In tell-all book, Michael Cohen says Trump hired a
'Faux-Bama' during White House run
By Erica Orden, CNN
Updated 10:02 PM ET, Sat September 5, 2020
President Donald Trump
(CNN) Before Donald Trump ever sought the Oval
Office, he was preoccupied by its occupant President Barack Obama, publicly
questioning his birthplace and privately describing him as "a Manchurian
candidate" who obtained his Ivy League degrees only by way of affirmative
action, according to a new book by Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen.
CNN obtained a copy of the book ahead of its
Tuesday publication.
Trump's disdain for Obama was so extreme that he
took his fixation a step further, according to Cohen: Trump hired a
"Faux-Bama" to participate in a video in which Trump
"ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired
him."
Cohen's book, "Disloyal: A Memoir,"
doesn't name the man who was allegedly hired to play Obama or provide a
specific date for the incident, but it does include a photograph of Trump
sitting behind a desk, facing a Black man wearing a suit with an American flag
pin affixed to the lapel. On Trump's desk are two books, one displaying Obama's
name in large letters.
As an insider who spent years as Trump's
personal attorney and self-proclaimed "fixer," Cohen says he is
uniquely equipped to unleash on Trump, whom Cohen describes as "a cheat, a
liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man" and a person
interested in using the presidency exclusively for his personal financial
benefit.
But according to federal prosecutors and
Cohen's own guilty pleas, he, too, is a liar and a cheat. In 2018, he pleaded
guilty to nine counts of federal crimes, including tax evasion, lying to Congress
and campaign-finance violations he and prosecutors have said were done at
Trump's direction to help him win the 2016 presidential election.
CNN has reached out to the White House for
comment. In a statement to the Washington Post, White House press secretary
Kayleigh McEnany said, "Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon
and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress. He has lost all credibility, and
it's unsurprising to see his latest attempt to profit off of lies."
Cohen acknowledges and apologizes for his role
in Trump's rise, saying he was "more than willing to lie, cheat, and
bully" to help his long-time boss win the White House. And he recounts the
pressure and guilt he experienced as he spoke out against Trump, writing that
he considered suicide "as a way to escape the unrelenting insanity"
in the weeks prior to testifying to Congress in 2019.
But in the book, he disputes having committed
certain crimes to which he has already admitted, portraying himself a victim of
the "gangster tactics" of the federal prosecutors of the US
Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York.
Still, Cohen's account of Trump's personal
nature and presidency is damning, and during Cohen's time in prison, he writes,
"I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office
peacefully."
Trump's model of a man in power, according to
Cohen, is Vladimir Putin, and Trump is described as enamored of Putin's wealth
and unilateral influence, and awestruck by what he sees as the Russian
president's ability to control everything from the country's press to its
financial institutions.
"Locking up your political enemies,
criminalizing dissent, terrifying or bankrupting the free press through libel
lawsuits -- Trump's all-encompassing vision wasn't evident to me before he
began to run for president," Cohen writes. "I honestly believe the
most extreme ideas about power and its uses only really took shape as he began
to seriously contemplate the implications of taking power and how he could
leverage it to the absolute maximum level possible."
But he reiterates his belief that Trump and
his campaign officials were too disorganized to have coordinated with the
Russians during the 2016 election. "What appeared to be collusion was
really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way
possible, up to and including interfering in the American election -- a subject
that caused Trump precisely zero unease," Cohen writes.
He also argues that, with Trump himself
expecting to lose the presidential race, Trump's goal in cozying up to Putin
was to position himself to benefit financially from a planned real-estate
development in Moscow after the election.
"By ingratiating himself with Putin, and
hinting at changes in American sanctions policy against the country under a
Trump Presidency," Cohen writes, "the Boss was trying to nudge the
Moscow Trump Tower project along." (One of the crimes to which Cohen
pleaded guilty was lying to Congress about the duration of the negotiations
regarding the Moscow development.)
Cohen also portrays Trump as aspiring to have
ties to the Russian president. After Trump sold a Palm Beach mansion he
purchased for $41 million to a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95
million in 2008, Cohen says, Trump told Cohen he believed the real buyer was
Putin.
Cohen, however, disputes the validity of a
rumored videotape depicting Trump during a trip to Moscow, saying, "this
claim never occurred, to the best of my knowledge and investigations."
But Cohen discloses that during the summer of
2016, he received an anonymous call from a man who said he was in possession of
a tape matching its description. Cohen told the caller that he would need to
see a few seconds of the tape to determine if it was real, and the caller
demanded $20 million before hanging up, never to be heard from again.
Blacks & Latinos,
'They're not my people'
If Putin is held in the highest regard in
Trump's mind, Cohen writes, Trump's own voters rank among those in the lowest.
Speaking to Cohen after Trump gathered religious leaders at Trump Tower in the
lead up to the 2012 presidential race, an encounter during which they asked to
"lay hands" on him, Trump asked Cohen, according to the book:
"Can you believe that bullsh*t?...Can you believe people believe that
bullsh*t?"
