Michael Cohen Exclaims It Was “A Heck of a Reunion” to Come Face-To-Face With Trump After Five Years
Michael Cohen, a pivotal witness in the financial fraud case against Donald Trump in New York, disclosed on Tuesday that he had a "heck of a reunion" with his former employer after five long years. The former top executive at the Trump Organization had previously withheld his explanation of how he "reverse-engineered" the financial documents of the Republican leaders to arrive at an arbitrary net worth for nearly five years. According to CNN, Cohen, together with the senior financial officer of the Trump Organization, described how they would inflate the worth of Trump's assets. Cohen entered the courtroom undetected by Trump, despite having previously declared he would "take a bullet" for the multibillionaire business magnate. Trump remained motionless upon Cohen's arrival, but he observed as Cohen started to speak, gazing straight ahead and folding his arms in front of his former lawyer.
When Cohen exited the courtroom during breaks, the two avoided looking at each other. But outside the trial, Trump disparaged Cohen, claiming he “has a horrible record.”
“It’s not going to end up very good for him. We’re not worried at all about his testimony,” Trump told the media outside the courtroom. When he left the civil fraud case trial briefly, Cohen had only one comment for his former boss: “Heck of a reunion.” Cohen testified in court that to make sure that Trump's financial statements, which are the main focus of the civil fraud trial, reflected his true net worth, he and former CFO of the Trump Organization Allen Weisselberg would modify them. “I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected and my responsibility along with Allen Weisselberg predominantly was to reverse engineer the various assets classes, increase those assets to achieve the number that Mr. Trump had tasked us.”
He added, “Whatever number Mr. Trump told us to.” Cohen clarified that upon reviewing the financial statements, Trump would “look at the total assets and he would say ‘I’m not worth 4.5 billion, I’m worth more like six.’ He would then direct Allen and me to go back to Allen’s office and return after we achieved the desired goal.” However, the goal of Trump's legal team is to undermine Cohen's reliability as a witness. Cohen had admitted lying to Congress in 2018, hence this could work against him.“They failed and failed miserably because this tactic is an old play out of the Trump playbook,” Cohen said, as per The NYMagazine.
Cohen concluded by saying after he testified, “It’s interesting that for two days, the same group called me a liar over and over as they lied to Judge Engoron about the person being attacked in his post, making the false claim that it was, in fact, me. Defense counsel was eager to throw out the term perjury at me. It might be time for them to look in the mirror.”
