Donald Trump has sued Michael Cohen, the main prosecution witness in the case that led to his indictment, the first by a former US president, for paying a bribe to porn actress Stormy Daniels to silence an affair. The Republican has filed a lawsuit for 500 million dollars (455 million euros) this Wednesday in Miami against his ex-lawyer and former trusted man, considering that he violated the lawyer-client confidentiality privilege in his evolution from loyal squire to witness traitor.
What is paradoxical, for locals and strangers, is that he waited to be formally charged and did not resort to justice before, given that Cohen testified against his former employer as early as 2018 (until then he had seconded his version about the slip ups). Although a source close to Trump’s legal team told Fox News that the lawsuit “has nothing to do with the Manhattan district attorney’s lawless and baseless case and is an entirely separate matter,” the complaint is one of the actions with which the candidate for re-election in 2024 intends to reverse the accusation for 34 counts of accounting irregularities in the books of the Trump Organization to make up the $130,000 given to Stormy Daniels. The amount was listed as “legal expenses” paid to Cohen, who at the time of the transaction in 2016 was serving as Trump’s wrong-solver as well as personal attorney.
Presented hours before the tycoon returns to the Big Apple to appear this Thursday before the New York prosecutor’s office, which is instructing a civil case against him for falsifying accounts to obtain advantageous credits, the complaint alleges that Cohen violated due confidentiality when speaking about his former boss in the media, which has meant, emphasizes Trump’s legal team, damage to his image and reputation. He also accuses the lawyer of “illicit enrichment.”
In the final stretch of the 2016 election campaign, in which Trump defeated the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, Cohen was in charge of closing the agreement with Daniels to stop his attempt to tell the media about the adventure that supposedly He maintained with the tycoon in 2006. The Republican candidate, and his circle of confidence, including Cohen himself, feared that the revelation of the story would harm their expectations of victory at the polls. Once in the White House, Trump delayed in the payment and Cohen advanced the money through a shell company, after the actress threatened to tell everything if she did not receive the money immediately. The president reimbursed Cohen with several checks that were fraudulently issued in the accounting records of the Trump Organization, the family emporium.
In 2018 Cohen pleaded guilty to the facts and served a little over a year in jail, followed by several months in house arrest. He has collaborated with the law since then, especially in the investigation of the Manhattan district attorney’s office into these accounting irregularities, and has offered to testify on numerous occasions, becoming a regular presence at the headquarters of the same.
Now, Trump accuses him of having breached the contract he signed with him by revealing confidential information about the magnate in numerous interviews for the media, as well as in a podcast created by the lawyer himself, entitled mea culpa, and in two books that he wrote about his experience with the former president. In the complaint, Trump also accuses Cohen of using these statements to spread false information about him, as well as damaging his reputation and image through perjury.
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According to the text of the lawsuit, Cohen “benefited from his confidential relationship with Trump for financial gain,” as well as to repair his own reputation, damaged by “his continued malpractices [legales] and their deceitful acts,” according to CNN.
For his part, Cohen’s lawyer has stated in a statement that they will defend themselves in a timely manner, and that Trump “is once again using and abusing the judicial system as a form of harassment and intimidation of Michael Cohen.” When Trump’s indictment for the investigation of alleged accounting fraud was known -susceptible to cover up another felony, related to the violation of electoral financing regulations, according to prosecutors-, Cohen’s was one of the first reactions, celebrating the veracity of the “adage that no one is above the law, not even a former president.”
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