Michael Cohen Admits He Stole Tens of Thousands of Dollars From Trump Organization
Cohen stole $30,000 from the Trump Organization.
Michael Cohen admitted under oath that he stole tens of thousands of dollars from former President Donald Trump’s organization.
Looks like Cohen, the prosecution’s star witness, continues to tank the case.
When Michael Cohen met with Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg in January 2017 to discuss being reimbursed for his $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, he also wanted $50,000 for a payment to Red Finch, a technical services company. But Cohen had actually paid Red Finch $20,000.
Weisselberg wanted to “gross up” Cohen’s payment by doubling it, Cohen and a Trump Organization official have testified, supposedly to help Cohen pay the taxes on money that was being reported as income. So the $50,000 reimbursement was doubled to $100,000 — $60,000 more than if Cohen had been honest about the true amount.
The Daniels payment was also doubled to $260,000 for tax purposes, and Weisselberg added a $60,000 bonus for a grand total of $420,000, payment records show. Cohen then received that money in installments over the next 12 months.
“You stole from the Trump Organization?” defense attorney Todd Blanche asked. “Yes,” Cohen said.
“You told multiple prosecutors in the district attorney’s office that story?” Blanche asked. “Yes sir,” Cohen answered.
“Did you ever have to plead guilty to larceny?” Blanche inquired. “No sir,” Cohen replied.
“Have you paid back the Trump Organization the money you stole from them?” Blanche asked. “No sir,” Cohen said.
Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records regarding a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
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Comments
Sixty grand…is THAT all?
What a chump. Letitia thinks Trump carries that amount in his pocket.
Silly Scooter….that’s what he admitted to when he couldn’t deny it. It’s a completely different amount than what he (no doubt) actually stole.
That was my thought as well. Nobody paid as much as Cohen was at the time steals JUST a tiny amount like $60k.
snicker snicker…tee hee hee all the way to San Marcos or Key Largo.
The New York case against Trump is imploding.
When do the powers-that-be get charged with malicious prosecution?
They don’t. They’re Democrats.
This crooked Jury could find Trump guilty even is Jesus himself took the stand and said DJT was innocent.
that’s the problem,…
Same as Styen Simberg defamation trial. The plaintiff had a new one ripped by the defense during cross examination, yet the DC jury still found steyn & Simberg liable.
The jury from NYC is going to convict Trump regardless of the evidence. (fwiw – I have a strong preference from most anyone except trump – preferably Desantis).
Not “even if” but “especially if”. New York Leftists.
Subotai Bahadur
Never.
Don’t worry, they got this one in the bag already by holding it in Democrat land.
It may not be imploding at all. Judge Merchan’s jury instructions could make the sideshow of Cohen’s testimony irrelevant.
You can, as judge, direct someone to forget about something. That doesn’t make them forget about it. The question will probably be will these 12 New Yorkers hate Trump more than they hate the people who made them sit through this farce.
Here’s the thing. You’re a juror who lives in Manhattan aka TDS Central. Sooner or later everyone is going to find out the names of the jurors, especially and particularly if the vote is to acquit.
So, if you vote to acquit, people going to know you did. You will catch holy hell from EVERYONE in the City of New York, “ How could you DO that?” for years and years.
Much easier to vote guilty and take comfort (if you have a conscience) that the appeals court will clear things up.
In the meantime, you friends will praise you.
They don’t. There’s no such charge, and they have absolute immunity.
…hence the fretting of a vindictive Trump.
This doesn’t logically follow:
1. Admittance of another crime isn’t a defence of the original crime is it
2. There have been perfectly good defences against Todd Blanches claims of lies re the phone call. How long does it take to say ‘That Stormy Daniels thing is done boss’ what 5 seconds. That’s the entire basis of the lie claim that it wasn’t possible to say that in 90 seconds and discuss the 14 year old calls
3. There is a tonne of evidence already presented that makes the main thrust of the argument pretty strong.
4. The defence argument in opening was that the affair never happened, that’s crashed and burned. The next defence they have is that the whole episode was to avoid Melania’s benefit but the timeline and testimony strongly suggests that this isn’t a viable argument. And even if we grant that it doesn’t exclude the other motive which is strongly indicated by the evidence.
5. Don’t forget that the last witness was a total crash and burn, the defence’s witness was the last thing the jury saw.
Denile ain’t just a river in Egypt, pal.
Correct, it’s a Trump supporters mental state too
Seems like Weisselberg couldn’t have cared less if the Red Finch reimbursement was correct. Otherwise he would have requested a paid bill.
Could we all remember that there isn’t any law allegedly broken in this case and that the strategy of Alvin Bragg from the start was pray for an unbelievably biased judge (which he achieved unfortunately) and depend on the bias of the jury pool (which he got an assist for from the judge)?
