Trump’s Former ‘Fixer’ Michael Cohen Says He’d Fear for His Safety With 45 Back in Office
18:51 GMT 12.10.2022 (Updated: 18:53 GMT 12.10.2022)
© AP Photo / Craig Ruttle
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Many have speculated that former US President Donald Trump will seek a return to office in 2024 after losing his 2020 reelection campaign. However, while he’s rallied his base in support of myriad candidates in state and local races, the real estate mogul has kept his future political plans ambiguous.
Michael Cohen, the onetime “fixer” for Trump who later turned against his former boss and helped the FBI, told The Hill recently that he would fear for his safety if Trump ever returned to power.
“Yeah, I am,” Cohen said when The Hill’s “In the Know” asked him if he would worry about his well-being if Trump ever returned to office.
“Actually, I’m worried for your safety, too,” he added, “and everybody else in America.”
“My fear is that you’re going to see like what you see in Russia right now,” Cohen continued. “All of these individuals flying out of windows or mysterious deaths of suicide. Donald has a very long list of - we’ll call it an enemies list - and I’m certain that I am definitively on it.”
Cohen once served as Trump’s “fixer,” handling his inconvenient legal problems, including attempting to keep porn star Stormy Daniels quiet about an alleged affair she had with Trump in the 2000s. Cohen’s payment, allegedly made without Trump’s knowledge, was later discovered by the FBI as it looked for potential connections between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government.
He struck a deal with the FBI in 2018 to plead guilty to nine federal crimes, including tax fraud, bank fraud, lying to Congress, and campaign finance violations, and spent three years in federal custody and house arrest. He later cooperated with Congressional investigations into Trump’s business dealings, and denounced his former boss as a “racist” and a “cheat.”
30 September 2022, 21:32 GMT
Cohen told the Hill that he thought one of the myriad legal cases being brought against Trump is likely to eventually get the real estate mogul jailed, now that he has lost the immunity of his office, including the recent FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. The federal law enforcement agency carried out hundreds of classified files kept in boxes in a storage closet in an August search and seizure, which reportedly included information on a foreign power’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
“I believe that the indictments should be - because it’s the low hanging fruit - for tax evasion,” Cohen said. “I call that my ‘Al Capone theory’: They couldn’t get him on murder, racketeering, extortion. So instead they got him on tax evasion. The same thing that they can get Donald on, not to mention Tish James’s case will financially destroy him.”
8 October 2022, 18:25 GMT
Interestingly, in an interview with the Washington Post a day prior, Cohen said he didn’t expect Trump to become president in 2024, as many have speculated might happen.
“I also don’t believe that Donald is actually going to run in 2024. Because I believe that he knows that he cannot win and that, even if he did choose to run, that he will face opposition for the Republican nomination,” Cohen told the Post.
“He also knows very well, statistically, that he cannot win the general election. He’s lost those independents now, based upon Roe v. Wade, climate, student relief, etc. So what he’ll do is he will seek to remain relevant in the party by becoming a power broker and believing that whichever nominee he backs and endorses will owe him a duty of loyalty so that, in the event that his day of reckoning comes, they will terminate or pardon him from the plethora of litigation and consequences that currently plagues him,” he predicted.
Another of Trump’s former associates, his former attorney general, William Barr, predicted much the same last month.
Both of Cohen’s interviews were given in connection with the release of his second book, “Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the US Department of Justice Against His Critics,” which hit shelves on Tuesday.
