Michael Cohen questioned under oath in New York Trump Organization investigation
Rachel Schilke
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Michael Cohen, a former lawyer for former President Donald Trump, underwent questioning under oath in a New York civil fraud case against the former president’s organization on Friday.
Cohen appeared in court beginning at 10 a.m. to sit for a deposition in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s $250 million civil fraud lawsuit against the Trump Organization, alleging that Trump and others manipulated property value and his net worth to obtain favorable loans and tax benefits in a decades-long scheme.
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The lawsuit, filed last year as a result of James’s investigation she opened in 2019, is against the former president and his adult children Ivanka, Eric, and Donald Trump Jr. The trial is set to begin on Oct. 2.
Cohen’s lawyer, Jeffrey K. Levine, confirmed “our attendance” in an email filed Thursday in James’s case, per court records.
Alina Habba, attorney for former President Trump, filed an order to show cause on April 3, claiming that Cohen had refused to show up for questioning at two separate times and asked a judge to order Cohen to comply with the deposition, per court records.
Habba had argued that because prosecutors had the opportunity to interview Cohen during their investigation into former President Trump, the defense should also be given the chance to interview him.
“Mr. Cohen claims to have intimate first-hand knowledge about the alleged acts that are the basis of the complaint in this case, as a witness and as active participant in those acts,” Habba wrote in the filing.
Habba filed the request for Cohen’s deposition the day before former President Trump was arraigned in a Manhattan criminal court on 34 counts of falsifying business records and hush-money payments he made to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign.
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Cohen had also testified before the grand jury involved in the hush-money case before the unprecedented criminal charges were announced against the former president. Trump recently filed a $500 million lawsuit against Cohen for “breaches of contract”
Former President Trump returned to New York on April 13 to give a deposition in the civil case, after giving his first deposition in August 2020. He called the lawsuit “persecution” but said it gave him an opportunity to “show what a great, profitable, and valuable company I built” with “some of the greatest real estate assets anywhere in the world.”