good evening, everyone, and welcome to politics and prose. i'm brad graham, the co-owner of the store, along with my wife, phyllis, in muscatine. and we're very privileged to have with us this evening michael cohen here to talk about his new book, revenge how donald

trump weaponized the u.s. department of justice against his critics. and now, for all the media that michael does and has been doing for years, this is the first time he's actually appeared in an independent bookstore. now he he skipped this. he he had to skip this format for his first book, disloyal, which was a memoir that came back. and it came out two years ago, you know, while pandemic was still going on. but this time, you know, as he was telling me a few minutes ago, you know, he wanted to appear in person to to help get get his message across. and that message is basically that the way donald trump used the department of justice, members of all of his own party,

the press, social media, to go after opponents and critics, should be a lesson for all of us. michael argues that his own experience and which he felt subjected to injustices by trump and associates like former attorney general bill barr should serve as a warning to anyone who would try to stand against a corrupt and immoral president. for those of you who might need reminding, michael was a trump's lawyer and served as an executive at the trump organization for for a dozen years. that relationship ended in may 2018, as michael became embroiled in a federal criminal investigation into, among other things, the hush money that he paid on trump's behalf to stormy daniels and karen mcdougal to stay silent about affairs they had with trump. a few months later, michael pleaded guilty to tax evasion and campaign finance violations

and was sentenced to three years in prison and fined. he was released to house arrest after a year because of covid concerns. then read jailed, then returned to home confinement. his sentence expired last november, but he's become very vocal critic of trump offering to congress and anyone who will listen disparaging accounts of the way trump operated, calling him a con man, a cheat and more. when the new york attorney general recently announced a civil lawsuit for fraud against trump, trump's family business and three of his children, she credited michael's congressional testimony with initially shedding light on the misconduct and triggering new york's investigation. michael himself has expressed remorse and shame for what he did while working for trump, although he maintains the tax evasion charges he pled guilty to were untrue and were forced

on him by prosecutors. i suspect you'll hear a little bit more about that in a minute. and these days, he runs a crisis management company, crisis x, and hosts a podcast, mia culpa with michael cohen. so please join me in welcoming michael cohen. well, well, well, i got to be very honest with you. first of all, when i was in school, i never thought in my life i would become an author, least of all a number one new york times bestselling author, which is what happened in disloyal. and i go back in time and i start thinking about, oh, my gosh, you know, why did i even write disloyal? i actually wrote disloyal. simply to pass time, because in prison time management is everything. i mean, if you if you don't have good time management skills, 24

hours could feel like 240 hours. the hardest part about being in prison was as i talk about in this book, revenge, i didn't belong there. and what i talk about is exactly what happened to me and most people don't even know the real story. everybody talks about michael cohen. everybody has an opinion. they have, you know, some idea in terms of who i was, what i was. i was not. let me be very clear. i was not ray donovan skulking around the city with a baseball bat, hitting people with it as the media would like to have portrayed me. what did i do? i sued people. i shoot people on behalf of donald trump. i was a lawyer. and that's exactly what we do now. some of the cases were, let's just say, less than on the up and up. it was a way for donald to take advantage of his economic power. the fact that there were a dozen lawyers in the firm in the office over at the trump

organization, and it was generally contractors and everybody's like, oh my gosh, you know, you're a terrible human being. you're horrible. look how many people that you hurt. well, with all due respect to a lot of the people that got hurt, some of them were really lousy contractors. right. and the things that they had done were improper. and we did what anybody else would do. we used the law, not baseball bats, not golf clubs. and the notion that we have to make donald trump into don corleone and everybody that works for him is a consigliere or something to that effect. it's just not accurate. fast forward all that i do end up coming out of otis ville and i do have to tell you, even though it was what's known as camp cupcake, it's i never saw a single cupcake while i was there. and that really upset me. you know, i was first told, are you going to camp cupcake rate? i love cupcakes. you know, let's make sure there's some black coffee. i'm going to be perfect. unfortunately, there was none. and it's very hard being away

from your family, your friends, losing your law license, your family's happiness, everything. it is absolute torture. the entire judicial system needs an overhaul. so who was with me? well, i had an actor like the situation was there. it was absolutely a riot watching jersey shore, about half a dozen doctors, orthopedists, podiatrists, you name it. we had at least two dozen lawyers, billy mcfarland from billy mcfarland from fyre festival was there for a short while with me, who we had accountants galore. my bunky was a forensic accountant. we would talk constant about the case and why so i'm going out to revenge on and really fast forward it here. oh, before i get there the unconscious tattoos shall remain, making me the very first political prisoner. hello, everybody. i am. should be in the guinness book of world records. i am the very first political

prisoner held in my country because i failed to wave. my first amendment constitutes personal right, which is exactly what happened. this nonsense by fox news. oh, i was at bill buckley eating a steak. it's 800 feet from my home. and i was permitted to be exactly where i was because i was on a furlough. so i get lord and i talk about this in the book. i get lord down to 500 pearl street, which is the criminal case. i'm saying, why are they sending me now? i'm supposed to go to the bronx like everybody else for an ankle monitor and they got new man and pakula, who works there, says, we, no, no, no, we want you coming here. and i said, okay, fine, i'll go there. but something didn't smell right, didn't feel right. so i asked a buddy of mine who is a friend of mine, since we were about the age of 14, also a lawyer just to join me because i wanted a second set of eyes. we get there and they hand me a piece of two pieces of paper. didn't look like standard government type document, you know, which is something that

