Michael Cohen | |
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Cohen in 2019 | |
Born | Michael Dean Cohen August 25, 1966 Lawrence, New York, U.S. |
Education | American University (BA) Cooley Law School (JD) |
Political party | Democratic (before 2002, 2004–2017, 2018–present) Republican (2002–2004, 2017–2018) |
Cohen joined the Trump Organization in fall of 2006. Trump hired him in part because he was already an admirer of Trump, having read Trump's Art of the Deal twice. He had purchased several Trump properties and convinced his own parents and in-laws, as well as a business partner, to buy condominiums in Trump World Tower. Cohen aided Trump in his struggle with the condominium board at the Trump World Tower, which led Trump to obtain control of the board. Cohen became a close confidant to Trump, maintaining an office near Trump at Trump Tower.
Cohen began practicing personal injury law in New York in 1992, working for Melvyn Estrin in Manhattan. As of 2003, Cohen was an attorney in private practice and CEO of MLA Cruises, Inc., and of the Atlantic Casino.
Michael Dean Cohen (born August 25, 1966) is an American disbarred lawyer who served as an attorney for U.S. president Donald Trump from 2006 to 2018. Cohen was a vice-president of the Trump Organization, and the personal counsel to Trump, and was often described by media as Trump's " fixer .". He served as co-president ...
Trump employed Cohen until May 2018, a year after the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections began. The investigation led Cohen to plead guilty on August 21, 2018, to eight counts including campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud.
Cohen volunteered for the 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. He was also an intern for Congressman Joe Moakley and voted for Barack Obama in 2008, although he later became disappointed with Obama.
That afternoon, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges: five counts of tax evasion, one count of making false statements to a financial institution, one count of willfully causing an unlawful corporate contribution, and one count of making an excessive campaign contribution at the request of a candidate (Trump) for the "principal purpose of influencing [the] election".
On November 29, 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee and House Intelligence Committee in 2017 regarding the proposed Trump Tower Moscow deal that he spearheaded in 2015 and 2016. Cohen had told Congress that the deal ceased in January 2016 when it actually ended in June 2016, and that he had not received a response about the deal from the office of a senior Russian official when he actually had. Cohen said that he had given the false testimony in order to be consistent with Trump's "repeated disavowals of commercial and political ties between himself and Russia" and out of loyalty to Trump. Cohen received a two-month sentence, to be served concurrently with his three-year sentence for tax fraud, for the false testimony.
Pam Bondi. Pam Bondi, a special advisor to Trump, speaks as part of his defense team during the Senate impeachment trial, January 29, 2020. (Source: C-SPAN) Another registered lobbyist who defended the president is Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general.
Dershowitz controversially said in Trump’s defense on the Senate floor in January that “if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”.
Exhibit A is the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who, rather than participating in Trump’s defense during the impeachment trial, was himself a major topic of debate on the Senate floor. Giuliani’s name appears hundreds of times in the House Judiciary Committee’s report accompanying the articles of impeachment.
(Source: C-SPAN) Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor known for representing celebrity criminal defendants, also has other business before the Trump administration.
Pam Bondi, a special advisor to Trump, speaks as part of his defense team during the Senate impeachment trial, January 29, 2020. (Source: C-SPAN) Another registered lobbyist who defended the president is Pam Bondi, a former Florida attorney general. Immediately prior to joining the impeachment defense team as a special government employee, ...
In early 2019, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel reversed its previous position on the law to correspond with an expansive interpretation favored by Sheldon Adelson, a casino operator who is one of Trump’s biggest donors and an opponent of online gambling, which competes with his business.
Jay Sekulow. Jay Sekulow, a personal attorney to Trump, speaks during the Senate impeachment trial, January 29, 2020. (Source: C-SPAN) Until its recent indictment by the Justice Department for money laundering and violating sanctions against Iran, state-owned Turkish bank Halkbank was another of Ballard’s clients.
Futerfas made his name as a defense attorney by successfully representing mobsters in New York City. He later expanded to defending corporate and white collar crimes, and more recently cyber crimes. In 2016, he defended a Russian man who was convicted in the U.S. of creating computer malware. Federal Election Commission records filed last month show Trump's re-election campaign began paying Futerfas' law firm more than a week before the June 2016 meeting became public.
