his right shoulder was one of the biggest men I've ever encountered. He was at least six inches taller than the lead agent, and had to step sideways to pass through the doorframe. He didn't say a word; he didn't need to.
We didn't know it at the time, but meanwhile, simultaneously, 48 other agents converged on my apartment that was undergoing renovation due to the flood, as well as my law office and our safety deposit book at TD Bank.
.... the warrant said my home, hotel room, and offices were to be searched for evidence related to conspiracy, false bank entries, false statements to a financial institution, wire fraud, bank fraud and illegal campaign contributions.
The agent asked me to unlock and and over my cellphones, and step into the hallway. .....
They spent five hours going through our rooms. They went through the sofas, looked behind curtains. They looked on top of and beneath cabinets, and even removed, checked and photographed all of my daughter's stuff in her underwear drawer. .... To this day, I still don't understand the need to photograph my college-age daughter's underwear. ....
Each of the bedrooms had a safe, and I was directed to open them. ....
Throughout, we didn't get upset. Not in the slightest. There was nothing that we had done that would have caused us any worry.
So I was beyond surprised then they walked out of the hotel room with a dozen boxes.
The FBI officials searching Cohen's law office seized 16 pages of shredded documents. An FBI laboratory at Quantico reassembled those 16 pages and (according to a Buzzfeed article quoted by Cohen) found that the shredded pages "don't seem to have a connection to the current investigations by the Office of Special Counsel and Southern District of New York". Cohen quotes also a longer passage from the Buzzfeed article:
It remains to be seen whether any of the reconstructed documents are of use to federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York in their ongoing probe into Cohen, whose home, office, and hotel room were raided by the FBI in April [2018].
They [the shredded 16 pages] are among the nearly four million individual paper records or electronic files discovered on more than a dozen cellphones, computers, and other devices. Some of the devices -- including old cellphones, cameras and laptops -- belonged to Cohen's wife and children.
On April 14 -- five days after the FBI search -- The Washington Post indicated that the search had been caused primarily by Christopher Steele's Dossier about President Trump's alleged collusion with Russian Intelligence.
Cohen's visiting Prague ... is concrete. Over the course of three of the Dossier's reports, the claim is outlined -- but we hasten to note that all these allegations have not been confirmed by The Washington Post.
Cohen rightfully mocks the newspaper's tendentious "journalism".
Well, if they weren't confirmed, then what the hell were they doing being reported as "concrete"? The Post and others wanted to say I took over management of the [Trump campaign staff's alleged] relationship with Russia after Paul Manafort was fired [from that campaign staff in mid-August 2016] and that I secretly traveled abroad [to Prague] to do so.
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Keep in mind that, when this search happened, Trump still employed Cohen as his lawyer. Cohen still felt himself to be innocent and expected to be exonerated by the FBI. He looked forward to his continued employment by Trump.
... other than poor reporting from the press, life returned to some sense of normalcy for a while after the raid. Reporters still diving into the Steele Dossier ... slowly began to see how baseless it all was -- at least in my case. So, I went back to the Trump fold, believing there was nothing to the federal investigation and that it would eventually all just blow over.
Immediately after the raid on my home and office, Trump himself called and told me not to worry. He told me to "stay strong." He told me it was all bullshit and the investigation was going nowhere. Our conversation was about five or ten minutes long. He told me three times there was no Russian collusion. .... I was still in his good graces, or so I thought.
Less than two weeks after the FBI raid, Trump slammed a report in The New York Times that said his legal team was bracing for me to "flip", and he went wild on Twitter:
The New York Times .... are going out of their way to destroy Michael Cohen and his relationship with me in the hope that he will "flip". Sorry, I don't see Michael doing that, despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media.
Since I didn't hear from the DOJ [Department of Justice] at all -- despite four months of repeated attempts to reach out to them -- I mistakenly thought all was well. The whole thing seemed to fall flat .. until the creation of the special counsel [Robert Mueller] into Russian collusion.[on May 17, 2017]
Trump continued to employ Cohen as a lawyer for two months longer -- until June 15, 2018. On about that date, Cohen was questioned by Mueller's staff.
On June 15, Trump wrote on Twitter that Cohen was not his lawyer any more, but Cohen was "a good person" and that the FBI's investigation of Cohen was an "attack on our country".
Cohen insinuates that Trump disassociated himself from Cohen in June 2018 on the advice of Rudy Giuliani. During that two-month interval, Trump had continued to think, correctly, that Cohen never would or could provide any information incriminating Trump in collusion with Russia.
After Cohen lost his job as Trump's lawyer, Cohen began to blame Trump for his situation. Trump should have fired Mueller. Trump and Giuliani were setting Cohen up "to make sure I took the fall".
Cohen's blaming Trump for the FBI's abuse of Cohen is preposterous. For example:
From the beginning, it should be understood that Trump always had control of the Mueller investigation. Technically, Mueller was not independent. He could be fired, the way Nixon fired Archibald Cox. ... So you can bet that instead of firing Mueller, Trump was protecting himself by closely monitoring what went on with me.
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Cohen's blaming of Trump is especially preposterous because "one of those [officials] who works inside the DOJ spoke to us on the condition of background for this book."
"This is how we do things," the DOJ official stated. "We thought (Trump) was a mob boss and that Cohen was his consigliere. But Cohen didn't know as much as we thought [he did]," or conversely the DOJ thought I was an expert on hiding shit. ...
What the DOJ was specifically looking for were crimes by Trump related to Russia. The DOS was correct in stating I [Cohen] did not know as much as they suspected.
In the end, the DOJ had to indict me on something. "We put a lot of effort into it, and it was a high-profile case," the agent stated. "We're happy we got him [Cohen] on something -- and we used a lot of pressure to get him [Cohen] to a plea deal. It's really questionable we would've been able [without a plea deal] to convict on some of those charges."
In explaining what "pressure" the DOJ used, the agent confessed, "We pulled every record we could. We talked to everyone and tried to use anyone who we thought have a connection to him (Cohen) to put pressure on him."
"We have to change some of this," the DOJ source stated. "We're on the right side of history and the law. But sometimes we're arrogant. Our power makes us this way."
And all of this began because of the Steele Dossier: that pile of unsubstantiated bullshit fiction about me. ....
Why did they [the DOJ] take the unprecedented step of raiding an attorney's office -- and not just any attorney but the attorney to the President of the United States ...?
... According to the DOJ source, I deserved "something". .... But to try to enforce the law, the DOJ stretched it to the point of breaking. And as the DOJ official told me, it all began "with that stupid dossier".
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Continued in Part 2
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