looks like it's been photocopied 600 times. you could barely read it and you could. luckily, if you figure out where exactly you know, your name is supposed to go, it was designed specifically for me in the very first paragraph of it was that i would not publish a book, i would not do a movie, i would not speak to the press, i would not speak to the media, that my family would not speak to the media or the press, that my friends would not speak at night. we have way this is a violation of my first amendment constitutional right. i mean, could we tamp down some of this language? and they said, sure, okay, great. so they had me sit with my lawyer friend jeff in the waiting area. and so i sit and i wait. and it was very sad because my son, who's at the time was 21, was waiting for me in the front. he had come in from college and it was it was rough. so he was sitting in the front

and all of a sudden about an hour later, three gigantic guys. i mean, humongous federal marshals with handcuffs and shackles. and this was an experience that i don't even know how to characterize. they put me in a freezer. it was a room that must have been 40 degrees. you're wearing a very thin outfit and it was absolutely horrific for about three and a half hours to the point that you're chattering so hard, your teeth feel like they're going to fall out of your head until they pull you out to a room which is like 80 degrees, 90 degrees, so your body can acclimate for the temperature and then they put you back into the freezer. so it's all a lot of mental torture. they run you around them, handcuffed in, shackled for what? for what? even assuming that i had done what was alleged and what i had pledged to were going to get to that who gets handcuffed in shackles? i mean, this is a white collar. i'm not hannibal lecter. i was the former personal attorney to the president, which could be similar, but it's not

exactly the same. and i think that the i think that the extent to which they went, this was all done at the direction of donald j. trump. so people turn around, they say, well, you know, why would you say that? how can you possibly say that? well, i'm the first person to get lured away from jail, which is the which is the reentry system that's used and sent over to 500 people. st given a document that was definitively written for me, though denied and i get thrown back only to have people from otisville there to drive me back. now what's amazing is today there was an article that came out from it and it's an online newspaper called ross story and the author, a young lady by the name of sarah k burress, wrote michael cohen's lawyer sent this memo days ahead of the s-t and

why shakedown and talks about into my new book and i really had something i was going to go into more until i read this while i was on the train coming in today and i just found it so fascinating that it took a small online newspaper to actually really get the story right. it's it's to me, again, is amazing. michael cohen's lawyer, guy petrillo, penned a letter to deputy u.s. attorney robert khuzami that is featured at the end of cohen's new book, asking for a meeting to discuss the cohen case and the grand jury. this was to me, the craziest thing. four and a half months post the raid, and we have no idea what they're talking about. what are the charges that are being brought against me now to anybody who knows me in the past, i don't drink. i don't do drugs. never did. i mean, i even went through college here at american university fraternity and never had a beer.

and i've really tried to live not like a priest, but rather like an average person. i have one speeding ticket in my entire life. i've never had a parking ticket. all of a sudden i'm confronted with four or 15 federal agents at the hotel. my home, which was two blocks away. so i was not on the lam as some of the newspapers put it, i was two blocks at the most visited hotel. the lows regency in new york city. i had to meet my at the bank where i had a safety deposit box because obviously my apartment was under renovation. we were flooded out by my next door neighbor and also my law office, where there were another 20 or so federal agents. and it was an overwhelming experience. and for four and a half months, we're asking the southern district of new york and my former attorney guy petrillo, was the former head of the criminal division of the southern district of new york. i mean, this guy was the big

boy. pitts, in the southern district, a.k.a. the sovereign district of new york. and i want to be very clear, i have no love for these guys at all. so now we now we sit there and we're really frustrated. four and a half months, i can't get an answer. what are you looking for? let me know if there's something i can help you with. no problem. right. well, nope. no answer. until finally my attorney decides that he's going to send a letter. it was at my request to them. we'd really like to know. we'd like to sit down while they decide that they're going to have a sit down, but i won't be included into it. it was on a friday. okay. so he asked me if he's all right. i said absolutely. it's okay now go ahead and call me when the meeting is over, which is exactly what he did. 5:30 p.m. on a friday night, we find out exactly what it is that i have until monday to plead guilty to tax evasion, misrepresentation to a bank as well as campaign finance

violation. or we're filing a 58 page indictment against you that's going to include your wife. now, anybody knows i live for my family and there was no way in the world that i was going to allow anything to happen to my wife. it was just our 20th anniversary a couple of days ago. there's no chance in the world i was going to let them do to her what my attorney told me that they were going to do. they're going to perp walk us out on a monday. so i had no documents. i had nothing the first time in my life having any issue with law. i've never and i go into the book here so i see someone just walked in, lanny davis, who was my lawyer and so on. thank you, lanny. and. lanny went wild. i'm so glad you walked in. perfect timing. you can. lanny, why don't you come take a seat so i could see your pretty face there. so come on. lanny. we're all waiting. we're all waiting now. that's barbour's. all right.

