Law Cohen began practicing
personal injury law in New York in 1992, working for Melvyn Estrin in
Manhattan. He practiced law at the firm for about a year before joining
The Trump Organization. Following his 2018 felony convictions, Cohen was
disbarred in New York.
Business In 2003, Cohen was a candidate for
New York City Council when he provided a biography to the
New York City Campaign Finance Board for inclusion in its voters' guide. The guide listed him as co-owner of Taxi Funding Corp. and a fleet of
New York City taxicabs numbering over 200. At the time, Cohen was a business partner in the taxi business with "taxi king"
Simon Garber. As of 2017, Cohen was estimated to own at least 34
taxi medallions through 17
limited liability companies (LLCs). managed the medallions still held by Cohen; this arrangement ended after the city's
Taxi and Limousine Commission decided not to renew Freidman's licenses. Cohen has been involved in real estate ventures in Manhattan, including the purchase and sale of four apartment buildings between 2011 and 2014. The total purchase price of the four buildings was $11 million and the total sales price was $32 million. Cohen sold the four properties at above their assessed values, in all-cash transactions, to LLCs owned by persons whose identities are not public. After this was reported by
McClatchy DC in October 2017, Cohen said that all four properties were purchased by an American-owned "New York real estate family fund" that paid cash for the properties in order to obtain a
tax-deferred (Section 1031) exchange, but did not specifically identify the buyer. (a
Manhattan district). In 2010, Cohen briefly campaigned for a seat in the
New York State Senate. He was a registered Democrat until he officially registered as a Republican on March 9, 2017. On October 11, 2018, Cohen as a Democrat to distance "himself from the values of the current" administration.
Donald Trump Cohen joined the Trump Organization in late 2006. In 2008, Cohen was named chief operating officer of
mixed martial arts promotion company
Affliction Entertainment, in which Trump held a significant financial stake. While Cohen was an executive at the Trump Organization, he was known as Trump's "pit bull". In late 2011, when Trump was publicly speculating about running for the
2012 Republican Party presidential nomination, Cohen the website "Should Trump Run?" to draft Trump into entering the race. In 2013, Cohen sent an email to the satirical news website
The Onion, demanding that an article it had published mocking Trump ("When You're Feeling Low, Just Remember I'll Be Dead In About 15 or 20 Years") be removed with an apology, claiming it was
defamatory. In 2015, in response to an inquiry by reporter
Tim Mak of
The Daily Beast concerning rape allegations (brought up in the 1980s but later recanted) by
Ivana Trump about her then-husband Donald Trump, Cohen said, "I'm warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I'm going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting." In April 2016, along with
Darrell C. Scott, Cohen was a of the
National Diversity Coalition for Trump. Peter J. Gleason, a lawyer who filed for protection of documents pertaining to two women with sexual-abuse allegations against
Eric T. Schneiderman, stated—without offering details or corroborating evidence—that Cohen told him that if Trump had been elected governor of New York in 2013, the latter would have helped bring the accusations to public attention. In mid-2016, Cohen defended Trump against allegations of
antisemitism. In May 2024, Cohen testified that while he did not desire a job based in Washington D.C. and wanted to remain in New York, he did hope to become a personal lawyer to the President. In July 2024, Cohen asked the Supreme Court to allow him to sue Trump. Cohen claimed that Trump had retaliated against him by having him sent back to prison after his 2020 release, following his announcement that he would write a book criticizing Trump. Lower courts had previously dismissed his lawsuit. In October, the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.