This is not news, the prosecution only called Cohen and Daniels because they felt they needed to pretend by calling some token witnesses.
Judge shopping is easy on home turf. I’m sure that Bragg was able to get exactly the judge he wanted by gaming the timing of the indictment, just as Jackoff Smith got the judge he wanted in DC.
There is a law allegedly broken in this case. That breach depends on a second law being broken, and when Bragg finally identified that law it turned out to depend on yet a third law being broken. I think we’re still guessing at that third law. But the allegation is that there was a third offense, which triggers the second offense, which triggers the first offense, green grow the rushes-oh, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Can you demonstrate why you think the judge is biased?
Good grief
I feared that the continued cross-examination of Cohen would prove to be an anticlimax that would let the jury forget last week’s bombshell about Cohen’s lies regarding the phone call. Instead, Blanche got an even more-damning admission from Cohen.
Doesn’t matter. This corrupt judge – whose daughter is getting paid DIRECTLY by Democrat politicians like Goldman, by the way – knows that this case is a joke and going to get reversed on appeal, but doesn’t care.
He knows that as long as he sends it to this corrupt far left jury that its an automatic conviction.
He wants his conviction, and he’s going to get it. If it’s already going to get reversed, who cares if he keeps stacking up reversible rulings?
Just read WSJ article on this. If the judge allows lesser included charge of misdemeanors, the statute of limitations is not violated, a conviction is all but guaranteed, and appeal, next to impossible. It would be a crafty, safe bet on the judge’s part.
As misdemeanors, the charges are way past the statute of limitations.–the only thing that allows them to be actionable even by this moronic ‘novel interpretation’ is that they were elevated to felonies because they were committed in furtherance of that felony that Bragg claims but can’t name.
You are wrong! The statute stops tolling while the accused is out of state. I referenced the article.
Yes, and the definition of ‘out of state’ they’re using is as novel as the rest of this farce.
Azathoth lying as usual. The definition of “out of state” is not at all novel, it’s the standard definition used everywhere: out of state means out of state and nothing more. Any day on which the accused is not physically present in the state is not counted. The fact that he was not evading service, and that his whereabouts were well known is irrelevant.
That’s always been how it works, it’s how it works for everyone else. Trump supporters’ preferred interpretation is a novel one. Not unreasonable, but novel and contrary to all precedent.
Just listen to Milhouse, he will leap in all avenging, to make you know that whatever benefits the left is the actual and correct thing.
With, as usual, zero understanding.
Like any leftist, Azathoth doesn’t even understand the concept of deciding anything without regard to whose ox is gored. This may be the defining feature of a leftist worldview, that whose ox is gored is highly relevant and actually determines what position one should take on any question, and what story one should tell regardless of the truth.
Democrats don’t care about this being over turned in appeal.
All they need is a conviction for November. Any appeal will be 2025 at some point and well past the memory of your average low information voter.
Reversal on appeal is not relevant to Democrat strategy. Preventing Trump from campaigning for the remainder of the election season to prevent his re-election is the goal. That makes their vote fraud effort more plausible. “He lost because he didn’t campaign and was in jail. Nothing to do with the allegedly suspicious vote counting.”
Yet the jury is still out about what the jury will do. If this is not a surreal disparagement of where things are in 2024, what is?
A lot will depend on the Judge’s jury instructions. He could write those instructions so a conviction is almost guaranteed.
https://jonathanturley.org/2024/05/17/getting-played-the-demolition-of-cohen-on-cross-examination-reveals-the-grift-to-a-new-york-jury/#more-219046
Could write? Is there any doubt he will?
Kudos to Blanche for making the prosecution out to be malign fools. Blanche has already won in the court of public opinion—at least for anyone not consumed with hatred of Trump and Republicans. What a sick joke our system of justice has become—for anyone who cannot afford to defend himself. Now the jury has the choice of either joining this parade of malice and incompetence, or not.
Aside from the “ballot harvesting”, the “court of public opinion” will determine the election outcome against the apparently advanced dementia patient …..
“When I was vice president, things were kind of bad during the pandemic and what happened was, Barack said to me, ‘Go to Detroit! Help fix it,’” Biden said during a campaign event with the NAACP on Sunday.
Same Fascism, Different Century.
You know, last time, when they got enough wind under their racist sails, it was too late.
The FEC already ruled Trump did not commit a federal election violation and the fact that the judge won’t allow the defense to call a former FEC employee as its expert witness is concerning.
No, it did not. You are telling an outright falsehood.
That is not true either. They can call him, he just can’t interpret the law to the jury, because expert witnesses are never allowed to do that. The only expert the jury is allowed to hear on the law is the judge.