anyway, so lanny goes crazy. does this makes absolutely no sense. i mean, and we create a powerpoint presentation that shows that there are elements in law to tax evasion, which is one of the things that i was given that i had to plead and they wrote the allocution. everything i spent more time going over the allocution, how i was to answer to the judge than i then was spent on my entire case. there was no case that was brought against me. i pled guilty to a one page information and you'll see as i go through the book, it's very easy for someone to turn around and point the finger and say, well, yeah, it's your story. you could tell it any way that you want. in fact, we have fbi agents that were involved, starting with the earliest, which you may all remember the mueller report i'm sorry, the steele dossier. there's still dossier as it related to me. 11 allegations raised against me. not one of them is true.

i do not have a dossier in sochi next door to putin. my father in law is not the largest real estate developer in moscow, though i wish he was. it. he's in fact, he's never been to moscow. he was. he's ukrainian. and they came to this country in 1973 because of anti summit ism. all right. then on top of that, they claim that i went to prague, which i've never been to prague. i would like to i hear it's beautiful, but i've never been. and i went with 10 million in cash in order to pay off a group of compromised on behalf of paul manafort. truth be told, i wouldn't pay $0.03 for paul manafort. so none of this made any sense. tax evasion and i talk about in the book, i've never not paid my taxes. i've never not file taxes. i've had a cpa my entire life that i paid every single dollar i ever earned was in capital one bank. that, by coincidence, was located at the base of the building that i live in. not one single element of tax evasion existed in my case.

well, okay, what am i going to do? put my wife at risk? the answer to that was no. there was no way in the world that i can that i can do this. and from a friday to a monday, 48 hours, you don't do it. this is what's going to happen. this is what i refer to as the weaponization of the justice department. donald trump set the whole thing up. why? well, as soon as our relationship started coming to an end and things i refused to do certain things that they would want me to do, which, of course, was to stay quiet, that they wanted me to just accept the punishment, move on, basically, as i had once said, stupidly to vanity fair, that i would take a bullet for trump. i probably would have, except for the fact that he was the guy pulling the trigger. and for me, that was a real problem. you know, to make a long story short, sara goes on in the book

revenge how donald trump weaponized the united states department of justice against his critics. it walks through what cohen describes as the dogged way in which donald trump used the government to make his life miserable, attack him, threaten his family, and ultimately land him in prison for a number of crimes. collins explains that he never committed, you know, the next one after these crazy tax evasion cases. yes, there was an error. i acknowledge it, and i paid that money. i never one thing that that guy petrillo was able to get the judge, william h. pauley, the third to acknowledge i never owed a single dollar to any bank, to any banking institution or any individual ever. there's no economic crime. so, again, how could you have a tax evasion? what it was, was a tax omission. and i paid the money before sentencing, but i got zero credit for that also. then the next one, which was the he locked violation, you don't know where the he lock is.

the home equity line of credit. i've 80% equity in my home. i had more money sitting in the bank than my mortgage. plus the heat lock combined in somewhere, somewhere down the line. they turn around and they now holding me that i misrepresent it myself to the bank. i mean it's i've been doing business with this bank. i had six buildings. i had 197 apartments. i had, you know, 52 taxi medallions between new york city. i mean, i had worked very hard over the course of the early part of my life. i didn't work for donald trump because i needed donald's job or i needed his money. i was semi-retired at the age of 39, and somehow, like so many people in america, i fell under the spell of this cult, of this cult leader. and i did things that i never should have done, including the stormy daniels. you know, one of the things, sir, that you mentioned in the intro me that i had paid off stormy daniels and karen mcdougal. i never paid karen mcdougal. i was charged for it. i pled guilty to it. i was fined $50,000 that i paid

for it. i never paid. karen mcdougal, david -- did from am i in the national enquirer. i was just asked by donald to look over the documents as a lawyer to make sure that his -- was protected in the event that david ended up going to time magazine, where he was supposed to be the next ceo and editor in chief, but somehow they needed to get david out of that, too, because that's why. well, michael was going to be the fall guy. anything that was negative, anything that was wrong. just point your finger at cohen. it's all right. everybody started doing it. all of a sudden, you had michael avenatti doing the same thing. now all of a sudden i'm skulking around nevada looking for stormy daniels while she's holding a baby and they're going to some place. plus, i'm saying to myself, what next? what next? you know, it was and not a lot of say anything if anybody's ever had any sort of an issue and you have a lawyer, the lawyer for the judges hate. the judges hate when you speak. you can't do that. you have to stay quiet, stay home, do nothing. okay. and so i did that. what happened?