Regarding Russia In January 2016, according to
The Washington Post, Cohen sent an email to Russian politician
Dmitry Peskov which was the "most direct outreach documented by a top Trump aide to a similarly senior member of Putin's government". The January 2017
Steele dossier alleges that Cohen met with Russian officials in
Prague,
Czech Republic, in 2016 with the objective of paying those who had
hacked the DNC and to "cover up all traces of the hacking". The dossier contains raw intelligence, and is thought to be a mix of accurate and inaccurate information. Cohen denied the allegations, stating that he was in Los Angeles between August 23 and 29, and in New York for the entire month of September. According to a Czech intelligence source, there is no record of him directly entering Prague by plane, although he ostensibly could have taken
land transport from a neighboring country within the
Schengen Area of the
European Union (EU), the initial entry into which would have been recorded. On April 13, 2018,
McClatchy Newspapers's
Washington, D.C., bureau reported that Special Counsel
Robert Mueller had evidence (including two sources) that Cohen travelled to Prague from
Germany in mid-to-late 2016, which itself would not have required a passport stamp. Cohen again denied ever traveling to Prague or to the EU in August 2016. The 2019
Mueller report claimed that "Cohen ... never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false". In late January 2017, Cohen met with Ukrainian opposition politician
Andrey Artemenko and
Felix Sater at the
Loews Regency in Manhattan to discuss a plan to lift
sanctions against Russia. The proposed plan would require that Russian forces withdraw from eastern Ukraine and that Ukraine hold a referendum on whether
Crimea should be "leased" to Russia for 50 or 100 years. Cohen was given a written proposal in a sealed envelope that he delivered to then-National Security Advisor
Michael Flynn in early February. In May 2017, amidst expanding inquiries into alleged
Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, two congressional panels asked Cohen to provide information about any communications he had with people connected to the Russian government. He was a subject of the
Mueller investigation in 2018. Because of these investigations, Cohen and Trump signed a joint defense agreement allowing their attorneys to share information during the Mueller investigations and joint defense agreements were arranged between Trump and both Flynn and
Paul Manafort. Cohen retained an attorney with Davidoff Hutcher & Citron who later also represented
Rudy Giuliani.
Payment to Stormy Daniels In late 2016, adult-film actress
Stormy Daniels (
legal name Stephanie Clifford) was speaking to some reporters and said that she had had a sexual affair with Trump in 2006. In October, Cohen and Daniels' attorney
Keith M. Davidson negotiated a
non-disclosure agreement (NDA) under which she was to be paid $130,000
hush money. Cohen created a Delaware LLC called Essential Consultants and used it to pay the $130,000. The arrangement was reported by
The Wall Street Journal in January 2018. Cohen told
The New York Times in February 2018 that he paid the $130,000 to Daniels from his own pocket; he also said that the payment was not a campaign contribution and he was not reimbursed by either the Trump Organization or
the Trump campaign.
The Washington Post later noted that, by stating that he used his own money to "facilitate" the payment, Cohen was not ruling out the possibility that Trump, as an individual, reimbursed Cohen for the payment. In April 2018, Trump acknowledged for the first time that Cohen had represented him in the Daniels case, after previously having denied knowledge of the $130,000 payment. On March 5,
The Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources recounting Cohen as saying he missed two deadlines to pay Daniels because Cohen "couldn't reach Mr. Trump in the hectic final days of the presidential campaign", and that after Trump's election, Cohen had complained that he had not been reimbursed for the payment. Cohen described this report as "
fake news". On March 9,
NBC News reported that Cohen had used his Trump Organization email to negotiate with Daniels regarding her NDA, and that Cohen had used the same Trump Organization email to arrange for a transfer for funds that would eventually lead to Daniels' payment. In response, Cohen acknowledged that he had transferred funds from his
home equity line of credit to the LLC and from the LLC to Daniels' attorney. In a March 25, 2018, interview with
