A Manhattan grand jury’s indictment of Donald Trump has started to look like an inevitability, as cable news—and Trump himself—speculate that charges could drop any hour now. But a lawyer who’s played a bit part in a number of MAGA scandals has now come out of nowhere to try to derail the entire case.
On Monday, the grand jury heard shocking testimony from Rudy Giuliani lawyer Bob Costello, who once again tried to pin the blame for Trump’s hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels on a familiar fall guy: Michael Cohen.
For years, Costello has been a low-key yet crucial background character in Trumpworld. He investigated crimes at the Southern District of New York—the same legendary federal prosecutor’s office once led by Giuliani—and in the decades since, Costello has stood by the former mayor’s side as Giuliani became a MAGA movement celebrity, with Costello also becoming a sort of Forrest Gump for many of the biggest scandals in that world.
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At one point, Costello was the key person pushing the FBI to investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop. At another point, he advised Trump’s buddy, Steve Bannon, to not cooperate with the Jan. 6 Committee. A colleague described Costello as “a MAGA guy all the way.”
But Costello also briefly interacted with Cohen, the one-time Trump fixer who took the blame for the Stormy Daniels payment and who has now become the Manhattan District Attorney’s star witness against Trump.
It’s that relationship with Cohen and Giuliani that placed Costello at the Manhattan DA’s offices for three hours on Monday afternoon.
Costello indicated Monday that he was there to explain why a half-dozen damning emails seem to indicate a wide-ranging conspiracy reaching deep into the Trump White House in early 2018—emails that appear to show the American president using Giuliani to keep Cohen from cooperating with the feds.
But instead of playing along, two dozen grand jurors heard Costello tear apart Cohen by portraying him as a former client and a desperate liar willing to do anything to avoid prison.
Costello, who spoke to reporters on a Manhattan sidewalk after his testimony, described how he hijacked the closed-door grand jury proceedings on Monday. The ex-prosecutor said he refused to answer a Manhattan prosecutor’s narrow questions and used them as an opportunity to flip the script, telling grand jurors there was a ton of evidence they weren’t being shown by the Manhattan DA.
“They'd ask me a limited question based on these six emails, and I would volunteer information that I thought the grand jury needed to hear,” he said. “My only mission there today was to tell the truth about what Michael Cohen was saying during any point in time when I was representing him in April 2018.”
“I told the grand jury that this guy couldn't tell the truth if you put a gun to his head,” he added.
Asked why he was suddenly turning on someone whom Costello himself portrays as a former client—and in a way that so obviously benefits Trump with a last-minute legal curveball—Costello deflected.
“I am honoring my ethical obligation,” he told reporters. “We are not Trump's lawyers. We do not represent Trump. We’ve never represented Trump.”
But his actions Monday certainly help the former president.
This ordeal dates back to when the feds first started investigating the way Trump paid Stormy Daniels to shut her up before she could tank his 2016 presidential campaign. The FBI zeroed in on Cohen, who doubled as a sort of consigliere for the real estate tycoon. But as Cohen’s world came crashing down, it was a fellow lawyer—Costello—who seemed to come to the rescue.
Costello played a pivotal role as a backchannel between Cohen and the Trump White House. As the investigation heated up in early 2018, a Cohen-Costello-Giuliani-Trump game of telephone emerged with the American president’s inner circle relaying the message that the investigation would go away—as long as Cohen stayed quiet.
These details all come from the much-maligned Trump-Russia investigation led by Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The team’s 448-page report is better known for explaining how then-President Trump obstructed the federal investigation but remained untouchable from his perch at the White House. An entire chapter—Section K—is dedicated to Trump’s dealings with Cohen and describes Costello’s role in the affair.
That communication relay game started about a week after the FBI searched Cohen’s home on April 9, 2018. According to the Mueller report, emails show that Costello began chatting with Cohen on April 17 of that year—and Costello started billing Cohen for work through his law firm, Davidoff Hutcher & Citron.