Andrew Rafferty. Andrew Rafferty has been a political reporter for NBCNews.com since 2013. Rafferty writes and reports on politics for the web, and shoots and produces video for all NBC platforms. Prior to joining NBCNews.com, Rafferty was a campaign reporter covering the 2012 presidential election.
Ty Cobb: The veteran Washington lawyer is the newest addition to Trump’s legal team. He was brought on to be in-house counsel, meaning he will work from the White House. His hiring comes amid reports the president is growing frustrated with Kasowitz, who remains in New York and commutes to Washington. Cobb is a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells, which is set to face off against the Trump administration in the upcoming Supreme Court case over the president’s travel restrictions.
Jay Sekulow: Sekulow is a lawyer with his own radio show and has largely been the public face for Trump’s legal team. He is the chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, a Pat Robertson founded group meant to be the conservative answer to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Sekulow, 64, is chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal group.
Pam Bondi is a former two-term Florida attorney general, elected in 2010 and again in 2014. Bondi, 55, already familiar to viewers of Fox News Channel, became a familiar figure early in 2020 as one of Trump’s lawyers during his Senate impeachment trial. She made strong arguments for the president on the Senate floor, ...
Marc Scaringi, a lawyer in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is leading the Trump campaign’s legal effort in that state. Scaringi, 51, focuses his practice on business and corporate law and has about 20 years of experience.
Sidney Powell made news recently by calling out potential problems with voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems and suggesting that enough evidence will emerge to overturn election results in several states.
(CNN) The orbit of former advisers and associates of President Donald Trump who have been indicted or found guilty grew Thursday when Steve Bannon, his former senior adviser and chief strategist, was arrested and indicted.
The case has become a political lightning rod, with Trump and Flynn both saying he's been treated unfairly by the judge and the prosecutors who cut his plea deal. Trump has not ruled out a pardon for Flynn.
Trump's onetime national security adviser, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his talks with the then-Russian ambassador about approaches that would undermine Obama administration policy before Trump took office.
Trump commuted his sentence this summer days, before Stone was set to report to a federal prison in Georgia.
This is a list of United States attorneys appointed by the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump.
President Trump nominated 86 people to be U.S. attorneys, and 84 of them were confirmed. There are a total of 93 U.S. attorneys in the Department of Justice.
Trump's U.S. attorneys have been overwhelmingly white and male. During Tru…
Michael Dean Cohen (born August 25, 1966) is an American disbarred lawyer who served as an attorney for U.S. president Donald Trump from 2006 to 2018. Cohen was a vice-president of the Trump Organization, and the personal counsel to Trump, and was often described by media as Trump's "fixer". He served as co-president of Trump Entertainment and was a board member of the Eric Trump F…
Cohen was raised in the town of Lawrence on Long Island, New York. His mother was a nurse, and his father, a Holocaust survivor, was a surgeon. Cohen is Ashkenazi Jewish. He attended Woodmere Academy and received his BA from American University in 1988 and his JD from Thomas M. Cooley Law School in 1991.
Cohen began practicing personal injury law in New York in 1992, working for Melvyn Estrin in Manhattan. As of 2003, Cohen was an attorney in private practice and CEO of MLA Cruises, Inc., and of the Atlantic Casino.
In 2006, Cohen was a partner at the law firm Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon. He practiced law at the firm for about a year before joining The Trump …
As of April 2018, Cohen was under federal criminal investigation by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY).
On April 9, 2018, the FBI raided Cohen's office at the law firm of Squire Patton Boggs, as well as his home and his hotel room in the Loews Regency Hotel in New York City, pursuant to a federal search warrant. The warrant was obtaine…
The Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Attorney General opened investigations into Trump. The Manhattan DA's office ultimately decided in 2022 not to pursue charges, in part because the new DA, Alvin Bragg, worried that the case relied too much on Michael Cohen's testimony.
These were separate from the investigation by the New York State Department of Taxation and F…
On January 10, 2019, Cohen agreed to testify publicly before the House Oversight Committee to give a "full and credible account" of his work on behalf of Trump. On January 12, Fox News contributor and legal analyst Jeanine Pirro took a 20-minute, on-air phone call from Trump in which he claimed Cohen had fabricated stories to reduce the length of his expected sentence. Trump suggested that investigations should instead focus on Cohen's father-in-law, saying "that's the o…