Michael Cohen | |
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Education | American University (BA) Cooley Law School (JD) |
Political party | Democratic (before 2002, 2004–2017, 2018–present) Republican (2002–2004, 2017–2018) |
Spouse(s) | Laura Shusterman ​ ( m. 1994)​ |
Children | 2 |
May 05, 2018 · Though there is no single official metric that defines America’s “worst law school,” Politico decided that the honor could be reasonably handed to Cooley Law, where Cohen graduated in 1991.
May 04, 2018 · Not so for the 51-year-old Cohen, whose home, office and safety-deposit box were raided by the FBI last month. “His legal career is flushing down the toilet,” American Lawyer magazine declared ...
May 12, 2018 · And exactly where did Michael Cohen go to law school? President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer attended the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan. It is a school that at one point was the largest law school in America.
Jul 30, 2018 · July 30, 2018. 1. 530. Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen went to the worst law school in the country — The Thomas M. Cooley law school in Western Michigan. The school admits 85 percent of the applicants and more than half of the graduates fail the bar. The tuition is $51,000 a year.
May 05, 2018 · President Donald Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen attended Cooley Law, which accepts almost anyone and has terrible bar passage rates.
White House Counsel | |
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Incumbent Dana Remus since January 20, 2021 | |
Formation | 1943 |
First holder | Samuel Rosenman |
Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs | |
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Incumbent Jake Sullivan since January 20, 2021 | |
Executive Office of the President | |
Member of | National Security Council Homeland Security Council |
Reports to | President of the United States |
Cohen began practicing personal injury law in New York in 1992, working for Melvyn Estrin in Manhattan. As of 2003, Cohen was an attorney in private practice and CEO of MLA Cruises, Inc., and of the Atlantic Casino.
Cohen joined the Trump Organization in fall of 2006. Trump hired him in part because he was already an admirer of Trump, having read Trump's Art of the Deal twice. He had purchased several Trump properties and convinced his own parents and in-laws, as well as a business partner, to buy condominiums in Trump World Tower. Cohen aided Trump in his struggle with the condominium board at the Trump World Tower, which led Trump to obtain control of the board. Cohen became a close confidant to Trump, maintaining an office near Trump at Trump Tower.
On March 5, The Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources recounting Cohen as saying he missed two deadlines to pay Daniels because Cohen "couldn't reach Mr. Trump in the hectic final days of the presidential campaign", and that after Trump's election, Cohen had complained that he had not been reimbursed for the payment. Cohen described this report as " fake news ".
Trump employed Cohen until May 2018, a year after the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections began. The investigation led Cohen to plead guilty on August 21, 2018, to eight counts including campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud. Cohen said he violated campaign finance laws at the direction of Trump and "for the principal purpose of influencing" the 2016 presidential election. In November 2018, Cohen entered a second guilty plea for lying to a Senate committee about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
On November 29, 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee and House Intelligence Committee in 2017 regarding the proposed Trump Tower Moscow deal that he spearheaded in 2015 and 2016. Cohen had told Congress that the deal ceased in January 2016 when it actually ended in June 2016, and that he had not received a response about the deal from the office of a senior Russian official when he actually had. Cohen said that he had given the false testimony in order to be consistent with Trump's "repeated disavowals of commercial and political ties between himself and Russia" and out of loyalty to Trump. Cohen received a two-month sentence, to be served concurrently with his three-year sentence for tax fraud, for the false testimony.
Cohen was paid $600,000 ($50,000 per month) over the year, which its CEO described as "a big mistake". Novartis was also approached by Cohen and was offered similar services.
The total purchase price of the four buildings was $11 million and the total sales price was $32 million. Cohen sold the four properties at above their assessed values, in all-cash transactions, to LLCs owned by persons whose identities are not public. After this was reported by McClatchy DC in October 2017, Cohen said that all four properties were purchased by an American-owned "New York real estate family fund" that paid cash for the properties in order to obtain a tax deferred (Section 1031) exchange, but did not specifically identify the buyer.
Beckley did not respond to requests for an interview. And Cohen’s Washington-based lawyer, Stephen M. Ryan, had no comment for this article.
Several tweets connect Cohen and the school to embarrassing headlines about another Cooley alum—Pennsylvania state judge Elizabeth Beckley, who graduated a year after Cohen. Recent news reports revealed that Beckley, asked to preside over a marriage late last year, instead called in federal immigration agents because she suspected the Guatemala-born groom was in the United States illegally. The 22-year-old groom, who had in fact been a legal resident of the U.S. since his adoption by an American couple when he was eight months old, was fingerprinted and faced with arrest by immigration agents on what was supposed to be his wedding day.
That begins with his role in drafting a legal agreement before the 2016 election to pay $130,000 in hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels after she alleged a sexual encounter with Trump.
The recent tax records show that school’s 88-year-old founder, Thomas Brennan, a former Michigan state Supreme Court justice who stepped down as Cooley’s president in 2002, has continued to be paid more than $329,000 a year as an emeritus professor even though he works only five hours a week.
