When the Supreme Court declared presidents immune from prosecution for their official acts Monday, one man immediately feared what it meant: Donald Trump’s fixer-turned-nemesis, Michael Cohen.
Now he is revealing fresh details of his tussles with Trump when his former boss was in the Oval Office, telling The Daily Beast that they show how the SCOTUS ruling would unleash him as a “Führer” if he wins the election.
"He’ll run the country like a king, like a supreme leader, like a monarch, like a dictator, like the Führer,” the former Trump lawyer told The Daily Beast. And he said that what happened to him should convince everyone of the dangers of a Trump unbound by law.
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Cohen is the only person summarily jailed by Trump, an experience he says awaits many more people if the Republican candidate wins in November.
Cohen admitted in December 2018 that he lied to Congress and paid illegal hush money to Stormy Daniels, and began a three-year sentence in May 2019. A year later he was granted early release from prison under arrangements to reduce the number of federal prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This was Michael Cohen after being freed one year into his three-year sentence, just before he was thrown back in prison and told he had to sign papers that would gag him, as he prepared to publish a book highly critical of Trump.
Mike Segar/ReutersBut he also happened to have a tell-all book—full of lurid details and one which he had heavily signaled would be damaging to Trump—coming out in September of that year.
It was that July he was presented with new early release conditions, reproduced today by The Daily Beast. At first, the release forms seemed straightforward. But after the formal procedures about Cohen having to subject himself to home monitoring and other conditions federal inmates agree to, there was something fishy.
The first red flag was the absence of a serial number in the top left corner. Then came language that, in effect, made waiving Cohen’s First Amendment rights a condition of his release.
In the Federal Location Monitoring Program Participant Agreement form he was told there could be, “No engagement of any kind with the media, including print, TV, film, books, or any other form of media/news… Prohibition from all social media platforms… No posting on social media and a requirement that you communicate with friends and family to exercise discretion in not posting on your behalf or posting any information about you. The purpose is to avoid glamorizing or bringing publicity to your status as a sentenced inmate serving a custodial term in the community.”
It was in effect a gagging order courtesy of the Department of Justice—and Cohen believes it came direct from Trump.
He believes that the documents offer an insight into how Trump could silence his political opponents by making them sign away their First Amendment rights as a condition of release.
Cohen refused to sign, sued, and spent 15 days in federal custody before a federal judge described the papers as an act of “retaliation,” and freed Cohen.
So surprising was the way Cohen was put back in federal custody that his attorney, Jeffrey Levine, ended up walking out of court holding his client’s belt. Cohen was held in a cell for 15 days when he refused to sign away his right to free speech.
Carlo Allegri/Reuters“The Court finds that Respondents’ [Trump and the DOJ] purpose in transferring Cohen from release on furlough and home confinement back to custody was retaliatory in response to Cohen desiring to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book critical of the President and to discuss the book on social media,” Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein wrote in a decision addressed to then-Attorney General Bill Barr on July 23, 2020, striking down the papers and freeing Cohen.
In court he said, “In 21 years of sentencing people and looking at the terms of release, I’ve never seen such a clause.”
Cohen told The Daily Beast that Trump’s move at the time “was merely a practice run.”
The bid to gag Cohen did not stop him writing and releasing his book, Disloyal. But he told The Daily Beast that an immune President Trump could not be stopped.
Cheriss May/Reuters“If re-elected in November,” Cohen said, “in light of the Supreme Court ruling, his worst impulses will be magnified a hundredfold. The depth of Donald’s actions will not be merely isolated to critics, political enemies and the like.
“The uber wealthy like the Elon Musks, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerbergs will see consequences as well, as Donald cares for no one or anything other than the almighty dollar. Members of the Supreme Court and federal judges will similarly become neutered as Donald fulfills his promise to dismantle our tripartite system of government, stripping the legislative and judicial branches of their coequal power and conferring all power to the executive branch; meaning himself.”
The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment.
Cohen’s parting message, meanwhile, was simple. “No one will be safe.”
