When Cohen testified before Congress in 2019 after pleading guilty to helping Trump, as his fixer, commit all sorts of crimes - like intimidating Trump's mistresses from coming forward about their relationships with Trump and intimidating Trump's detractors to prevent them from speaking out about him (like former Republican operative Cheri Jacobus), he expressed anger and regret for ever having gotten involved with the business mogul. He described with great passion how his misdeeds cost him so much because he believed in what Trump was doing (whatever that was) and how he felt he had been taken like so many Trump "University" graduates stuck with diplomas that had all the validity of a certificate from Ace Obedience School. After serving time in prison for his violations of the law, he went full tilt boogie on bashing Trump, going on all sorts of media outlets and doing his own podcast on the MeidasTouch Network. This not-so-nice Jewish boy became a symbol of a widely-held belief among Roman Catholics, the power of redemption.
Then the roof caved in.
When investigative reporter Tara Palmeri, digging more deeply into the case of noted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, asked Cohen about his and Trump's connections to the late financier, he got bitterly defensive and lashed out at her as if she had just asked him to pull down his pants. And Palmeri wasn't the only reporter Cohen blew up at over the Epstein question. He'd done that with at least three other reporters. Soon and sure enough, Cohen all but recanted his testimony to New York State Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, saying he had been "coerced" to provide selective information relevant to their cases against Trump.
Cohen didn't find redemption because he converted to Catholicism (for the record, he didn't) or because he suddenly saw the light in a manner reminiscent of the end of a sitcom episode (guest starring Joyce Bulifant). He found redemption because he was caught.
And this phony redemption allowed Cohen to make lots of money going after Trump like the attack dog people wish Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries were. He was embraced by a bunch of white bourgeois liberals who should have known better. And it was all a lie. He didn't publicly turn against Trump because of conviction. He publicly turned against Trump because he was convicted. But playing the wronged Mafia lawyer who's since gone straight is a lucrative business.
Or, rather, it was. Cohen was fine so long as someone didn't ask him about Jeffrey Epstein, because it's becoming more obvious by the nanosecond that he knows a lot more about Epstein than he's willing to admit, and what he knows likely involves personal dealings with both Epstein and Trump. By insisting that Letitia James and Alvin Bragg coerced him into giving selectively parsed testimony, Cohen not only revealed himself as an unrepentant grifter (sorry - not sorry), he revealed himself as someone who wanted to get back into Trump's good graces. And he apparently did. Trump has pledged to investigate James and Bragg and place them where Cohen used to be - behind bars.
I listened to some of Cohen's podcast rants when I started relying on podcasts for news in place of the bankrupt legacy media, but his schtick wore very thin very quickly, and I stopped listening to him because I was tired of his loud-mouthed Long Island accent. I stopped listening to him for all the wrong reasons; it never occurred to me that he had knowledge about Jeffrey Epstein that he likely never would have divulged, or that until someone thought to ask him about it, he was safe from having to divulge it and could make bakeries full of dough for as long as no one did. It never occurred to the Meiselas brothers at MeidasTouch, either, until they dropped Cohen once his statement about James and Bragg came out. They did not explain why they dropped Cohen. They didn't need to.
But then, it never occurred to a lot of people, particularly people in the New York or Washington social scenes, that Cohen had privileged information about Epstein he was prepared to take to his grave - something an intelligent primary school student in the north of England could have figured out.
Michael Cohen did, though, ultimately see the error of his ways. Except that the error was dissociating himself from Trump.
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