(Oh, and Smith was never an FEC employee; he was on the commission itself. That’s a significant difference. Especially since all appointments to the commission are explicitly partisan. )
See? It always turns out that Milhouse lets us know that this Democrat kangaroo court is actually how things are SUPPOSED to be.
See? Azathoth, the leftist demon from Hell, doesn’t give a sh*t about the truth, doesn’t even understand the concept that some things are true and some are not, and cares only about what assertions are useful to one side or the other.
“You stole from the Trump Organization?” defense attorney Todd Blanche asked.
This raises an important question about the adequacy of the defense. The records and text of the indictment make it clear that the first checks came from the Donald Trump Trust and the rest from Trump’s personal account. The money was stolen from and the records belonged to Trump as a person, not the Organization. This is a fatal flaw in the charges, because neither Trump nor the Trust are an Enterprise under the definition of the statute. The records whether true or false are not legally “business records”. The Trump Organization is an Enterprise, but it acted only as accountant for Trump’s personal finances. It kept Trump’s records for him, but they did not become Enterprise records simply because the Organization served as his accountant. Read carefully the following example text from the indictment itself:
“an invoice from Michael Cohen dated May 22, 2017, marked as a record of Donald J. Trump, and kept and maintained by the Trump Organization.” The record is personal and was only kept and maintained for him by the business, so it is not a “false entry in the business records of an enterprise” as the charges claim.
The decisions the judge has made this morning have been absolutely insane, disallowing incriminating text messages about Cohen presented by the defense while admitting text messages put forward by the prosecution just last week. He’s also prohibiting a defense – a former chairman of the FEC – witness from testifying about what a ‘campaign violation’ is and is NOT under federal law. Marchan isn’t even attempting to disguise his animus for Trump.
And oh by the way, it just came out that Merchan DONATED TO BIDEN’S CAMPAIGN IN 2020.
While the amount is small, the amount is irrelevant. He donated money to the political opponent of the man being prosecuted.
This is a joke, a not a funny one.
Expert witnesses are never allowed to interpret the law.
The amount is very relevant. The Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics already ruled last year that “A judge’s impartiality cannot reasonably be questioned based on (a) de minimis political contributions made more than two years ago or (b) the business and/or political activities of the judge’s first-degree relative, where the relative has no direct or indirect involvement in the proceeding and no interests that could be substantially affected by the proceeding.”
“no interests that could be substantially affected by the proceeding.”
Is she not using the hearing as a basis for her personal profit thru DNC fundraising?
No, she is not. I don’t know where you heard that.
In any case, the standard is whether her income stands to be affected in any way by the trial’s outcome. If she earns exactly the same amount no matter how it turns out, then how can it even appear to be a conflict of interest for her father?
Then why did Marchan allow MICHAEL COHEN to testify what a campaign finance violation is?
https://x.com/CommishSmith/status/1792673058769289434
He didn’t. Cohen testified to what he thought was a violation, and Merchan instructed the jury to disregard Cohen’s opinions on the matter.
Just tossing this out. Let us say that a “conviction” is obtained that functionally steals the presidential election from Trump. At which point we are on the road to building “true Communism” in this country and don’t have to worry about semi-real elections here ever again,
But, for the half of the country that knows that the election was stolen, how legitimate is the government so installed and what duty do they have to obey or to resist it . . . and how?
Subotai Bahadur
It is my understanding that the jury is not sequestered. Unless they live in a monastery, they cannot avoid news about the trial and some of the conflicts of the judge, Biden DOJ involvement, no laws broken, etc.
Since at least one juror is an attorney and others are professionals, they would have to be as thoroughly corrupt as the prosecutor and judge to convict.
I hold out some hope that at least one or two jurors have some sense of honor and a bit of courage and the trial ends in a hung jury.
anything attached to affrimaction>> dei is built on a faulty foundation
just waiting for the truth to topple it
Interesting comments but one thing I’m curious about. If Cohen flat out admitted to a crime to the DA then isn’t the DA obligated to charge him? Bragg isn’t his lawyer or Priest.
No, he isn’t. Prosecutorial discretion is absolute.
Ok. Couldn’t some other enterprising DA in, say, Lake Placid or Oswego (upstate*) go after him much like the DA’s in several places going after Trump?
There would be jurisdictional issues for any other city/county prosecutor to file the case. I’m not sure how the law works in NY. In some states, the Attorney General would have the authority to bring a case a local county/city prosecutor refused to bring. I suspect that NY in fact does have a ‘strong’ AG who probably could file charges as it’s clear the NY can file civil charges.