i end up with the 36 months. i, i was saying to myself at the time of the hearing, 36 months for what? and i couldn't believe it. i was so angry that i was forced to read this allocution that was prepared for me, that i bit my inner lip. so hard. and it was like you could see that i was playing with my with my side of my cheek because i was so angry that i bit myself and i was just beyond nauseous watching as my father, you know, who at the time, 80, 84, you know, holocaust survivor came with four children, all of us lawyers. he's a head and neck reconstructive surgery. my mom's a surgical nurse. we all come from the family of mafioso, like they tried to like they tried to say, i know people when i was a kid who were in the mob. absolutely right. and someone who didn't. right. i'm from new york. i mean, for god's sakes, it was it was crazy. but we never you know, they were in we were part of any family. this is absolutely okay. maybe now and then they give us

a discount on on some meat or something like that. but for god's sakes, it was crazy. also, now everybody's pointing the finger at cohen. cohen, cohen. and i just became the fall guy for everything. well, interesting. you know, there's an old expression that the three things that will always rise the sun, the moon and the truth. and that's what's happening each and every day. more and more information seems to be dripping out. now, for god's sakes, i wish to speak. it would open and it would just flood and it would make my life so much easier. drip, drip, drip. we see geoffrey berman came out with a book, for god's sakes. this guy did one of two things. either what he did, his actions or unethical, or the illegal he was contact acted by bill barr, by bill barr's office. and they put pressure on him in order to expunge donald's name and to pull back the charges against me and the plea that i had made to the southern

district of new york so that they could whitewash the document. and he did still whitewash it. instead of the 40 pages. it was 20 pages. this is not the way government is supposed to work. and i just scratch my head and i say, where was this guy for five years? well, okay. all right. he needs to hold on to that information so that he could write a book. and i'm saying to myself, this is absolutely improper. it's like brady material that they withheld that i could have used. well, is that going to change anything? no. why? because i already did my time. and now i'm just on a supervised release that hopefully will be over very, very soon. also, you you know, sometimes you wake up and you wonder whose life is this? because i know that this wasn't mine, right? yes. i you know, i had worked i had built myself a life and a wonderful family. and i was enjoying every single day of waking up. and i can honestly tell you from that day of that federal raid to today, there is no happiness anymore. there's no joy.

i try. i fight every day to put on a smile, to enjoy myself. i try to do it so that my children don't see, you know, an unhappy father who's just dedicated. but one of the things that i also put into this book, because i think it's extremely, extremely important. is some issues regarding the media. the media gives donald trump too much attention, whatever it is that he opens his mouth, he says he could burp. it's going to be all over the news and it's just it's absolutely horrific. and we are the ones that are building this guy up. the sentencing report that i wrote with petrillo and lanny as well, it laid everything out and i spoke to so many people in the media, some who i've known for over two decades, friends. i call these people friends. and i would ask them, had did you read the sentencing, the petrillo sentencing memo? because the story that you're

writing in the paper is wrong and facts matter, truth matters, accuracy matters. but the media didn't see it that way. like i said, i've never been to prague. right? i can't tell you the number of journalists that wrote michael cohen told me he was in prague. know michael was in los angeles with his son, who was hoping to play baseball as a lefty pitcher for usc. and they went to usc and they asked the coach and he said, yeah, they were here. and then the day after i was on tmz, i was on set with with harvey levin, who's also a friend. and you can't be in two places at the same time. you know, people say, oh, you look so familiar on the go. you probably yeah, it's possible. i don't know. everybody's got a doppelganger, but i've never been to prague. and no matter how many times that you want to say it, i never have. and then it just. it just explore loads there from the steele dossier all the way to the unconstitutional remand. i mean, that was absolutely that was even more horrific than the

first time around. but i wanted to lay out in this book revenge, which is, i believe i accomplished i wanted to lay out the story of not just what happened to me. that's already happened. it's done. it's over. i have my own internal healing that i have to deal with on a daily basis. if donald trump, if i'm ron desantis for josh hawley, marjorie taylor greene, any one of these maga -- to, you know, just if they take power again, they now have the playbook on what it means in order to turn this country into an autocracy. you know, the way you make a country, the way you turn a country into an autocracy, the first thing that you do is you take away people's first amendment rights. that free speech, and you create state run television and media. you know, newspapers and so on, like fox news. all right. that's just what they do.

what do you do after that? well, then you weaponize a group of people. you take over the military. those are the two things that we saw. we saw january six and we saw what happened to me. i believe it was a test run. and i believe that the next person is going to take donald's failures because they are both failures. take them and figure out how to make them into successes. we've already seen what's going on with roe. we see what's going to be happening with obergefell, weld and a series of other cases. the supreme court is out of control. things that we have grown up with 50 years. for example, of roe as stari decisis. all of a sudden gone and weighs the outrage. okay. yes, a couple of days we see people shutting down the streets, picketing, yelling at, you know, members of congress. that's not enough. it's not enough. there has to be a movement and we need to ensure that come november that we make sure that these people are no longer there because and this is what i say

in the book, what happened to me can happen to any one of you can happen to every one of you will certainly happen to a slew of people who are on donald hit list, his enemies list. and i can tell you that hit list is probably longer than any scroll that we saw from king tut's, you know, tomb. i can promise you that he hates everybody that doesn't sit there and flatter him and praise him. i know i blew smoke up business for over a decade, so i promise you it is not. it is. you know, it's funny, we could laugh about him. there's not i mean, he is an absolute cartoon character. when we first started the campaign campaign was never supposed to be legitimate. it never was. it was it was supposed to be the greatest infomercial in the history of u.s. politics. i've said it on television a dozen times, because it's true when he got in to the office, he realized what power was. he tasted a power that he had

