When I met Michael Cohen in New York two years ago, he was a man visibly crushed by what life had done to him. His whole face sagged: he could have defined the word ‘hangdog’, a beagle caught peeing on the Persian rug. We stood outside his apartment building, which was Trump Park Avenue, Trump’s name bearing down on Cohen’s head in gold letters three feet high. We’d already had a long lunch and I was trying to say goodbye but as he spoke about one injustice or humiliation he remembered another, a torrent of self-pity. Everyone had treated Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer unfairly: the Feds, Congress, the media, above all his former boss. ‘I go to jail because he gets his pecker pulled by a porn star?’
He was talking about Stormy Daniels. Cohen had given her $130,000 to keep quiet about having sex with Trump at a golf tournament in Utah in 2006.
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