Michael Cohen, once celebrated by the left as the star witness against Donald Trump, is now alleging that he was coerced and pressured by Democrat prosecutors determined to take down the former president at any cost.
According to Breitbart, Cohen used a recent Substack article to disclose that a federal appeals court had revived Trumps effort to undo his conviction from his business records trial. In May 2024, a Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree over payments routed through Cohen to adult actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential race.
In that same piece, Cohen noted that a lower court had been ordered to reconsider whether the case belongs in state court or should be moved to federal court. The development underscores long-standing concerns among conservatives that local Democrat prosecutors have stretched state law to pursue a federal election narrative that never belonged in their jurisdiction.
Breitbart News previously reported that Cohen was expected to testify about his role in the case that Alvin Bragg built around the Daniels payments. Cohen was Trumps former lawyer and fixer, who is expected to testify about his role in alleged crime Trump is being accused of falsifying business records to influence the 2016 presidential election.
At the heart of Braggs theory is the claim that Trump misclassified reimbursements to Cohen as legal expenses rather than campaign expenses, and that this bookkeeping decision somehow amounted to a criminal conspiracy to win the election. Specifically, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is accusing Trump of classifying payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels through Cohen as legal expenses, when he argues they should have been classified as campaign expenses and that the crime is that Trump knowingly did this to hide an illegal conspiracy to win the election. (Legal scholar Jonathan Turley and others have argued there is no crime in the case.) Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Cohen now says the pressure he faced from New Yorks Democrat law-enforcement establishment was relentless and unmistakable. From the time I first began meeting with lawyers from the Manhattan DAs Office and the New York Attorney Generals Office in connection with their investigations of President Trump, and through the trials themselves, I felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the governments desire to build the cases against and secure a judgement and convictions against President Trump.
He stressed that his perspective is not theoretical, insisting that it is lived because he had testified in two trials against Trump. Those proceedings, both driven by elected Democrats who campaigned on targeting Trump, have long been criticized by conservatives as examples of weaponized lawfare rather than neutral justice.
The first trial was a civil action brought by the New York State Attorney Generals Office alleging that President Trump fraudulently inflated his assets to obtain favorable loan terms, Cohen continued. The court found President Trump liable and ordered that he and other defendants pay a staggering $454 million penalty, which was later overturned on appeal.
He then described the second case, the criminal prosecution that Bragg used to secure the unprecedented conviction of a former president over what many legal experts regard as a glorified paperwork dispute. Cohen explained that the second trial against Trump was a criminal action brought by the Manhattan District Attorneys Office alleging that President Trump falsified business records in connection with hush money payments made to Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 presidential election.
In his Substack article, Cohen repeated his claim that the prosecutorial pressure campaign was constant and one-directional. From the time I first began meeting with lawyers from the Manhattan DAs Office and the New York Attorney Generals Office in connection with their investigations of President Trump, and through the trials themselves, I felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the governments desire to build the cases against and secure a judgement and convictions against President Trump.
He recounted that his first contact with the Manhattan District Attorneys Office came in August 2019, when he was barely three months into a three-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to various federal offenses. My first meeting with prosecutors from the Manhattan DAs Office was in August 2019, when I was a little over three months into serving a three-year prison sentence following my guilty plea to committing federal crimes. As later came out during President Trumps criminal trial, one of the very first questions I asked those prosecutors was how I would benefit from cooperating. The reason was simple: I wanted to do whatever I could to obtain my Rule 35(b) motion, return home to my family and resume my fractured life.
Cohen went on to claim that as he prepared for, and participated in, the Trump-related trials, it was clear prosecutors were only interested in testimony that would enable them to convict President Trump. That assertion feeds directly into conservative warnings that plea-dependent witnesses are often steered toward narratives that serve political goals rather than objective truth.
Breitbart News has previously noted that Cohen himself was hardly a disinterested observer, having been sentenced in December 2018 to three years in prison for making hush-money payments, and lying to Congress about past business dealings in Russia. In July 2020, a federal judge ordered that Cohen be released from prison and into home confinement.
Cohens new claims do not erase his past conduct, but they do raise fresh questions about the integrity of the prosecutions that Democrats have used to try to sideline Trump ahead of another presidential election.
For many on the right, his description of being coerced and pressured by Alvin Bragg and Letitia James only reinforces the view that these cases were never about neutral law enforcement, but about using the justice system as a political weapon against a leading conservative figure.
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