After the Grand Jury
I appeared before Mueller’s team twice, once in April 2019 and once in May 2019. Over the next few months, there was a small number of follow-ups between the special counsel and my attorneys.
One last thing: since my testimony, I’ve often been asked if at any moment during my questioning at the DOJ, or before the grand jury, I actually met Mueller himself.
All I can say is that Mueller was definitely in the building during the time of my testimony and nearby during my questioning. I don’t know if he was sitting watching my questioning or testimony on some close-circuit audio or video feed, but I was made to believe that Mueller knew every word I said, and perhaps the answers to questions I wasn’t even asked. However, I am not so sure about that now. Later, I will explain why.
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Following my grand jury appearance, Mueller’s team continued to email my lawyers. For the most part, we answered by email. My lawyers wanted to avoid any further face-to-face meetings. On occasion, I went down to DC to see my attorneys and we worked our way through their questions which, for the most part, just rehashed what I had already told them.
Mueller’s team was very persistent in wanting to find out a few things: Who was the person at the party in Moscow who overhead someone talking about the tapes? (I told them.) What was my connection to him? (He was a friend.) And who was the person who was bragging about the tapes? (Don’t know. He didn’t know them.) Who wrote Trump’s letter to the mayor of Moscow? (I didn’t know but assumed it was my friends in Russia.) And who translated it into Russian? (The translation was mine.)
So long as there were open questions, the Mueller team reserved the right to call me back in for questioning.
Just knowing that the special counsel can call you back anytime felt like standing in a minefield. This was all the more true as each day the news became more and more focused on Michael Cohen. In Soviet Georgia, I had experienced fear of seeing the KGB at our door or watching us. I never imagined I would know that fear again in the United States.
The impact on my family was greater than you can imagine. Our six-year-old son, Sandro, had friends in the neighborhood who suddenly no longer wanted to play with him or have playdates.
Worse yet, Sandro couldn’t understand why CNN reporters outside of our home were flashing photos of me, asking our neighbors questions about his father. I didn’t really have an easy explanation. I hope when he’s older this book will explain it all to him. As for me, I will never forget my son asking me, “Daddy, why no more playdates? Is it because they’re afraid of you?”
The press was relentless, calling me on my cell at all times.
Jennifer Forsyth at The Wall Street Journal was strategically persistent. She was very professional and, I must say, one of the nicest of the journalists I met. She said we should meet in person and talk, even off the record, because she knew things that I “would want to know.”
I met with Jennifer. She didn’t pressure me. But we played a kind of cat-and-mouse game where we circled around what she wanted to know. She had very good journalistic instincts. She was very empathetic as well as smart and nimble. I completely understand how people fall into confidence with reporters and then are shocked the next day when they see what’s written about them.
I can best compare dealing with journalists like Jennifer to going through a very relaxing, meditation-like experience where you are treated like a star, you are allowed to express yourself, release your anger and worries, you are assured that the only thing that matters at that moment is your truth and that the world needs to hear your story.
Reporters like Jennifer are great at showing their compassion and quest for justice. It doesn’t take much for you to pour your heart out and forget that you are on the record. However, the next morning when you read the news story in the paper, it conforms to their spin, not to your truth as you shared it or how you imagined it would read. And that’s when, shocked and angry, you call your very expensive lawyers to scream, “They took everything out of context!”
On those occasions when I found myself in that situation, my lawyers would calmly remind me that defamation is tough to prove and harder still to win. In the US, we have a free press, but talking to them can cost you greatly. Unfortunately, I’ve been in that situation too many times in the last two years. So I was extremely wary with Jennifer.
Jennifer and I spoke again by phone, and she asked me questions related to Michael Cohen that had nothing to do with Georgia, Kazakhstan, or Russia. She did ask me if I was called before the grand jury. I didn’t know if she had that information from other sources but all I said was “I will neither confirm nor deny.”
But what she did tell me was that the WSJ was doing an article about Michael Cohen and the Stormy Daniels case.
Stormy Daniels drew tabloid attention because she was a porn star. However, if Trump did indeed have an affair with her years before running for president or becoming president, well, that seemed like water under the bridge that was only being brought up now to smear Trump and hurt Melania. If Michael had bought her silence—even if it was $130,000—didn’t that occur all the time? It seemed hard to believe that the same Democrats who argued that Bill Clinton’s affair while he was president shouldn’t matter would now go after Trump about his over-a-decade-old story when Trump was a businessman.
Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s attorney, did not impress me. He seemed to be more interested in publicity for himself than in resolving his client’s legal problems, which made me think he was just a flash in the pan and would crash and burn. Which is what happened eventually.
However, the Wall Street Journal reporter made me realize that because of Michael Cohen’s hush payment story, Stormy Daniels was a much more serious matter than I had thought. I saw how my honest and friendly conversation with Michael Cohen at his hotel room in March 2017 about the Stormy Daniels payment could now be of great interest.
What I did tell Jennifer was that Michael had said that whatever he did, he did it because he really respected his boss. He loved him. Being part of the Trump Organization was more than just work for him. To him, Donald Trump was a friend—more than a friend, a father figure. And Michael really, really respected Melania. He did not want her embarrassed or hurt. He wanted to make sure that the Stormy Daniels matter was kept out of the press. And that he had taken it upon himself to deal with this, even taking a home equity loan to make sure that it was kept quiet. Never in my conversation with him did Michael say or imply that he was directed or ordered to do so.
As more facts emerged over time about the payments and Daniels published her own account of the tryst, it all seemed too sordid and amateurish to be of national concern. But it involved Trump, so it fed the news cycle for weeks on end.
What I did not tell the WSJ reporter at the time was that Michael was also upset about being ceaselessly trashed in the press as a bad lawyer, a bad businessman, and a bad person. My advice to him was to take control of his narrative: “Choose a network and appear personally to set the record straight. Just tell everybody what happened in your own words.”
I told him I thought he should so do right away. The sooner the better.
“Maybe you’re right,” Michael said.
But Michael is a very stubborn person.
I still wonder, if Michael had come forward immediately after the Stormy Daniels story broke and given a fuller explanation of the situation to the American public, whether things might have gone better for him.
Dodging the Trump Bullet
Michael Cohen is someone I’ve known and observed for almost a decade. I’ve seen up close what it takes for Michael to consider a deal ready to be shown to Trump. The proposal needs to be bulletproof. And more than legitimate. I’ve known firsthand how every detail is negotiated and scrutinized.
There was never a time nor a moment when Trump said, “Get it done no matter what, at any cost.” Never. I worked on three different deals with Michael and it was a very diligent, thorough process. Very tough, hard work.
Michael rarely issued legal opinions. His lawyering was confined to finding deals, scrutinizing them, and negotiating them—but he did no drafting of contracts. Trump had other lawyers to draft terms—and I had my lawyers to review them. Michael Cohen was always the guy thinking about how to hype the Trump brand and delivering that to Trump so he could get a pat on the back. Michael was the person who personally defended, protected, and cared for Trump’s interests.
I don’t think Michael fully appreciated the threat Russia poses. He saw how the Russian oligarchs lived and he admired that. He wanted that for himself (as many would). I do believe there is a part of him that wants to do the right thing and be the hero—who knows? Maybe he’ll get his chance again to do just that.
The values I was brought up with by my parents stayed with me throughout my life. My sister and I were always told that there are more good people in the world than bad, and that if you look for them, you will find them.
I’m not saying that I am a saint—far from it. I grew up on the streets of Tbilisi in a rough time. Over the course of my adult life, I’ve dealt with monsters and made deals with people I wish I had never met—but I did not do these things because I was determined to do bad things. To the contrary, I did them because I imagined that good would come from what I was doing. In some cases it did, and in some I failed, but I never lost sight of the difference between good and bad. This only made me cherish the good people around me, the people who stood by me no matter what, when it mattered the most. You find your true friends in times of trouble. My wife and I certainly found ours, and lost the ones we thought were true friends. But like they say, “You can’t lose what you never had.”
My plan of bringing Trump Towers to the former Soviet region has cost me greatly, financially and in business. The Mueller and House and Senate committee investigations have been very tough on me and my family, but none of this has made me bitter or angry. That is not who I am, nor who my parents and my country raised me to be. I will always stand up for myself, my friends, my partners, my country (USA), and my native homeland of Georgia.
Georgia’s alliance to the United States remains strong, and I will do all in my power to see that the feeling is mutual.