In the wake of Trump's presidential kickoff
announcement in 2015, in which he called Mexicans criminals and rapists, he
dismissed concerns that he had alienated Latinos. "Plus, I will never get
the Hispanic vote," Trump allegedly told Cohen. "Like the blacks,
they're too stupid to vote for Trump. They're not my people." (Trump won
28% of the Latino vote in 2016.)
Trump's contempt, in Cohen's telling, extends
broadly. Cohen characterizes Trump bluntly as racist, and says that while he
never heard Trump use the "N-word," Trump used other offensive
language.
Ranting about Obama after he won office in
2008, Trump said, "Tell me one country run by a black person that isn't a
sh*thole...They are all complete f*cking toilets," according to Cohen.
After Nelson Mandela died, Trump allegedly said of South Africa that
"Mandela f*cked the whole country up. Now it's a sh*thole. F*ck Mandela.
He was no leader."
Cohen also divulges personal details about
Trump, including his hair routine, described as a "three-step"
combover designed to disguise "unsightly scars on his scalp from a failed
hair-implant operation in the 1980s."
Writing that he once witnessed Trump shortly
after he showered, Cohen recalls that "when his hair wasn't done, his
strands of dyed-golden hair reached below his shoulders along the right side of
his head and on his back, like a balding Allman Brother or strung out old '60s
hippie."
Many instances of Trump's alleged deceit have
previously been detailed by Cohen and others in recent years: Trump's alleged
inflation of his net worth to publications like Forbes and Fortune and his
minimizing of the value of his properties to avoid taxes, Cohen's pressuring of
the New York Military Academy to not release Trump's high school records to
avoid their public disclosure, Cohen paying to rig CNBC and Drudge Report polls
in Trump's favor, Trump campaign officials hiring extras for $50 apiece to
attend Trump's 2015 announcement that he was running for president and the
alleged fraudulent Trump University scheme, over which Trump settled a class
action lawsuit for $25 million.
Harshest judgment for
the media
And a healthy portion of the book is devoted
to the incidents perhaps best known at this point: Trump's and Cohen's alleged
efforts to silence women who claimed affairs with Trump during the 2016
election -- campaign finance violations that landed Cohen in prison and led
prosecutors to say were done "in coordination with and at the direction of
Individual - 1," otherwise known as Trump.
Trump has denied the affairs and any
involvement with the payments.
Cohen provides detailed accounts of the
negotiations that led to the payments to two women -- adult-film actress
Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, and former Playboy
model Karen McDougal -- efforts that, according to Cohen, deeply involved
himself, Trump and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen
Weisselberg, who ultimately cooperated with prosecutors.
Trump specifically authorized Cohen to strike
the deal with Daniels, Cohen writes. "It's only $130,000," Trump
said, according to Cohen. "F*ck it, Michael. Go talk to Allen and figure
it all out." (Cohen, too, mocks the payment, "a sum that seemed
almost laughably low.")
And he recalls Weisselberg allegedly
convincing him to front the money to pay Daniels by using Cohen's home equity
line of credit.
On October 27, 2016, after Cohen had wired the
$130,000, he called Trump to tell him the transaction was complete, Cohen
writes.
In describing the investigation and
prosecution, however, Cohen portrays himself as exceedingly cooperative, a
notion prosecutors have refuted. With respect to tax evasion charges, he claims
he provided his accountant with all of his records, an assertion federal
prosecutors have said in court filings is false.
Regarding a count of lying to a bank, Cohen
calls it a "fantasy of the federal prosecutors from the Southern District
of New York."
"I didn't lie for the simplest reason:
the bank never asked what I wanted the money for," he writes. But the
charge to which Cohen pleaded guilty, according to court documents, stemmed
from him repeatedly withholding information from banks or providing them with
misleading information about various lines of credit secured by his taxi
medallions. (In a sentencing memo to the judge overseeing his case, prosecutors
referred to the false statement to a bank charge as "far from an isolated
event: It was one in a long series of self-serving lies Cohen told to numerous
financial institutions.")
He writes that New York federal prosecutors
"refused" his requests, made through his lawyer Guy Petrillo, to meet
with him for four months in advance of his guilty plea and that they threatened
to charge his wife if he didn't agree to plead guilty.
And he says it is "unimaginable"
that Trump didn't have advance knowledge of the FBI raids of his properties,
because Trump is "the chief law enforcement officer in the country,"
which he is not.
"My lawyers had continually stated that
they didn't see any charges coming," Cohen writes, "but the truth in
this country is that if federal prosecutors want to get you, they will."
In a section in which he describes reporting
to serve his sentence, he laments being "railroaded into prison by federal
prosecutors who'd since gone on to high paying white-shoe law firms, with my
conviction as their signature achievement at the Southern District." A
spokesman for the Manhattan US Attorney's office declined to comment.
But in a way perhaps even Trump could appreciate,
Cohen reserves some of his harshest judgment for the media, which he blames for
falling for Trump's attention-grabbing tactics and propelling him to office.
"Donald Trump's presidency is a product
of the free press," he writes. "Not free as in freedom of expression,
I mean free as unpaid for. Rallies broadcast live, tweets, press conferences,
idiotic interviews, 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny.
The free press gave America Trump."
"Right, left, moderate, tabloid,
broadsheet, television, radio, Internet, Facebook -- that is who elected Trump
and might well elect him again."