never tasted before, despite the fact, you know, he was obviously the ruler of the 25th and 26th floor of trump tower, but nothing like this before. the most powerful man on the planet. and he refused to give it up. and that's why i said when i testified before the house oversight committee, my biggest fear and one of the reasons why i'm here today testifying at tremendous, tremendous cost to me and my family in terms of danger and peril and, you know, and our lives. my biggest fear is that if donald trump loses the election, that there will never be a peaceful transfer of power. that's a statement that we hear every single day in the press. sadly, sadly, we hear this every single day in the press. but that came from my mouth going back four and a half years ago. and i'm not prescient. i'm not nostradamus. i just know the man. and i'm telling you right here, right now, today in this marvelous bookstore, that if donald trump or any of his

acolytes end up taking office or power to the america that we know, the democracy that we have will be gone and we will never get it back. so blue wave. yeah. so, michael, you ready for some audience questions? oh, do i love questions? all right, we got about seven or eight here. the first one asks, is trump's former lawyer, how do you balance the obligation to protect client confidential information and the attorney client privilege with the need to disclose what trump was doing? it's a difficult question as it relates to attorney client privilege. you may all remember that when they raided my home, they took 10 million documents. oh, this is a great story. so they all of a sudden i have ten burner phones. no. three belong to my daughter

because, you know, children every year they have to get a new phone and there were photos in them. and we don't throw them away. and i'm technologically challenge age, so i put them into a box in our apartment right. so that one day we'll find somebody who will be able to put it up onto the cloud or whatever, you know, onto a drive because there are pictures of them when they children. so there were never there was no burner phones. these were old apple iphones. one of them was even a palm pilot, the ones that i don't remember, just some young people here. you wouldn't remember. but the palm pilot was the original one that used to put a battery in in order to charge it. by the time the thing charge, the battery was dead. yet to keep going on and on. so you never i never it was never activated because it never worked. you couldn't get a battery to last long enough to keep the charge. these were the things you may also remember when they allegedly got some very special documents that were in the shredder. in my law office, it was garbage. it was i had filled up my garbage pail with garbage.

and so i put it in the shredder in order to get rid of it. envelope pipes and things like that. the united states paid over at quantico, put those 18 or 20 pages back that the media ran. oh, we've got it all. we've got it all. what you have you had bunch of envelopes that i threw into there. 18 pages. that's where our money went. thank you, quantico, for your technology. it's amazing. so how do you up? how do you end up balancing it? there was a special master that went through the 10 million documents, and i spent 30 days with this law firm. mcdermott will and emery in the city, going through documents, recordings, everything to ensure that there was no attorney client privilege and that nothing was between just attorney. so if you have two attorneys and say, ivanka on, you know, the document on an email, she there is no attorney client privilege because a non attorney on to it breaks the privilege not to

mention donald himself broke the privilege he said i don't care let him say whatever he wants. i have nothing to hide. okay, great. he have nothing to hide now look what's happening. three and a half, four years later, we all know there was plenty to hide. there's also something called the crime fraud exception rule. and this is what the prosecutors do. they tell you everything is part of the crime fraud exception rule. so legitimately you could fight till you know till the end of time. and they will just continuously tell you, well, that's a crime. and under the crime fraud exception rule doesn't apply. so it's a very it's a very good question. it's a tough question. it's sort of something you have to take on an ad hoc basis. there were certain documents that were not released. they weren't relevant to any of these cases, but they were attorney client privilege. and so they weren't released and, you know, i respected the attorney client privilege. he owns the privilege, not me. as the lawyer. but, you know, once, for example, rudy giuliani started

coming out and lying and making statements about, oh, i transcribed this recording and that's not what it says. well, okay. i mean, poor rudy, right? i mean, what what an absolute shame. america's mayor. could you imagine saying america's embarrassment? so, you know, i said just do me a favor and please just listen to it. listen to it yourself. and then it was given to cnn. and i think chris cuomo ended up putting it out there and lo and behold, that was the end of specific attorney client privilege communication, even though it really wasn't. but it's on an ad hoc basis. i mean, it's a very circular answer. all right. next question. trump has a history of cheating people and his real estate career. what can you do? if ever he started to start that one over again, the assertion that trump has a history of cheating people in his real estate career. so why do supporters of trump

ignore that? because they're stupid. i mean, as as as i was, there's no other way to describe it, you know, i constantly refer to the trump organization. it is the cult of donald j. trump. you walk into the trump building on fifth avenue. his name is all over the place. you go into the elevator, its name is all over the place. you come to the 26th floor. his name is. you're drinking the water. it's trump. i mean, it's it's come to him. trump from trump. and you just don't get away. you want to have lunch, you go down to the trump grill, the trump bar. now, or you can even go and get to the trump ice cream parlor that's down there. everything is there. that is his world. and so, you know, why do people follow him that are in alabama, arkansas or any of these other, you know, sort of incredibly red states? i don't know the answer for it. there's something inherent is like an inherent racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, islamophobe phobia, antisemitism that this guy brings out in people and they

