Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen said the ex-president will use the Armed Forces and the elite Navy SEAL Team Six to “round up” his critics if he is re-elected in November.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to prosecute and jail his opponents, including “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” in a post last month on his social media platform Truth Social.
“The 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” he wrote on Sept. 7.
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Cohen, who was Trump’s attorney for over a decade, told MSNBC’s Inside With Jen Psaki on Sunday that he believes the president will go one step further, using the military to do his bidding.
“When Donald Trump says something, stop ‘sane-washing’ it,” Cohen said. “Stop trying to make it into something which has some normalcy to it. What he says he intends to do and when he turns around and says to the head of this network or other people who are critics that he intends to use SEAL Team Six or the military to round up his critics or his opponents, he intends to do it.”
Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations in 2018 for acting as Trump’s fixer by arranging hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal to prevent them from publicly claiming they had extramarital affairs with his boss during the 2016 election campaign cycle.
The two had a massive falling out after Cohen went to prison: Cohen sued the Trump Organization over unpaid legal bills, settling in 2023. Trump countersued but dropped his lawsuit a week before he was scheduled to testify. Cohen has gone on to become one of several former Trump World fixtures who have warned they believe the former president is unfit to serve again.
“I suspect that there’s going to be many, many more people that will be incarcerated at simply Donald’s whim, and simply because he deems them to be a critic,” he added.
