What did Michael Cohen do for Donald Trump? What the fixer did for the former president

Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen is a star witness in the former president’s criminal trial involving hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.

Cohen has been testifying at the Manhattan courtroom where he has been detailing the work he did for Trump for ten years as an attorney and as a self-described “fixer”.

What did Michael Cohen do for Donald Trump? What the fixer did for the former president?

Cohen began working for the Trump Organization in the 2000s as Trump’s special counsel and fixer, and quickly became a trusted ally of the former president. He held this position for 10 years.

Cohen reported directly to Trump, whom he said needed to sign off on everything he did. His first responsibilities involved bargaining with vendors over invoices that his boss deemed excessive.

Many of the former lawyer’s problems began when Trump decided to run for president in the 2016 election. Some of the tasks as fixer carried bigger risks, since the stakes became much higher.

His job description suddenly included organizing “catch-and-kill” schemes, which refers to the practice where a media outlet pays for the exclusive rights to a story with the intention of never publishing it. Instead, the purpose of “catch and kill” was to bury women’s stories claiming they had sex with Trump and prevent them  from harming his presidential campaign.

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The cost of Cohen’s career as fixer

Cohen paid a high price for his actions during his time working for the former president. In 2018, after he had worked for Trump for more than a decade, he pled guilty to a number of crimes, including campaign finance violations as well as tax and bank fraud.

He also admitted to lying to Congress about his involvement in Trump’s real estate interests abroad, and unethical acts related to the hush payments to Daniels.

Cohen was given the chance to make a statement during the hearing, and said he took full responsibility for each act that he pled guilty to: the ones personal to him, “and those involving the president of the United States of America.”

His work for Trump cost him three years in prison as well as financial penalties imposed by the judge presiding over his case. It also cost him his license to practice law, as Cohen was disbarred after a panel of New York State judges granted a request to remove his name from the official list of New York lawyers in 2019.