just want to express it. you know, this whole nonsense with the second amendment that you should have a right to own an air 15. and if you take away someone's right for an ar 15, that means you're taking away their handguns, their shotguns, you taking away their, you know, their ability to defend themselves. he manages to somehow appeal the worst part of anyone, and they just latch on to it. so this next question, you know, has to do with one of the things that you were saying before that you get accused of. did you help launder russian money for trump? no, no. in fact, i don't know if that's even a true statement about trump launder money. remember, i started in 2006, 2007, this allegedly in the nineties, you know, when this happened, eric trump made the statement and i think we should

get him up here and he should certainly be able to answer that, though at the time. i don't even think he was born. look, the kids like, their father are just stupid. there's no other way to there. i mean, eric is the dumbest of the top three. and it's really it's an absolute shame because he not only is he dumb, but he talks. so you know if you're stupid, you should know that you're stupid and keep your mouth shut. it's about, you know, my grandmother used to say that. yeah, you can't argue with stupid. let him speak because they embarrassed themselves. that's eric. now, don, interestingly enough, happens to be the inherently the smartest of them all. it's not ivanka. everybody thinks, oh, it's ivana ivanka. right? it's not ivanka. she's the most prepared, she's the most phony like her father. but i believe don is probably the smartest, but he's just i don't know what happened to him, but for god's sakes, that's not the same donald junior that i remember from when i was working there. he's lost his mind and i have no

idea what's caused it, but no, i don't believe that there was money laundering, in fact. oh, we got to go to the press on this one for the media made an allegation in that my father in law of the big russian mobster. right. who happens to be ukrainian was in the garment industry. he had a fabric dying company, you know, until he ultimately retired and not the russian mobster that he was claimed to be by the press, allegedly. my father in law loaned donald trump $100 million. i wish to god i knew where that money was today, but he loaned him $100 million to save him in his company. so i'll never forget right after we read that my mother in law turn around said to my father in law. why didn't you ask me for permission? you know, so it was it was. it was it's comical. i mean, the press just makes up stuff. they go with it. why? because they're looking for those clicks. they're advertising money and so on. so i don't believe that there was any russian laundering. does in his apartment buildings,

which are condominiums in there. you the way you purchase them like any piece of property it's called a fee simple absolute. that means that you actually own your block in lot number not opposed to a co-op where its shares into that block in lot. yes there were russians that own in there some of these russians happened to be from long island decided to move to new york. there was some and we have the saudi the kingdom of saudi arabia has a floor, for example, at trump world tower. does that mean that, you know, he was laundering money from the saudis there? it's new york. it's a you know, it's the melting pot of america. so, yes, there are some, but it's a very small number. and when error came out and said, oh, we have, you know, russians and they're they're buying our properties, it's again, he's just stupid and he was running his mouth in order to try to prove a point on somebody that may have said something that he found injurious to his daddy. so this next questioner says he heard you somewhere earlier this

week predict that trump will be indicted indicted soon. but this person says that for months, you know, they've listened to other people predict that trump would be indicted and he hasn't hasn't been. and he says, you know, he hopes you're right, but but why do you believe so strongly then and indictment will be soon? because this is really the first time that the department of justice has gotten involved. you know, merrick garland has been very, very careful, slow walking. and i said this yesterday on on cnn. he's been slow walking this. so it's like molasses to a strainer. it's hard to it's hard to imagine like a drip. drip of of this is the first time. and thanks to tish james, you know, a great new york attorney general. now, that's a civil matter that's just going to wipe him out financially and she's going for i don't know if you saw today she filed an injunction. she's so clever she filed an injunction today against donald so that cannot move any of the

assets and that he cannot hypoxic transfer sell any of these assets because they could be part of the settlement that would ultimately be due to new york pursuant to this civil case. but what she also did is she went ahead and she has now referred this to the southern district of new york to justice for tax evasion, which seems to me to be the low hanging fruit. what are what are we doing? we should have done this from day number one. we all know that this tax evasion they have now access to his tax returns due to that long, long, long, you know, litigation. that first was the lawsuit, then it was it was granted. and then he appealed and then he lost on that and then went to supreme court. he lost on that. and so they all now have his tax returns. so take it apart. take a look. he took over what, 170 plus million in refunds. we all know about the inflation of his assets for his own personal ego as as more importantly, to get benefit from insurance and so on, and then deflate him for tax purposes.

