Michael Cohen was new to the job and eager to please his new boss by telling him he was worth his new $375,000 salary and his office in the Fifth Avenue skyscraper.
So, in an early display of his tough-guy lawyer skills, he set to work on a pending billing puzzle at the ill-fated Trump University. Some 50 suppliers had not received payment from him, with a total that “far exceeded” the $2 million available in the company’s bank account.
The personal injury attorney got to work, creating a handwritten spreadsheet that “basically produced 20 percent of everyone’s bill,” denying each of them 80 percent of what they were owed. (Two other suppliers ‘just left’). He called each of them one by one to tell them what they were getting.
Donald Trump’s response when Cohen told him what he accomplished? “Fantastic,” Cohen testified. He made him feel “like he was on top of the world,” in a company he described as “a big family.”
Years later, it would be Cohen’s turn to feel what it was like to feel stiff, even after helping guide Trump to the White House. His annual bonus amounted to two-thirds of what he had been before.
“I felt truly insulted, personally hurt by it,” Cohen told prosecutor Susan Hoffinger. He told her that he was “really angry and upset” and that “I used quite a few swear words.”
- Ted Cruz demands that Jen Psaki apologize to the family of the 2-year-old boy killed “by an illegal immigrant” just “30 miles from his $1.7 million home” after she and Rachel Maddow laughed at that immigration was a priority issue for voters in the state.
- Dana White donates six-figure sum to Donald Trump’s Hurricane Helene fundraiser
- Dylan Mulvaney sparks controversy AGAIN with ‘triggering’ one-man show about his conservative Catholic upbringing
- Kim Kardashian breaks silence on ‘unexpected’ death of her aunt Karen Houghton at 65