60 Minutes, Daniels said that she and Trump had sex once, and that later she had been threatened in front of her infant daughter and felt pressured to later sign an NDA. On March 26, David Schwarz, a lawyer for Cohen, told
ABC's
Good Morning America that Daniels was lying in the
60 Minutes interview. Cohen's lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter claiming that Daniels' statements constituted "libel per se and intentional infliction of emotional distress" to Cohen. Cohen initiated a private arbitration case against Daniels in February 2018, based on an NDA signed by Daniels in October 2016 in exchange for $130,000. Cohen obtained an order from an arbitrator barring Daniels from publicly discussing her alleged relationship with Trump. Daniels subsequently brought a lawsuit in federal court against Trump and Cohen, arguing that the NDA was legally invalid because Trump never signed it. Cohen responded by seeking to compel arbitration, which would avoid public proceedings. On May 18, lawyers for Cohen filed an
objection to Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti being allowed to represent her in a case involving Cohen, claiming it (the objection) was based on the violations of ethical rules and local court rules, among other issues. After Cohen's August 2018 conviction, Trump stated that the payment to Daniels came from him personally and not from the campaign during a
Fox & Friends interview. On May 13, 2024, Cohen directly implicated Trump when he testified during Trump's
New York criminal trial that Trump directed him to make the hush money payment to Daniels and also signed off on Allen Weisselberg's plan on how to reimburse him. Cohen would also bring up his history in dealing with the Daniels allegation and planning out the non-disclosure agreement, including his suggestion to include a clause ensuring that Daniels would required to pay $1,000,000 for every time she violated the agreement by telling her story. According to Cohen, Daniels wanted an appearance on Fox News'
Hannity, though she would end up not doing the interview. The
National Enquirer paid McDougal $150,000 for her story but never published it, a practice known as
catch and kill. On September 30, 2016, Cohen created Resolution Consultants LLC, a
Delaware shell company, to purchase the rights to McDougal's story from the
National Enquirer, though the rights to the story were ultimately never purchased. Cohen had been known to record conversations and phone calls with other people. According to his lawyer Lanny Davis, "Michael Cohen had the habit of using his phone to record conversations instead of taking notes." Altogether the prosecutors have been given more than one hundred audio recordings from the material seized from Cohen in the April 2018 raid; reportedly only one of them featured a substantive conversation with Trump. The discussion involved a potential hush payment to the publisher of the
National Enquirer. The recording had been classified as a
privileged attorney–client communication by the Special Master reviewing the Cohen material, but Trump's attorneys waived that claim, On July 25, Cohen's attorney
Lanny Davis released the actual recording to
CNN, which played it on the air on the
Cuomo Prime Time program. On it, Trump can be heard concluding a telephone conversation with an unidentified person and then discussing several items of business with Cohen. Cohen mentions that he needs to "open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David", interpreted as meaning
David Pecker, the head of
American Media, which publishes the
National Enquirer. Later when they discuss financing, Trump is heard saying something about "pay with cash", to which Cohen responds "no, no, no", but the tape is unclear and it is disputed what is said next; the word "check" can be heard. The tape cuts off abruptly at that point. A lawyer for the Trump Organization said that any reference to "cash" would not have meant "green currency", but a one-time payment ("cash") vs. extended payments ("
financing"), in either case accompanied by documents. According to U.S. election rules, any payments intended to influence an election vote must be reported, and the payments have raised questions about campaign-finance ethics. On May 14, 2024, Cohen testified that McDougal's hush money was undertaken "in order to ensure that the possibility of Mr. Trump succeeding in the election — that this would not be a hindrance" and that he did not alter the recording of the conversation.
