How Michael Cohen Went From Trump Lawyer Who Would ‘Take A Bullet’ For Trump, To Prosecutors’ Key Witness Against Him

2006Trump hired Cohen, a former Manhattan personal injury attorney and one-time candidate for New York City Council, as his personal counsel.

While working with the Trump Organization, Cohen, a former Democrat, reportedly established a close relationship with American Media, Inc., the National Enquirer publisher that has since become enmeshed in Trump’s criminal hush money trial over a “catch and kill” scheme to suppress negative stories on Trump.

April 2011Cohen supported Trump’s ambitions as a potential 2012 presidential candidate in an interview with ABC News, with Cohen calling himself Trump’s “pit bull” and co-founding the pro-Trump website: Should Trump Run?

October 2016Cohen made a now-infamous $130,000 hush-money payment to former adult film star Stormy Daniels to hide an alleged affair with Trump—those payments are at the heart of Trump’s criminal case, where the 2024 GOP nominee faces 34 criminal counts for allegedly falsifying business records in his reimbursement to Cohen for those payments.

January 2017BuzzFeed published the so-called Steele Dossier that laid out an unverified allegation that Russian officials were “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Trump in his 2016 presidential campaign, which Cohen vehemently denied.

September 2017Cohen told Vanity Fair he would “take a bullet for the president” after former Trump advisor Steve Bannon accused Cohen of leaking White House information to a reporter, with Cohen defending himself as “the guy who stops the leaks” and “protects the president and the family.”

January 2018Cohen filed a defamation lawsuit against Fusion GPS, the group that released the dossier accusing Trump of accepting Russian support in his 2016 presidential campaign, and filed another defamation suit against BuzzFeed in New York state court, calling the dossier a “lie filled document.”

April 2018Cohen dropped those suits three months later after he came under a criminal investigation for bank fraud and campaign finance violations.

May 2018Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos Cohen was no longer working for Trump.

August 2018Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal counts, including causing an unlawful campaign contribution through a hush money payment to Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, as well as five counts of tax evasion and one count of making false statements to a bank over a scheme to conceal more than $4 million in personal income between 2012 and 2016 from the IRS, and false reports to a bank for a $500,000 home equity loan.

November 2018Cohen pleaded guilty in a separate matter to lying to Congress in a letter to House and Senate intelligence committees over his work on an abandoned Trump real estate proposal in Moscow, admitting he falsely told members of Congress the project died years before it was actually aborted, and that he lied out of loyalty to Trump.

December 2018Cohen was sentenced in federal District Court to three years in prison and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine for criminal tax evasion, making false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations.

February 2019Cohen testified before the House Oversight Committee, admitting he paid Daniels to stay silent about an alleged affair with Trump, that Trump told him to lie about the payment, and that he was reimbursed for the payment; Cohen also blasted Trump’s character, calling him a racist.

May 2019After being sent to federal prison, Cohen wrote portions of his memoir “Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump,” detailing his fall from grace as Trump’s right-hand man, slamming Trump as a “cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man” and still admitting that around Trump he “felt excited, alive, like [Trump] possessed the urgent and only truth, the chance for my salvation and success in life.”

September 2020Skyhorse Publishing released “Disloyal,” which became a New York Times bestseller.

November 2021Cohen was released from prison, two-and-a-half years into his sentence.

October 2022Cohen released his second book critical of Trump, called “Revenge: How Donald Trump Weaponized the U.S. Department of Justice Against His Critics.”

October 2023Cohen testified in Trump’s New York civil case that he helped the former president inflate the value of his properties, saying Trump valued his assets at “whatever number” he chose; Trump and his co-defendants in the civil trial were found liable in February for fraudulently inflating the value of their assets and ordered to pay over $464 million, including interest.

April 2024Trump lashed out at Cohen, posting a tirade of insults on his social media platform Truth Social calling Cohen a “disgraced attorney” who has been “prosecuted for LYING,” despite the judge in Trump’s New York criminal case issuing a gag order on Trump preventing him from making public comments about potential witnesses.

Cohen responded to Trump’s attack, arguing the former president should be sanctioned for calling him a “sleazebag” and asking in a post on X: “When does enough become enough and the petulant man child gets a timeout in lockup for his bad behavior.”