Former US president, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen has testified that he manipulated the values of the former U.S. president’s real estate properties to match “whatever number Mr. Trump told us.”
Testifying as a key witness in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud case against Trump on Tuesday, October 24, Cohen said Trump tasked him and other former Trump Organization executives with doctoring financial statements to boost the value of the company’s holdings and secure better real estate premiums.
“He would say, ‘I’m actually not worth $4.5 billion, I’m really worth more like 6 (billion),” Cohen said, adding that Trump arrived at the valuations of his assets “arbitrarily.”
Cohen said he and onetime Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg would mark up line items by hand using red ink in Trump’s financial statements after he told them the numbers were too low.
The testimony came during the fourth week of a trial in New York state court in Manhattan.
The trial comes from a lawsuit that Letitia James, a Democrat, brought against Trump and his family company last September. The suit, which could break up Trump’s business empire, alleges Trump inflated the value of his properties.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has denied wrongdoing and defended the valuations of his properties, saying the case is a “fraud” and a political witch hunt.
Speaking to reporters outside the courtroom during the trial’s lunch break, Trump called Cohen a “liar” and said he was “not worried at all about his testimony.”
Cohen, who once said he would “take a bullet” for Trump, turned on his one-time boss in 2018, and pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation and lying to Congress about Trump’s business dealings in Russia.
Cohen’s testimony during a 2019 Congressional probe of Trump’s finances led to James’ lawsuit.
Colleen Faherty, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office, began her questioning of Cohen by reviewing his criminal history.
“I did that at the direction of, in concert with and for the benefit of Donald Trump,” Cohen said on the stand, referring to his false congressional testimony.
Cohen began a three-year prison sentence in 2019 but was released to home confinement the following year during the coronavirus pandemic.