Later matters On April 3, 2017, Cohen was appointed as one of three national deputy finance chairmen of the
Republican National Committee (RNC), along with
Elliott Broidy and
Louis DeJoy. In April 2017, Cohen also formed an alliance with
Squire Patton Boggs for legal and lobbying counsel on behalf of Trump. Despite serving as a consultant lawyer, Cohen later testified that Trump never made a personal lawyer to the President. Cohen and the Ukrainian president's office denied the allegations. The BBC ended up having to state the allegation was untrue, apologizing to Poroshenko, deleting the article from its website, paying legal costs, and paying damages to Poroshenko. In May 2018, Rudy Giuliani announced that Cohen was no longer Trump's lawyer. In June 2018, Cohen resigned as deputy finance chairman of the RNC. His resignation letter cited the ongoing investigations and also criticized the Trump administration's policy of
separating undocumented families at the border. In July 2018, Cohen asserted that then-candidate Trump knew in advance about the
June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his son
Donald Jr. and other Trump campaign officials with Russians who claimed to possess information damaging to the Hillary Clinton campaign, contradicting Trump's repeated insistence that he was not aware of the meeting until long after it had taken place. In his May 2024 testimony, Cohen linked not only Trump, but also Allen Weisselberg to both the
Stormy Daniels and
Karen McDougal hush money payments. Jury selection began on July 17, 2023, ahead of a trial which was set to start on July 24. On July 21, both parties agreed to an undisclosed
settlement. In April 2023, Trump sued Cohen for $500 million, alleging breaching the trust of their
attorney–client privilege while making statements against Trump. Cohen sought documents from
The Trump Organization to use in his defense. In August, Trump claimed that these documents "should be covered by a confidentiality order" and disclosing them could expose Trump "to the risk of self-incrimination" in
other cases. On October 5, 2023, Trump dropped the suit after he was scheduled to
give sworn testimony the following week.
Involvement in Falwell scandal In 2015,
Liberty University president
Jerry Falwell Jr. reached out to Cohen and asked him for a personal favor. Falwell had told Cohen that a third party had obtained compromising nude photos of Falwell's wife Becki Falwell. Cohen met with the third party and after the meeting the person destroyed the photos. Shortly after Cohen did this favor for Falwell, Falwell endorsed
Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. In August 2020, Cohen told CNN that there was no link between the favor and the endorsement, saying, "There is absolutely no connection between the photos and my personal request to the Falwells to assist the Trump campaign".
The Wall Street Journal reported that
Shera Bechard, a former
Playboy Playmate, had an affair in 2017 with Broidy, who was married. She became pregnant by him, had an abortion, and was to be paid $1.6 million
hush money. Broidy was a deputy finance chairman of the
Republican National Committee along with Cohen and DeJoy. Cohen was Broidy's attorney and
Keith M. Davidson represented Bechard. The payments were to be made in installments. On July 6, 2018, Bechard filed a lawsuit against Broidy, Davidson, and Daniels' attorney
Michael Avenatti, claiming the three had breached the agreement in relation to the cessation of the settlement payments.
Essential Consultants LLC Essential Consultants LLC is a
Delaware shell company created by Cohen in October 2016 to facilitate payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels. for an array of business activities largely unknown to the public, with at least $4.4 million moving through the LLC between Trump's election to the presidency and January 2018. In May 2018, Daniels' lawyer
Michael Avenatti posted a seven-page report to
Twitter detailing what he said were financial transactions involving Essential Consultants and Cohen. Avenatti did not reveal the source of his information, which was later largely confirmed by
The New York Times and other publications. A spokesperson for Columbus Nova said that the payment was a consulting fee that had nothing to do with Vekselberg. while at the same time the proposed merger between the company and
Time Warner was pending before the Justice Department. AT&T claimed that the money was paid to the LLC and other firms that were used to provide insights into understanding the new administration, and that the LLC did no legal or lobbying work for AT&T. On May 11, 2018, the CEO of AT&T stated that in early 2017 it was approached by Cohen to provide "his opinion on the new president and his administration". Cohen was paid $600,000 ($50,000 per month) over the year, which its CEO described as "a big mistake". Novartis was also approached by Cohen and was offered similar services. Novartis, a
Switzerland–based pharmaceutical giant paid the LLC nearly $1.2 million in separate payments. Novartis released a statement May 9, 2018, that it hired the LLC to help the company understand the "health care policy" of the new administration, but it actually did not receive benefit for its investment. The statement continued that Novartis made a decision to not engage Essential Consultants further, but it could not terminate the contract for "cause", raising concerns on why the company did not pursue reimbursement.
Korea Aerospace Industries paid $150,000, ostensibly for advice on "cost accounting standards". ==Investigations==