Photo Credit: AP Photo/Charles Krupa
Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Micheal Cohen has said that the former president “arbitrarily” inflated the value of his real estate assets in order to secure favorable insurance premiums.
Cohen testified at the former president’s civil fraud case on Tuesday.
Cohen, who cut ties with the former U.S. president five years ago, is now a key witness in a case brought by Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James alleging Trump inflated the value of his family companies' properties.
The case threatens to break up Trump's business empire, Reuters reports.
Cohen testified that Trump instructed him to "reverse-engineer" the values of many of the Trump Organization's holdings so that the company's financial statements would show the assets "had extremely high values with low liabilities in order to secure better insurance premiums."
The value of the company's holdings would be "whatever number Mr. Trump told us," Cohen said in brief testimony before the trial's lunch break. The trial is set to resume at 2:15 p.m. EDT.
After the trial broke, Trump told reporters he was "not worried at all" about Cohen's testimony.
Colleen Faherty, a lawyer for the attorney general's office, began her questioning of Cohen by reviewing his criminal history.
Cohen in 2018 pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation and lying to Congress during a separate probe of Trump's business dealings with Russia.
"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 testimony to Congress.
Trump leaned back in his chair with his arms folded and intently watched Cohen on the stand, occasionally whispering to his lawyers.
Faherty's early questioning appeared geared toward heading off attacks by Trump's lawyers on Cohen's credibility.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, called Cohen a "liar."
"He's a proven liar, as you know, a felon."
Trump told reporters before entering the courtroom, referring to Cohen. "We did nothing wrong and that's the truth."
Cohen, who once said he would "take a bullet" for Trump, began a three-year prison sentence in 2019 but was released to home confinement the following year during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump arrived on Monday following a campaign stop in New Hampshire and just days after being fined $5,000 by Justice Arthur Engoron, the judge overseeing the case, for violating a gag order.