these are all crimes. make no mistakes. if it was any one of you in this audience, you would be with probably me at otisville, right? i mean, it's just nobody else seems to have gotten away with it. and it's so blatant. it's so in our faces that for some, i believe now the doj has no choice, especially on the tax evasion charge, to you know, to indict and to move forward with it. so here's the follow up question. if if trump is indicted, do you think he'll end up doing time? yeah. so that's a really difficult question to answer because. i believe that he will be indicted. i believe that he will be found guilty. but do i think that they can put a former president in prison? and i think, unfortunately, the answer to that is no. and the reason i say is because the former president, despite the fact he's dumb as a stump,

he he does still have enough requisite knowledge on briefings. and so on that he could be a true danger to the national security of this country. and i promise you that he would sell any of that information to an adversary for a bag of tuna or for a, you know, for a book of stamps. he doesn't he's willing to do it. he doesn't care about this country. you know, this he believes this country is here to serve him as opposed to what our founding fathers wanted, which is for the president of the united states to serve for the benefit of the people. and i think would be very difficult. but i do believe that they would put him under a home confinement situation that would mirror a the same sort of way that they operate. the bureau. so so where that whether he's indicted or ends up serving time this questioner asks are all of these lawsuits enough to break

trump and his family financially? yeah. so that's the tish james case. you know, i've been very vocal on this one. remember, it's a civil case and with a civil the bar is lowered whereby he took the fifth on every single question for the deposition other than his name. in a civil case, you can use that in order to demonstrate guilt or you can place that before, whether it's the judge or the jury, depending upon how the trial goes, he will be found guilty. in the tish james case, there's no doubt about that one. well, it creates a problem for him. and in her 220 plus page lawsuit, there's the statement that the settlement, the bar at the bottom of the baseline settlement that she's looking for is $250 million. and everybody start talking

about that. the baseline is the ceiling. it is not, i suspect that the amount will be somewhere between 750 million to $1 billion, which he does not have no matter how many of his supporters keep stupidly giving him money, it doesn't make a difference. he will not have that money, so he's going to have to start selling assets. and what do we know? well, he's got a lot of golf courses, but golf courses aren't income producing assets. right. you're lucky if they break. if they break even, he gets away with it simply because of the dues and from the bond that people put up. but that bond is not his, even though he thinks it is. it's not his. when they when they leave, he has to return it to them after a certain membership number, which of course not one of his clubs ever reaches the membership number. so it's kind of like a little bit of a ponzi scheme. those assets are not income producing, so what do you sell them for? not based on who wants to buy it? whatever you think you can get for it. if he ends up selling, for example, 40 wall street, he owns

that property for $1,000,000. it's a 1.2 million square foot property. and let's say it's worth what cushman wakefield is saying. it's worth 300 million. well, he has taxes on the 299 million. so in new york, that's a 50%. so he's off of that 250 million a buck in a quarter. so now he has only 125 to pay towards the $75 billion. he doesn't have enough assets that have the liquidity in between in order to pay this amount off and this case with tish james will ultimately bankrupt the trump organization. so the next two questions are about to trump related things that happened today. and one of course was that a decision by the january six committee to subpoena trump. do you believe that trump will respect the subpoena and testify? and if you were his lawyer and if you were his lawyer, what

would you advise him to do? so, first of all, do i think he'll respect process according to donald processes what he says is right also so i could declassify something just by thinking about it right? right. you know, it's almost like if he was able to do that, he would have like the jedi choke on me right now and i would be on the floor, you know, the answer to that is he's not showing up. now, of course. what does he do? a big, brave bed, donald. he's going to i want to testify. i want to go before them. i want to make a whole thing out of this. it's not true. we've seen this act before. that's the whole thing. why are we falling for the same nonsense again? and again and again? how many times has this man turn said? 100%. i'm going to cooperate. does he cooperate? no. i want to testify. i want the truth to be told. he takes the fifth 500 times. this is an old story. this is this is the same donald trump that's been doing it since started his practice.

and so the answer is, no, he's not going to testify. he's not going to respect the process. he has no respect for any of the nine individuals that are on the committee. you know, whether it's adam kinzinger especially or liz cheney, adam schiff, he has no respect for any of them. so the answer is he will not. as far as what would i tell him to do if i was his attorney? well, morocco, i believe namibia, these are countries that have no extradite dition. and so he should get on his 757, you know which of course needs to be fixed at the expense of his supporters. he should he should get on there. he should get the hell out of dodge really fast because he's in very serious trouble. and it's not just him. the kids are in trouble, too, don. ivanka. eric they're all in trouble. mark meadows i warned them, you may remember during my house oversight committee when i turn around and said to him and jim jordan, i know what you're doing, i know the playbook. so you know how i know the

playbook because i wrote it and you can't run the playbook on me. i know it better than you do. and what's happened to me and the harm and the pain and the damage that my family has gone through, you're going to know it yourself one of these days. if you stand by this man. and lo and behold, once again, prescient. i told him it was going to happen and it's happening. so the other trump related thing that happened today involves supreme court, which reject it, and in a very brief statement, a request from trump to intervene in that litigation over over the documents that were seized at my mar a lago. you know, trump had had objected to a decision by a lower court to remove the 100 classified documents from review by the special master. and the supreme court said it's just not going to not going to intervene. so the question is, well, what did you think about this decision and what do you think generally about the whole mar a lago situation? so the decision is obviously appropriate and it's correct.

