(The New Yorker)
Jeffrey Toobin April 29, 2019
It takes some time for Michael Cohen to work his way to a table at the grill room of the Loews Regency Hotel, on Park Avenue. He’s been a regular at the hotel’s famous power breakfasts for more than two decades, and on several recent visits staff members reached out to him for handshakes and bro hugs. These days, the restaurant, with its twenty-seven-dollar pancakes and sumptuously upholstered banquettes, represents a welcome refuge for the erstwhile “Personal Attorney to the President,” as Cohen used to describe himself. Outside the friendly cocoon of the hotel, he has attracted a bipartisan coalition of adversaries—Democrats who remember his years of service as Donald Trump’s fierce and profane fixer, and Republicans who abhor Cohen’s transformation into a vocal Trump critic. Robert Mueller, the special counsel, apparently has a different view of him. Cohen pleaded guilty, last year, to campaign-finance and financial-fraud crimes in the federal court for the Southern District of New York, in Manhattan, and Mueller got Cohen to plead guilty to lying to Congress. But Mueller referred to Cohen’s testimony more than a hundred times in the recently released report of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and he used Cohen’s testimony to establish one of his central conclusions: that Trump and his allies may have obstructed justice, by attempting to steer Cohen into protecting the President.
On May 6th, Cohen will begin serving a three-year sentence at the federal prison in Otisville, New York, seventy-five miles north of Manhattan, leaving in his wake a grieving family, vanishing wealth, and gloating enemies. In hostile tweets, the President has called him a “rat” who “makes up stories,” and insinuated that Cohen’s family members had committed other crimes. Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, told me last week, about Cohen, “I think he is a pathological, dumb liar.” Prosecutors in the Southern District have rebuffed Cohen’s attempts to offer evidence against Trump and others, thwarting his hope of reducing his sentence or delaying his surrender date. Congressional committees continue to demand his time. Cohen, who is fifty-two, has an unlined face, more or less permanently set in a hangdog scowl, and a voice that retains the unmistakable trace of his childhood on Long Island. In conversation, he jumps from topic to topic in a jittery staccato. To sit with him today is to listen to a fugue of self-pity and rage, from a man who also exhibits some understandable bewilderment at his plight. “I now have congressional committees asking me for more information based upon information that I had already given,” he told me at the Regency. “I’m not going to take another minute out of my family’s time with me in order to do anything anymore without knowing what benefit there is now to me.”
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