On November 9, 2017, as I was pledging allegiance to the United States during my US citizenship ceremony, I meant every word. It seems like since I’ve become a US citizen, my allegiance to America has been tested to its limits through endless investigations and interrogations. But I can tell you one thing: through this painful process, my pledge to the greatest country in the world has only been strengthened.
Michael’s Testimony before Congress
On February 27, 2019, Michael Cohen testified before Congress. The day before, he had been disbarred from the practice of law. He had already pled guilty to campaign finance violations that would put him in federal prison for several years.
Like the rest of America, I watched Michael’s testimony, spellbound. For me, the experience was bittersweet, and again, very surreal.
I had always been in favor of Michael telling his side of the story—but I had suggested he do so much, much earlier. Seeing Lanny Davis sitting behind him, I was concerned that this might do Lanny more good than it did Michael. I told Michael that in one of my last text messages to him, but he ignored it.
First, I felt so bad for Michael’s truly beautiful family. This whole ordeal must have been awful for his wife and children. It pained me to know that Michael, whom I had worked so closely with for over a decade, was going to jail. And I knew that Michael must have been suffering terribly to be saying what he did about Trump, a man he looked up to and had praised so much for so many years.
As much as I tried to, I found it hard to believe Michael’s claim that he lied or did other actions on Trump’s behalf because he was blinded by him. There was no more aggressive defender of what he called “Trump Standards.”
During his testimony, there were moments when I felt Michael did himself no service and, to my mind, they had Lanny written all over them.
So, for example, to hear Michael say about Trump, a person he so revered, that “He is a con man, he is a racist, he is a cheat”—Michael would never have said those words about Trump. As to why he felt he needed to do so, I imagine he had his reasons.
What I did feel was positive and good for Michael was that all of America got to see Michael as he is—not the super-aggressive Michael whom I negotiated against, but a sadder Michael who is honestly remorseful for himself and for his family.
That Michael said that he saw no collusion between the Trump Organization and Russia wasn’t surprising, and as much as I had predicted, there was none.
Michael spoke of the payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. Clearly Michael had placed himself in legal jeopardy with those payments, and his lies concerning them had led to a three-year jail sentence. Now, whether out of contrition or revenge, he was there to set the record straight and settle scores.
Michael spoke of the involvement of David Pecker and other executives of AMI in some of those payments and the Trump Organization as having knowledge of the arrangements. And although he never mentioned such to me, Michael said the president was fully aware and that nothing happened at the Trump Organization that Trump was not fully involved with.
In my experience that was true and not true. Trump was not aware of everything that transpired. Michael and others were always looking for deals, screening offers, doing the advance work, scrutinizing and even negotiating agreements before and after they came to Trump’s attention. But it is also true that there were no deals signed that Donald Trump didn’t know about and no signature that mattered other than his. But that is what you expect from the head of the company. This is what I do with my and my company’s deals.
Similarly, Michael also implicated Trump’s children, Don Jr. and Ivanka in particular, with knowledge of negotiations for a Trump Tower in Moscow. Again, based on my experience in negotiating for Trump Towers in Georgia and Kazakhstan, Donald always wanted to find ways to involve his children and keep them in the loop, but they were always his deals, not theirs. Now, whether this information contradicts what Don Jr. in particular told Congress previously, I can’t say.
Michael made clear that his cooperation with the Southern District of New York was ongoing. This was in many ways, I thought, a warning to Trump and his supporters not to come after Michael and his family. And it was where, perhaps, Trump had the most to lose. But if so, it was not because of collusion with Russia.
It is hard for me to say whether Michael convinced anyone of anything they didn’t believe before his Congressional appearance. The Democrats have their agenda and the Republicans theirs. I did not see much to change that.
Shortly after his testimony, my wife and I were having dinner at a popular Upper East Side restaurant when in walked Laura, Michael’s wife. She’s a wonderful person who didn’t ask nor deserve any of what befell her family. We hugged her and offered what little support we could.
What I told her is that I had been concerned I wouldn’t recognize Michael in his testimony but that who he was had come through well. She didn’t say much. Shortly after, she came back to our table and showed me a text Michael had just written addressed to me: “Send my love to him and tell him I miss him.” I replied that time heals everything and that we would see each other again soon.