President Trump’s disgraced longtime lawyer Michel Cohen said in a recorded conversation that he helped evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr. handle a potential scandal involving racy photos.
Cohen, who began his three-year prison sentence Monday, said in the recording that Falwell reached out for help months before the Liberty University president endorsed Trump, according to Reuters.
According to Cohen, someone had obtained racy “personal photographs” that would generally be kept “between husband and wife” and was demanding money.
Cohen traveled to Florida to meet with an attorney representing the person who obtained the photographs and told the attorney his client was committing a crime and police would be called if the situation were not resolved.
A source familiar with Cohen’s thinking told Reuters the person who had the photos destroyed them after Cohen intervened.
The Falwells declined to comment.
Cohen made the comments in March while speaking with actor Tom Arnold, who recorded the conversation without Cohen’s knowledge. Arnold has been on a yearslong quest to search for incriminating evidence against Trump, including an rumored tape of prostitutes urinating on his hotel room bed in Moscow and Trump allegedly using the N-word during unaired footage of “The Apprentice.” He starred in an eight-episode series for Viceland called “The Hunt for the Trump Tapes with Tom Arnold.”
“I actually have one of the photos,” Cohen told Arnold. “It’s terrible.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Cohen helped persuade Falwell to endorse Trump before the Iowa caucuses. Falwell has since been a close ally of the president’s, recently saying Trump should have two more years added to his first term to make up for the length of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
