As Donald Trump’s hush-money trial enters its third week, jurors will be asked to focus on the testimony of his former Mr Fixit – the disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen.
Cohen, who served as Trump’s personal attorney for 12 years until 2018, is acting as a witness for the New York district attorney, Alvin Bragg. The case could turn on Cohen’s testimony about payments sought by two women, the porn star Stormy Daniels and the Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, and how those payments were made and allegedly disguised, as prosecutors contend, in violation of accounting and political campaign laws.
Another disbarred lawyer, Michael Avenatti, will feature in Cohen’s testimony, given he previously represented Clifford and McDougal in the transaction. Avenatti is serving a five-year sentence after being convicted of stealing $297,000 in book proceeds from Daniels, defrauding $20m from Nike, and obstructing the IRS.
Avenatti said in court in 2022 he had chosen to represent Daniels because she was an underdog, and because no one else would.
“Nobody could have predicted the success we would have and the notoriety that would follow,” he said at the time.
In one case, Avenatti was charged with defrauding a mentally ill and disabled person of $4m and concealing a further payment of $2.5m, putting it toward the purchase of a private jet. Ryan Korner, the chief of IRS criminal investigations in Los Angeles, said Avenatti had used the money “to fuel a lavish lifestyle that had no limits”.
While Trump seeks to avoid being found guilty for his alleged payments to Daniels and McDougal, Cohen and Avenatti are seeking public redemption – and potentially a presidential pardon.
But it has been a long road to get here. Avenatti, once a staunch critic of Trump and who briefly toyed with running for the Democratic presidential nomination, now describes the four separate criminal cases against Trump as “absolute overkill” and said he is willing to testify for the defense in the current case.
Avenatti told Fox News Digital last week that “a group of individuals” had decided that “they don’t want to leave it to ‘the little guy’” to decide the next president.
“I certainly see [Trump] as a victim of the system, and that’s something that I never thought I would say,” he said.
There has long been media speculation that Avenatti is simply seeking the chance of a presidential pardon if Trump is returned to the White House in November.
As for Cohen, he has claimed to be a changed man in congressional testimony, TV interviews, two books, a podcast and in court testimony (which a judge said amounted to perjury).
“I am the canary in the coalmine for millions of Americans mesmerized by Trump,” Cohen said on his podcast, Mea Culpa. He said he hoped that speaking out would serve as a “way to right some of the many wrongs I committed at his behest”.
Like Avenatti, Cohen, too, is a convicted felon, and served a prison sentence after pleading guilty to eight counts of criminal tax evasion and campaign-finance violations – including on a $100,000 payment received on the sale of a Florida property, $30,000 in profit made from brokering the sale of an Hermès Birkin handbag, more than $200,000 in consulting income earned from an assisted living company, and failing to report more than $4m on income from a New York yellow-cab medallions scheme.
Senior Democrats in Congress have voiced concern that a man like Cohen, who once said he would “take a bullet” for Trump, presents an uneven claim for redemption.
“I think his willingness to speak out and to incur the wrath of Trump world is significant,” the congressman Adam Schiff told the Washington Post last week, but said Cohen “would still be a loyal Trump soldier if Trump hadn’t been willing to discard him like a piece of bad fruit”.
A federal judge overseeing Cohen’s request to be released from court supervision said last month that the testimony Cohen had given in Trump’s previous civil trial showed he had either lied when he pleaded guilty to tax fraud in 2018 or perjured himself when he “repeatedly and unambiguously” denied it at Trump’s fraud case.
Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly risked violating a court-imposed gag order that prevents him from disparaging witnesses, including Cohen, and virtually anyone involved in the case except the judge and the district attorney.
“Michael Cohen is a convicted liar, and he’s got no credibility whatsoever,” he railed last week in an interview with Philadelphia radio station WPVI.
Still, a disbarred lawyer serving as a turncoat witness in a criminal trial is uncommon, says Michael S Ariens, author of The Lawyer’s Conscience: a History of American Lawyer Ethics.
“Ordinarily, lawyers don’t get involved as deeply into these illicit activities as you see in Cohen’s case and Avenatti’s case. Lawyers can do things the public finds pretty distasteful, but they normally stick to distasteful activities rather than criminal,” Ariens said.
“It started as distasteful and worked its way to illicit.”
The seated jury in the hush-money trial contains two lawyers, probably a purposeful component of the two opposing jury selection teams. Ariens says having lawyers on a jury could lead to a few things. While they are likely to do their best to follow the instructions, they’re also “often harshly critical of other members of their profession, both in terms of the prosecution and defense team in assessing their abilities, but in this case the lawyers who are also witnesses”.
“That could help the defendant Donald Trump in this because there might be less of a sense of scoring political points and more of this is a legal case, let’s follow the law,” Ariens said.
Striking, too, is the number of lawyers who have become embroiled in Trump’s other alleged crimes. In the Florida classified documents case, the attorney-client privilege of the Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran was waived. He was forced to testify before a grand jury, after the presiding judge found that Corcoran’s legal work may have been used in the commission of a continuing crime.
In the Georgia elections interference case, special prosecutor Nathan Wade was forced to step down after a judge found that a romance between him and the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, had created an “appearance of impropriety”. In the January 6 case, the Trump justice department lawyer Jeffrey Clark was called to testify before a congressional committee, and Clark also faces criminal charges in the Georgia case.
The only comparable time when so many lawyers have been converted into criminal defendants was Watergate, Ariens points out.
Converting lawyers into turncoat or cooperating witnesses, or into criminal defendants, could have two outcomes, says Ariens. In one, the public will says, “well, what did you expect from lawyers – we knew they were untrustworthy and use their knowledge to help their clients and that’s the kind of system we have”.
In the other, Ariens says, the public may conclude, that, yes, there were crooked lawyers involved “but there were other lawyers who wanted to do justice in the criminal system who actually helped create the opportunity for sussing them out and prosecuting them under the law”.
