Michael Cohen is a bad man. He was a bad man before he met Donald Trump, he remained a bad man afterward, and he became, if anything, even worse after Trump started running for President. Michael Cohen has—it seems possible—become penitent and regretful about one aspect of his badness, specifically the bad things that he did for Trump over the past twelve years. Yet he has remained defiantly silent on the many, many other bad things he has done. When he leaves prison (he is scheduled to start a three-year sentence in May), he will remain a very rich man, wealthy from a decade of grifting.
On Wednesday, Cohen will try to be a hero of this age, in the Greek sense of the hero: a flawed man with special powers, brought low by his own hubris, who moves the plot forward. It could be his greatest act of heroism. During his testimony, he will—he claims—lay bare many things that he knows about Trump, and he will bring proof. He will bring receipts that show that Trump knowingly reimbursed Cohen for his contribution to an illegal scheme to silence a woman with whom Trump had an affair. He will tell us, in detail, Trump’s view of America, the Presidency, African-Americans, and how, Cohen says, Trump said that running for President was the “greatest infomercial in political history.” Most important, perhaps, Cohen will provide something that followers of the special counsel’s investigation have desperately wanted: actual financial statements from 2011 to 2013, a period when the Trump Organization was engaged in a range of suspicious business practices around the world.
Republicans are already seeking to impeach Cohen’s testimony, to reveal him to be a liar and a criminal. That will be easy to do. Cohen went to one of the worst law schools in America, and then spent years working alongside a string of lawyers and others who would go on to be convicted of crimes. His first legal job was with a lawyer who later pleaded guilty to bribing insurance adjusters. Later, Cohen worked with a doctor convicted of insurance fraud. Cohen also worked closely with taxicab moguls, including his father-in-law, who would be convicted of crimes. Cohen himself remained unindicted. (His life story is told beautifully in an episode of the podcast “Trump, Inc.”) And Cohen, surely, has lied constantly, including before the very committee that hosts him today. Before his flip away from Trump, Cohen was a voluble but duplicitous source for countless reporters, who knew that Cohen would always answer his phone and would always talk (and always lie). But his mendacity was so obvious and easily proved that the falsehoods acted, often, as confirmations. And he is, of course, a convicted felon going to prison. If the Republicans are wise—though they likely won’t be—they could use some restraint, and let Cohen impeach himself.
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