Cooley, named for a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court in Michigan, was founded in 1974 and grew rapidly until, by 2010, it had several campuses, annual revenue of $123 million and a student body of 3,900, making it at the time the largest law school in the country. But overall enrollment at the nation’s laws schools has fallen sharply since then, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. And the drop-off has been even sharper at Cooley, where enrollment has plummeted more than 60 percent in recent years, forcing the school to close one of its campuses and lay off or otherwise lose more than half its full-time faculty.
Michael Cohen’s alma mater has long been a punchline in the legal world. Continue to article content. The roster of the school’s graduates includes federal and state judges, two members of Congress and several high-profile courtroom lawyers and business leaders.
After the FBI raids, television comedian Samantha Bee took a swipe at Cooley on her cable program “Full Frontal,” asking why rich, powerful figures like Trump would retain “a graduate of the actual worst law school in the country?”. She described Cohen as “a guy whose whole business model seems to be built around blackmailing mistresses.”.
Later, Cohen's lawyer, Davis, copped to being the one who had informed the media about Trump's supposed knowledge of the meeting, though he admitted that "the only person who could confirm that information is my client.".
Continuing down that path, Cohen reportedly leaked word that he was prepared to share with Mueller his account of how the then-presidential candidate gave the go-ahead for the July 2016 Trump Tower meeting between key campaign members, including Donald Trump Jr. and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Russian agents who promised damaging information on opponent Hillary Clinton. Later, Cohen's lawyer, Davis, copped to being the one who had informed the media about Trump's supposed knowledge of the meeting, though he admitted that "the only person who could confirm that information is my client."
Michael Cohen began his career as a private injury lawyer in 1992, but his business interests quickly expanded as he built a large real estate portfolio and a business that specialized in the New York City taxicab trade. In the 2000s, Cohen began working for future President Donald Trump, where he earned a reputation for loyalty and ferocity. His work on behalf of Trump during the 2016 campaign, including the payment of $130,000 to adult film star Stormy Daniels, along with his possible involvement in attempts to cover-up purported collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, landed Cohen in the crossfires of the investigation being led by special counsel Robert Mueller. In August 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion and bank fraud, while also claiming that he made illegal campaign contributions under the direction of Trump. He began serving a three-year prison sentence in May 2019.
In early 2018, it was revealed that Cohen paid Stephanie Clifford, also known by her adult film name Stormy Daniels, $130,000 in the fall of 2016. The payment was made with regards to Daniels’ claim of a 2006 affair with Trump.
Cohen sued Daniels for breaking the terms of a non-disclosure agreement related to the payment, and Daniels countersued, alleging the NDA was invalid because it had never been signed by Trump.
Cohen also described how Trump often understated his net worth for tax purposes and instructed him to threaten someone to prevent the release of potentially damaging information. His statements were met with significant pushback from the president's supporters, who sought to discredit him as a liar and convicted felon.
The club has been accused of being a base of operation for several Russian-American gangsters, and in the 1980s, Cohen’s uncle (the primary owner) was accused of providing medical advice to members of the notorious Lucchese crime family.
Michael Dean Cohen (born August 25, 1966) is an American disbarred lawyer who served as an attorney for U.S. president Donald Trump from 2006 to 2018. Cohen was a vice-president of the Trump Organization, and the personal counsel to Trump, and was often described by media as Trump's "fixer". He served as co-president of Trump Entertainment and was a board member of the Eric Trump F…
Cohen was raised in the town of Lawrence on Long Island, New York. His mother was a nurse, and his father, a Holocaust survivor, was a surgeon. Cohen is Ashkenazi Jewish. He attended Woodmere Academy and received his BA from American University in 1988 and his JD from Thomas M. Cooley Law School in 1991.
The Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Attorney General opened investigations into Trump. The Manhattan DA's office ultimately decided in 2022 not to pursue charges, in part because the new DA, Alvin Bragg, worried that the case relied too much on Michael Cohen's testimony.
These were separate from the investigation by the New York State Department of Taxation and F…
On January 10, 2019, Cohen agreed to testify publicly before the House Oversight Committee to give a "full and credible account" of his work on behalf of Trump. On January 12, Fox News contributor and legal analyst Jeanine Pirrotook a 20-minute, on-air phone call from Trump in which he claimed Cohen had fabricated stories to reduce the length of his expected sentence. Trump suggested that investigations should instead focus on Cohen's father-in-law, saying "that's the o…
Cohen's memoir on Donald Trump, Disloyal: A Memoir, was released in September 2020. In the foreword, Cohen characterizes Trump as "a cheat, a mobster, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man."
Cohen married Ukrainian-born Laura Shusterman in 1994. Laura Shusterman's father, Fima Shusterman, left Soviet Ukraine for New York in 1975. They have a daughter, Samantha, and a son, Jake. Cohen's father-in-law was the person who introduced him to Trump, according to a Trump biographer.
Cohen has been friends with Felix Sater since childhood. Sater is a convicted felon and real estat…