Michael Cohen, a former lawyer for former President of the United States Donald Trump, leaves his apartment in the Manhattan neighborhood of New York, New York, on March 10, 2021.
Carlo Allegri | Reuters
This week, senior officials in the Manhattan district attorney’s office asked former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to return for what would be his eighth interview with the office, which is conducting a comprehensive criminal investigation related to to the Trump Organization.
A person familiar with the case said that Cohen, when questioned for the seventh time by officials via video conference earlier this week, was asked to make himself available shortly for a personal interview at the office of prosecutor Cyrus Vance Jr.
Cohen, who is now a declared enemy of Trump, agreed to do so, the source said.
Cohen declined to comment to CNBC, as did Vance’s spokesman Danny Frost. A Trump Organization spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The interest in talking to Cohen comes repeatedly when Vance reinforced his investigative team, recently gained access to Trump’s financial records and reportedly expanded the scope of his investigation to examine Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg and the children of Weisselberg.
One of these sons works for the Trump Organization, running the company’s Central Park ice skating rinks. The other works for Ladder Capital Finance, a company that lent Trump’s company nearly $ 300 million in connection with four buildings in Manhattan. Vance is known for keeping an eye on how the Trump Organization valued its buildings.
These events, as well as Vance’s long-awaited announcement on Friday that he will not seek re-election this fall, have heightened speculation that the prosecutor will try to indict Trump or his company’s employees in the coming months.
Vance’s investigation was originally focused on how the Trump Organization accounted for silent payments that Cohen made or facilitated for two women, porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, prior to the 2016 presidential election.
Cohen, when he pleaded guilty to campaign funding violations and other crimes in 2018, told a federal judge that he arranged these payments under Trump’s direction to keep women quiet about his allegations of having sex with Trump. The former president denies the women’s claims.
Cohen later testified to Congress that the Trump Organization would inflate and deflate the value of real estate assets to obtain favorable loans and insurance conditions or to reduce the amount of taxes owed on them.
These claims by Cohen are now being examined in Vance’s investigation and in a civil investigation by Attorney General Letitia James.
Vance’s lawsuits suggest that his investigation is investigating possible “bank fraud and insurance by the Trump Organization and its officials” as well as possible tax crimes.
Vance last month enlisted Mark Pomerantz, a white-collar criminal defense lawyer in private practice, as a special assistant to the prosecutor’s office for the sole purpose of working on Trump’s investigation.
Pomerantz’s career included a stint at the head of the Manhattan Public Prosecutor’s Criminal Division, where he oversaw securities fraud and organized crime cases.
Pomerantz was one of the investigators who spoke to Cohen this week on the video call. Also on this call were Vance and other senior office staff.
The DA’s office also hired consulting firm FTI to review Trump’s financial records.
In February, after hiring Pomerantz, the United States Supreme Court rejected Trump’s effort to prevent Vance from receiving his tax returns and other financial records from his longtime accountants through a grand jury subpoena.
The investigators readily obtained these documents.
Cohen began cooperating with Vance’s investigation in 2018, before being sentenced in 2019 to three years in prison for his crimes.
Investigators from the prosecutor’s office visited him at the federal prison in Otisville, New York.
Cohen was released from prison for home confinement last May due to concerns that he was at particular risk for Covid-19 because of several health problems.
He was thrown back in prison in July after refusing to comply with a federal parole officer requirement that he not publish a book about Trump, or anyone else, while serving the rest of his sentence in home confinement.
Cohen was released again about two weeks later, after an indignant federal judge said he was the victim of retaliation by the Prison Department for failing to meet this condition. Later, Cohen published his book on Trump, entitled “Disloyal”.
Since then, in addition to cooperating with Vance’s investigations, Cohen has hosted a podcast, Mea Culpa, whose guests included other Trump critics such as porn star Daniels and Rosie O’Donnell.
Audio Up, which produces the podcast, presented it on Friday as “the fastest growing podcast in the world” with “5 million downloads”.