Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen wrote he considered taking his own life before testifying to Congress.
In a new memoir, titled Disloyal, Cohen acknowledges he was “more than willing to lie, cheat, and bully,” but said he did so to advance the president’s ambitions. Leading up to his testimony before the House Oversight Committee in 2019, he said he considered suicide to escape publicly speaking out against his former boss.
Cohen wrote he considered suicide “as a way to escape the unrelenting insanity.” He asserts that he became a victim of “gangster tactics” by President Trump and his allies.
Cohen, who was sentenced to three years in federal prison in December 2018, is serving the rest of his three-year sentence in home confinement after he was briefly sent back to prison in July following his original release in May due to concerns related to the coronavirus. Cohen pleaded guilty to several criminal charges in 2018, including lying to Congress as well as bank fraud, tax fraud, and campaign finance violations related to facilitating hush money payments to two women who alleged romantic affairs with Trump. The president has vehemently denied those relationships.
In his memoir, Cohen writes that he became “more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully” while in prison, speculating during an interview that Trump “would even go so far as to start a war in order to prevent himself from being removed from office.”
“Locking up your political enemies, criminalizing dissent, terrifying or bankrupting the free press through libel lawsuits — Trump’s all-encompassing vision wasn’t evident to me before he began to run for president,” Cohen writes in his memoir. “I honestly believe the most extreme ideas about power and its uses only really took shape as he began to seriously contemplate the implications of taking power and how he could leverage it to the absolute maximum level possible.”
Cohen’s book is due for release on Tuesday, but excerpts began to surface on Saturday. In response, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called the book’s claims “lies,” taking aim at his credibility by invoking his criminal record.
“Michael Cohen is a disgraced felon and disbarred lawyer, who lied to Congress. He has lost all credibility, and it’s unsurprising to see his latest attempt to profit off of lies,” McEnany said in a statement.
Cohen is scheduled to participate in a series of interviews this week to promote his book.