“Costello told Cohen that he had a ‘back channel of communication’ to Giuliani, and that Giuliani had said the ‘channel’ was ‘crucial’ and ‘must be maintained,’” according to Mueller’s findings.
That delicate relationship came into question three days later, when The New York Times reported that Trump was bracing for an epic betrayal, expecting that Cohen “could end up cooperating.” Trump went into damage control with a tweet that called Cohen “a fine person” who wouldn’t “flip.”
But behind the scenes, Costello was reassuring Cohen, too. In an April 21 email that year, Costello told him that he’d spoken with Giuliani—and everything would be all right. According to the Mueller report, Costello wrote that the conversation with Giuliani went “Very Very Positive[.] You are ‘loved’... they are in our corner… Sleep well tonight[], you have friends in high places.”
Cohen would later tell the FBI that “he believed he had the support of the White House if he continued to toe the party line, and he determined to stay on message and be part of the team,” the Mueller report says.
A footnote about that “friends in high places” email remains redacted on the publicly available version of the Mueller report, which cites the potential of “harm to ongoing matter.” It’s unclear if aspects of that email are still under investigation, though federal prosecutors in Manhattan told a judge late last year that Giuliani was no longer under investigation for a related matter: his business dealings in Ukraine.
Federal investigators largely dropped the ball on the Stormy Daniels investigation, seemingly satisfied by sending Cohen alone to prison. But the Manhattan DA’s Office picked up the ball and eventually put together the current grand jury.
So far, the grand jury has heard all about Trump’s damning Stormy Daniels hush money from Cohen himself, who has twice spoken to grand jurors in recent days about the $130,000 payment and the way it was kept secret by routing it through Trump’s company instead of closely scrutinized political campaign funds. Cohen’s view is that Trump violated campaign finance laws by directing him to do it—and that his former boss left him out to dry as the fall guy who eventually spent time in prison for it.
For weeks, grand jurors have almost certainly heard how Cohen was merely acting at Trump’s direction—that the real fault lies at the top.
But on Monday, Costello apparently told them otherwise.
From what Costello said on his way out of the DA’s office on Monday, it’s clear that this grand jury’s 23 or so members have now heard about his role as Cohen’s backchannel to the White House. But Costello testified on Monday that Cohen made the payment all on his own—and he figured out a way to do it to keep it secret from Trump, Trump’s wife Melania, and even his own wife.
"Michael Cohen decided ‘on his own’—that's what he told us—to see if he could take care of this,” Costello told reporters, describing how Cohen avoided pulling money from his bank account and instead drew the hush money funds from a HELOC loan, opening a line of credit borrowed against the equity of his home.
Costello also criticized what he called the Manhattan DA’s decision to “cherry-pick” six of his emails with Cohen out of 330 total, which he promised to share with journalists in the days to come.
“Now he's on a revenge tour. I understand it, but I don’t condone it,” Costello said, pinning the blame for the entire scheme on Cohen.
While Costello’s testimony is certainly unhelpful for securing an indictment, the DA’s office doesn’t seem fazed by Costello’s last-minute hurrah.
New York County prosecutors who initially told Cohen he should come back to testify to the grand jury as a rebuttal witness told him to stand down, and Cohen instead appeared on MSNBC on Monday to push back on Costello’s alternative telling of the story.
“I didn’t know Bob Costello from a hole in the wall,” Cohen told MSNBC host Ari Melber. “He was never my lawyer.”
Trump’s former fixer doubled down on what he anticipates is a coming indictment, saying Monday that the Manhattan DA has already built a bulletproof case.
“The beauty that I have is, I have facts. I have truth. I have the documentation. Let me rephrase that: The District Attorney has the documentation in order to validate every single statement that I have made and to basically dispel anything that Bob Costello has to say,” Cohen said on MSNBC.
Either way, the New York Police Department is gearing up for a potential Trump indictment this week, which would be a historic event, particularly since Trump has called on loyal supporters to make a forceful public protest in his defense, echoing the calls to civil disobedience that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.
