Did Michael Cohen steal from the Trump Organization?

Michael Cohen has been a thorn in Donald Trump’s side since the disgraced U.S. president tossed his former ally to the wolves in 2018.

In the decade leading up to his abrupt ouster, Cohen and Trump worked closely together, as Cohen provided legal assistance to the infamously sketchy businessman. He started working for Trump in 2006, and quickly became deeply intertwined with a number of Trump endeavors. He served as vice president of the Trump Organization for years, he was considered Trump’s chief “fixer,” and he even served as co-president of Trump Entertainment and a board member of the Eric Trump Foundation, until the day he became more useful as a target than an ally.

The moment Cohen presented more risk than reward, Trump tossed him under the bus and never looked back, and that move is officially biting the 77-year-old in the behind. Cohen is taking the stand in his former employer’s hush money trial, in which he is deeply entangled, and in the process he’s revealing some harsh truths. Not about Trump’s sex life — we got plenty of that from Stormy Daniels — but about his own time in the Trump Organization.

Did Michael Cohen steal money from Donald Trump?

Trump is running out of people to take the fall, and that’s landing him in the hot seat for once. For years, he’s leaned on an eager lineup of patsies to take the blame for his misdeeds, and many of them paid the price. He’s worked his way through a bulk of them by now, unfortunately, which leaves Trump with nowhere to turn now that he’s on criminal trial.

Many of the people he’s stepped on to navigate his way to the top are likewise coming back to roost as Trump’s hush money trial edges on. Stormy Daniels, a woman he sought to erase from the narrative, came back with a vengeance, and so did one-time Trump bestie Michael Cohen, who took a bulk of the blame (and faced harsh consequences) following the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Cohen claimed that many of his illegal acts were performed at the behest of the former president, and his voice is being treated as damning counter-evidence in the hush money trial. In the proceedings, however, Cohen seemingly implicated himself in at least one crime not endorsed by the former president, when he fessed up to stealing tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump Organization.

Cohen admitted, on his final day of testimony, to stealing a full $30,000 via reimbursements following the 2016 election. He didn’t shy away from the answer either, answering lead defense lawyer Todd Blanche’s question of “You did steal from the Trump Organization,” with a straightforward “Yes, sir.”

Cohen later described the extra money as “almost like self-help,” after explaining that he’d been under-paid — or not paid at all — on several occasions, and he was trying to recoup his losses. That doesn’t make what he did legal, of course, but in the grand scheme of things it may well pale in comparison to Trump’s transgressions.