Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen is set to deliver highly anticipated testimony on Tuesday against his former boss at the former president’s fraud trial in New York.
Trump is expected to be in attendance for the testimony, which Cohen said will be the first time he has seen Trump in five years.
“I look forward to the reunion,” Cohen, once Trump’s lawyer, said. “I hope Donald does as well.”
Now in its fourth week, Trump, his adult sons and their family business have been found liable for inflating the value of Trump’s assets to routinely and repeatedly deceive banks, insurers and others. Judge Arthur Engoron is using the hearings to decide on punishment, which could include a huge fine and probably means the dissolution of the Trump’s New York property empire.
Over a dozen witnesses, many former Trump Organization employees, have testified in the trial so far. But Cohen’s testimony is seen as crucial to the case.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, who brought the case against Trump, said that Cohen’s 2019 congressional testimony led her office to pursue this fraud case against Trump. Cohen had told Congress that Trump “inflated his assets when it served his purposes”.
In a video clip briefly shown during prosecutors’ opening argument earlier this month, Cohen told investigators that Trump “wanted to be higher on the Forbes list” and had directed him to increase the value of assets to “accommodate” a higher net worth. Cohen will probably be questioned at length over specific incidents of this on the witness stand.
Once a staunchly loyal Trump employee, Cohen broke away from Trump in 2018 after he pleaded guilty to federal charges – including lying to Congress and facilitating illegal hush-money payments – that led to a three-year prison sentence, mostly spent in home confinement.
Since his release in November 2021, Cohen has been a vocal critic of Trump, who he described in his 2020 memoir as “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator and a conman”.
In return, Trump has called Cohen a “rat” and tried to sue Cohen for $500m for “spreading falsehoods” “with malicious intent”, though Trump has since dropped the lawsuit.
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Because this is a civil case, Trump will not be sent to prison if found guilty. It is also a bench trial, meaning there is no jury, and the judge is the sole decider of the trial.
Cohen has been a key witness in two of the six cases, including this fraud trial, against the former president.
In May, Cohen testified in front of a grand jury for the Manhattan district attorney’s office over hush-money payments he made on behalf of Trump to the adult film star Stormy Daniels to quash her story about an affair with the former president. The trial over the hush-money payments is set to start in March.