There would also likely be statute of limitations problems. But, you know what doesn’t have statute of limitations problems? Tax-related charges. If you steal money and don’t report it on your income tax returns (few criminals do), you’re committing tax evasion…which has no statute of limitations for a civil charge and even though it has a 6-year statute of limitation for crimes, that can often be extended because of the complexities of our tax code; six years can often become 10-years. The next GOP US Attorney General could open a case, presuming they haven’t already immunized Cohen in a previous agreement….which is a possibility.
In any case, he can’t charge him even if he wants to, because the statute of limitations has run. Cohen has been present in NY for almost the entire time, so the clock ran out long ago.
Interesting that Oberlin College is contributing to Dan Goldman.
That’ is interesting…and illegal. Private universities/colleges are prohibited by both federal statutory law (The Higher Education Act) and the IRS rules regarding 501 (c)(3)s from engaging in specific kinds of political activity….including making campaign contributions. 501 (c)(3)s can’t even endorse candidate much less send candidates any money.
Illegal, and therefore obviously not true. Oberlin has not given a penny to Dan Goldman’s campaign. However Oberlin’s employees and their relatives are obviously entitled to give their own money to anyone or anything they like. MarkSmith is clearly referring to reports that individuals connected to Oberlin, either personally or through relatives, have collectively donated $13,200 to Goldman’s campaign.
Number 18
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/dan-goldman/contributors?cid=N00051424&cycle=2024
These tables list the top donors to candidates in the 2023 – 2024 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations’ PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.
The question is “is Oberlin bundling?”
Except that it doesn’t do that at all.
Therefore calling them donors is a lie.
The table lists PAC money separately, and in this case none of the $13,200 came from an Oberlin PAC.
In other words hundreds, or thousands, of separate individuals, each of whom makes their own decisions, for which the organization is not in any way responsible. Grouping donations like this is simply not useful and does not serve the truth, because it’s a gilt-edged invitation for people to misrepresent it in exactly the way that you just did.
So the husband of a cleaner at Oberlin made a donation to a Democrat. In all likelihood there’s also an accountant at Oberlin whose wife donated to some Republican, and an adjunct professor whose same-sex partner gave to a communist. That’s how large groups work.
And the answer is, maybe, but there’s no particular reason to suppose so.
You got a source on that because I can find no mention of it on the internet.
I’ve little doubt that this is his source. But what he missed is that this is not actually a list of contributors, but an aggregation of contributors by corporate affiliation. So a total of $13,200 was donated by people who are either themselves associated with Oberlin, or have close relatives who are. Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, though organizations like “Open Secrets” like to pretend that it does. Oberlin has a lot of employees, and each of them is likely to have several relatives.
Brad Smith, former FEC Commissioner has a thread addressing the defense’s decision to not call him as a witness. The reason they’re not calling him is because Marchan has so deeply limited the scope of what Smith could say, it effectively makes any testimony he could offer irrelevant. Smith explains why this is a horribly unfair ruling to the defense and why it’s critical to the interest of justice for the jury to be properly instructed in the intricacies of FEC rules, which are WILDLY complicated.
https://x.com/CommishSmith/status/1792673042835075497
Unfortunately expert witnesses are never allowed to instruct the jury on the law. Only the judge gets to do that. And that is essentially all Smith could testify about. He has no knowledge about the case; all he knows is the law. He’s surely more familiar with this area of law than Merchan is, but the proper way to use that expertise would be for him to write a brief to Merchan on the law, in the forlorn hope that Merchan would understand and accept his instruction and pass it on to the jury.
And the judge has now told the jury that the fact that the perjurer on the stand is a CONVICTED perjurer is inadmissible–
Come on, Milhouse, tell us why the left is right on this one just like all the others you defend them on.
No, he didn’t. You’re lying again.
Did someone allow you to think you’re worthy to speak to me?
Bleat to the others, Democrat, your bestial grunting means nothing to those who can see what you are.
Excuse me? “Worthy to speak to [you]?” YOU?! If you stopped commenting here, no one would even notice. Literally, no one. If anyone did notice, they wouldn’t care or comment. Contrast: When Milhouse was silent for several months, a LOT of people were asking where he was either in the comment section or by contacting us via email.
Milhouse is worth ten of you on a bad day. I don’t always agree with him (in fact, I often don’t), but that is because he is one of the most objective people I’ve ever encountered. He literally doesn’t ride emotion on any issue, and that’s pretty incredible. So yeah, his take is going to be different than mine, but he’s always worth reading because he presents a reasoned argument.
Unlike you. You just puff up like some crazed self-important big mouth, add nothing to any discussion because you are always on the verge of fainting on the nearest couch, and spout crap you don’t even understand. You should try reading Milhouse more closely and try to learn something not just about the topic at hand but about critical thinking rather than subjecting us all to your constant (and exhausting) overwrought girlie hysteria.