RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney to President Donald Trump, departs his Manhattan apartment for prison on May 6, 2019. —Spencer Platt—Getty Images
President Donald Trump on Thursday buried the hatchet with his former attorney Michael Cohen , appearing on Cohen’s radio show in what was the first public exchange between the two men in eight years.
Trump and Cohen have a tumultuous history. Cohen worked as Trump’s personal lawyer dating back to the mid-2000s. But he severed ties with Trump around 2018, when he pleaded guilty to federal crimes, including campaign finance violations, and said he had made payments to two women at Trump’s direction in an effort to keep them from speaking publicly about alleged affairs with the then-presidential candidate. He went on to serve a three-year sentence following his guilty plea. Cohen later made a number of explosive claims about Trump in testimony in front of Congress, and served as a key witness in the criminal hush money trial that resulted in Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts.
“You and I have obviously traveled a pretty rocky road together,” Cohen said to Trump on his radio show 77 WABC-AM in New York on Thursday. The program will air in its entirety on Sunday.
Trump did not dwell too much on the past during the portion of the show that aired on Thursday, but voiced sympathy and appreciation for Cohen.
"They weaponized you like nobody's ever been weaponized, like few have been," Trump told his former lawyer. “They weaponized a lot of people, and I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said. And that’s a big — that’s a big thing that you did. That’s a very big thing.”
The men’s conversation also criss-crossed through a range of other topics related to Iran, the economy, and Democrats.
Cohen appeared on CNN ahead of the airing of the program and commented on his relationship, and conversation, with Trump.
“How is it possible after all of what took place? All of the name calling, the years of the public war, the verbal missiles that we threw at one another. How is it possible that the two of us can ever sit down again?” Cohen told CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “The answer is that we forgave.”
When asked to define the current state of his relationship with the President, Cohen remarked, “it’s being resuscitated.”
Cohen was also pressed on whether he has asked Trump for a pardon.
“I have not,” Cohen first responded. But he went on to clarify that he did submit a pardon application to President Joe Biden, which he later altered after Trump took back office.
“What I did is I took that same application with the same documentation, and I just rewrote the cover letter, removing the name of President Joe Biden and inserting the name President Donald Trump,” Cohen said.
Cohen also took to his Substack on Thursday to speak about making amends with Trump, which he said made people “furious.” Referencing the Bible, Cohen asserted that Colossians 3:13—a passage that reads, ”Forgive as the Lord forgave you”—was the “foundation” of what transpired between him and Trump.
“We forgave,” Cohen wrote. “Forgiveness doesn’t require amnesia. It requires the courage to stop allowing yesterday to dictate tomorrow.”
Cohen’s remarks ring in stark contrast to previous words he has offered about the President.
In 2019, after pleading guilty, Cohen was called by the House Oversight and Reform Committee to further detail his role as Trump’s attorney and said Trump “is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.” When asked how many times Trump had asked him to threaten an individual or entity on his behalf, Cohen responded that Trump had done so on over 500 occasions throughout their professional relationship.
The following year, Cohen published Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump , a 432-page tell-all about the years he spent as Trump’s lawyer and fixer.
“I knew Trump better than anyone else did,” Cohen wrote at one point in the book. “I knew him better than even his family did, because I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: A cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”
And in 2024, Cohen was the prosecution’s main witness in Trump’s criminal trial over charges of falsifying business records related to hush money payments made to Daniels when Trump was running for President for the first time in 2016.
“What I was doing, I was doing at the direction of and benefit of Mr. Trump,” Cohen said on the stand in 2024.
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