and finally, you know, they're doing their job as opposed to trying to play politics. and the supreme court. i mean, let's just look at the whole mar a lago document scandal. anyway, the guy is fighting to keep documents out of the nara, which is the national archives and they're stolen documents. they don't belong to him. they belong to us. i mean, under the presidential records act, they are not his documents. now, some of them might be. i mean, he may have a letter from his girlfriend, kim jong un or vladimir putin or something. i love letters. i mean, who have anybody here ever turn on said, oh, yeah, i got a love letter from vladimir putin. it was beautiful, the most beautiful. and kim jong un, by the way, i don't even if that's, you know, that's who you like, it's great. but, you know, at least we get a better haircut. does it make any sense at all? love letters. it just who calls a letter from one from a supreme leader to the president of the united states. a love letter.

how about just call it a letter? well, none. maybe we can allow him to have that one. okay, no problem. but you told about national security, top secret documents, ones that are, you know, marked not just classified, but the highest level classified location that no one other than the guy who wrote it is allowed to read. that's another thing i don't understand. so if you're the guy who writes it and you're the only ones allowed to read it, what good is it? right. it doesn't make any sense to somebody else. get a chance to read it. clearly not. but he has it and he has it at mar a lago, sitting in his in his office above the catering facility for anybody. just walk up the nine steps, pick the lock, because it's a regular medical lock. i mean, you're not talking about anything sophisticated here. oh, that's oh, it's more secure. for example, you said that. and then within national archives, keep it. no, that's not true. donald. just another one of the 38,000 million, billion, trillion lies that you've told the american people. it is not more secure downstairs

in the sub cell. but i don't know if any of you saw the picture of the pallets of box office that this guy took. if i was his lawyer in this one, the first thing i would have done is told them to shut up and absorb silently. say, i didn't pack any of those boxes. i have no idea. i don't even know why they sent the boxes to mar a lago. right. that's what he should have done. but instead, there are no documents. then there are documents, then they're my documents, then the declassified documents. and then more. they could be closer, but they're not there. do you sit there and you scratch your head and you're saying to yourself again, what's this man talking about? and how stupid is 70 million americans to vote for him? i mean at the end of the day, isn't that really what this is all about? do we not want to keep our democracy the way that we have grown and seen you know, this country, people are so they're so confused about democracy. you believe that it's a god given right that somehow or another our constitution, you know, provides us with democracy, democracies in experiment. and it could be taken from us at any given moment.

right. and again, the two ways freedom of speech, take it stifle it and then bring in a military or a paramilitary just like january 6th. so like i said before, democracy is not a god given. we have to fight for it every single day. and that's why this midterm elections i mean, we want to talk about crazy with the midterm elections all of a sudden we're going to end up with a big, big problem come november. if, in fact, democrats take the house and senate, i promise you, within 30 minutes of their being inducted, joe biden is going to be impeached. and if they control the senate as well, it's going to be a bigger problem because they will probably convict him on that as well. and they'll do the same with kamala harris. and then they're going to absolutely destroy the entire democrat party because they think they can. because they want to. because each and every one of them is on a power trip. mark meadows jim jordan, you know, all of they're all on a power trip, and it's our obligation and it's our responsibility to the next

generation and the generations to come to stop it. so i got one more question here. i'm not quite sure what to make of it. it's a little bit off point, but i'm going to ask it because it says that it's from two or three people who know you. oh, boy. so do you eat eggs or chicken? okay. so i've never had a piece of chicken in my life. never tried it. don't eat chicken soup. i'm chicken phobic. why? that's relevant. i don't know. but thank you all. bringing that to the forefront. you know, i'm sure that's going to help us save our democracy. all right, michael cohen, thank you so much for that. copies of michael's book revenge are available to check out. just he'll be up here signing please form a line to the right of the desk and help our staff byformer vice president mike pee

examines his faith and journey to the vice presidency. and in the light we carry former first lady michelle obama follows up her bestselling memoir, becoming by offering advice on how to overcome uncertainty. those are just some of the political books that are being

published this fall. you can look forward to book tv covering all these books in the near future. weekend on c-span two are an intellectual feast. every saturday, american history tv documents america's story. and on sundays, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span two comes from these television companies and more, including comcast. are you think this is just a community center? no, it's way more than that. comcast is partnering with 1000 community centers to create wi-fi enabled lifts. so students from low income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. comcast along with these television companies, supports c-span two as a public service. the finalists for the 2022 national book awards were recently announced. the annual awards were established in 1950 to celebrate the best in american writing

since 1989. they've been overseen by the nonprofit national book foundation. in the nonfiction category, this year's finalists include meghan o'rourke for the invisible kingdom reimagining chronic illness, the imani perry for south to america, a journey below the mason-dixon to understand the soul of a nation. david quammen for breathless the scientific race to defeat a deadly virus. ingrid rojas contreras for the man who could move clouds, a memoir. and robert samuels. and tolu olaru nipa for his name is george floyd. one man's life and the struggle for racial justice. the winners of this year's awards will be announced in new york city on november 16th, and book tv will be covering the award ceremony. it's the tv thing i don't like. i don't care about the other stuff and book tv's live coverage of the southern festival of books in nashville begins