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After FBI Raids,Trump’s Punching Bag Suddenly Has Clout

For years, a joke among Trump Tower employees was that the boss was like Manhattan’s First Avenue, where the traffic goes only one way.

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After FBI Raids,Trump’s Punching Bag Suddenly Has Clout
By
MAGGIE HABERMAN, SHARON LaFRANIERE
and
DANNY HAKIM, New York Times

For years, a joke among Trump Tower employees was that the boss was like Manhattan’s First Avenue, where the traffic goes only one way.

That one-sidedness has always been at the heart of President Donald Trump’s relationship with his longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, who has said he would “take a bullet” for Trump. For years Trump treated Cohen poorly, with gratuitous insults, dismissive statements and, at least twice, threats of being fired, according to interviews with a half-dozen people familiar with their relationship.

“Donald goes out of his way to treat him like garbage,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., Trump’s informal and longest-serving political adviser, who, along with Cohen, was one of five people originally surrounding the president when he was considering a presidential campaign before 2016.

Now, for the first time, the traffic may be going Cohen’s way. Trump’s lawyers and advisers have become resigned to the strong possibility that Cohen, who has a wife and two children and faces the prospect of devastating legal fees, if not criminal charges, could end up cooperating with federal officials who are investigating him for activity that could relate, at least in part, to work he did for Trump.

Last week federal agents raided Cohen’s office and hotel room and seized business records, emails and other material as part of what Trump has called a “witch hunt” by his own Justice Department. The trove included documents dating back decades, as well as more recent ones related to a payment in 2016 to a pornographic film actress who has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump, which Trump denies.

Although Trump called Cohen on April 13, four days after the raid, to “check in,” according to people familiar with the call, he and Cohen have spoken little since Trump entered the White House. The two men did have dinner together at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida, a few weeks ago, but since the raid Cohen has told associates he feels isolated.

Trump has long felt he had leverage over Cohen, but people who have worked for the president said the raid has changed all that.

“Ironically, Michael now holds the leverage over Trump,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Trump who worked with Cohen and Stone. Nunberg said Cohen “should maximize” that leverage.

“The softer side of the president genuinely has an affection for Michael,” Nunberg said. For instance, Trump attended the bar and bat mitzvahs of Cohen’s children. “However, the president has also taken Michael for granted.” Nunberg added that “whenever anyone complains to me about Trump screwing them over, my reflexive response is that person has nothing to complain about compared to Michael.”

Stone recalled Trump saying of Cohen, “He owns some of the finest Trump real estate in the country — paid top dollar for it, too.” In Trump’s worldview, there are few insults more devastating than saying someone overpaid.

For years, Cohen has described himself as unflinchingly devoted to Trump, whom he has admired since high school. He has told interviewers that he has never heard Trump utter an inaccuracy or break a promise. He has tweeted about Trump nearly 3,000 times.

In a Fox News interview last year, Cohen declared: “I will do anything to protect Mr. Trump.” He told Vanity Fair in September that “I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president,” adding, “I’d never walk away.”

At a Republican fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago this year, Cohen went so far as to approach the first lady, Melania Trump, to try to apologize for the pain he caused her with the payment to Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who has claimed to have had the sexual encounter with Donald Trump.

Over the years, Trump threatened to fire Cohen over deals that didn’t work out, or snafus with business projects, people who were present for the discussions said. He was aware that Cohen benefited in other business projects as being seen as affiliated with the Trump Organization, and it irked him.

“He clearly doesn’t think that Michael Cohen is his Roy Cohn,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, referring to Trump’s former mentor and the president’s ideal for a pit bull-like defender. “I think his abusive behavior to Michael is animated by his feeling that Michael is inadequate.”

Prosecutors have argued that Cohen did little actual legal work for Trump and instead focused on extensive political, media and real estate dealings for the president. Michael D’Antonio, another Trump biographer, recalled Cohen calling him soon before the book was published.

“He wanted to know if I was going to call Trump a racist and he wanted to know” if it would include an old allegation from Trump’s wife, Ivana Trump, that he had committed marital rape, D’Antonio said.

Cohen also wanted the title of the book, which was originally “Never Enough,” changed, D’Antonio said. He recalled saying to Cohen, “When has it ever been enough for Donald?”

“And Cohen started laughing, and he said, ‘I don’t have a problem with the title personally,'” D’Antonio recalled. Nonetheless, he said, Cohen said he would call the publisher to get the title changed, and then threatened a lawsuit when he couldn’t.

In 2007, Cohen was dispatched, along with Ivanka Trump, to scout a golf course development project in Fresno, California, that didn’t materialize. The next year, he served as chief operating officer of Affliction Entertainment, a Trump mixed-martial arts venture of boxing, wrestling and karate that featured a Russian army veteran named Fedor Emelianenko. (“His thing is inflicting death on people,” Donald Trump said at the time.)

He has also scouted business opportunities for Trump in the former Soviet bloc, including a 2010 trip to Georgia on Trump’s behalf.

Cohen has been active in Trump’s political ventures. When Trump pondered running for president in 2012, it was Cohen who went on an early trip to Iowa to meet with Republican operatives and who set up a website called ShouldTrumpRun.org. He even initially sought to pay some of the costs for the site with money raised for his own abortive run for New York state Senate.

Trump never ran in 2012, but Cohen raised $500,000 in four hours for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign that year during one of their “national call days” — and had campaign officials credit it as money that his boss had raised, one former Romney official recalled. When Trump ran for president in 2016, Cohen was given no official role on the campaign.

He fought with the initial campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, later blocked him from coming on board. Trump never ordered his aides to make a place for Cohen.

Some of Cohen’s efforts to help only led to embarrassing rebuffs in front of those in charge. A month before the election, Cohen approached Trump outside his Trump Tower office with photographs of Bill Clinton and a mixed-race man alleged — without any evidence — to be the former president’s illegitimate son. Trump knocked the papers away, angrily telling Cohen to “get that out of my face,” said one former campaign official who witnessed the incident. Particularly hurtful to Cohen was the way Trump lavished approval on Lewandowski in a way he never did for Cohen. When Cohen told Trump that he believed Lewandowski had been behind a negative story about Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Trump dismissed the comments as simple jealousy, and didn’t pay attention, according to two people familiar with the incident.

Cohen raised millions of dollars for Trump in the campaign, at a time when the candidate was struggling to attract support. Cohen tried to soften the edges as Trump faced a torrent of criticism for decades of racially divisive remarks, forming a “diversity coalition” to give Trump cover composed of African-Americans, Muslims and other groups.

“Nobody else around Donald Trump would have thought to do that for him,” said Darrell Scott, an African-American pastor from Ohio and a friend of Cohen who helped create the coalition.

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