Michael Cohen said this week that he would be concerned about his safety if Donald Trump successfully ran for president again in 2024.
“My fear is that you’re going to see like what you see in Russia right now,” Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, told The Hill in an interview. “All of these individuals flying out of windows or mysterious deaths of suicide. Donald has a very long list of — we’ll call it an enemies list — and I’m certain that I am definitively on it.”
Cohen was once one of Trump’s closest advisers, but he’s gone scorched earth on his boss in recent years, routinely speaking out against him. He has also cooperated with multiple investigations into the former president and was instrumental to kicking off the sprawling three-year New York state civil probe into an alleged tax fraud scheme involving Trump and his three eldest children.
New York Attorney General Letitia James recently announced that she had filed a civil lawsuit against the Trumps in that case, seeking to bar Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump from conducting business in the state of New York, as well as making them pay about $250 million in restitution and limiting their access to loans.
Cohen testified to Congress in 2019 that Trump grossly overstated his wealth before he was president, inflating his assets when it suited him and understating them at other times to pay less in taxes.
He served time in prison after he pleaded guilty in 2018 to tax crimes, fraud, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress. He admitted to facilitating hush money payments to two women who threatened to go public with claims of past extramarital affairs with Trump before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen said he did it at Trump’s direction, but Trump has not faced any consequences over the scheme.
Cohen has written two books that are critical of Trump. His most recent, “Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the U.S. Department of Justice Against His Critics,” was released this week.