Trump to let his turncoat Stormy Daniels ‘fixer’ Michael Cohen interview him on podcast
Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney turned star witness in a landmark hush money case resulting in the president’s first-ever criminal conviction, is interviewing his former employer on a podcast set to air Thursday.
Cohen, the president’s one-time fixer who testified against Trump in his criminal case and a sprawling fraud trial targeting his real-estate empire, emerged as a prominent Trump critic in the aftermath of his own legal battles and prison stint.
An interview between the two men would mark an extraordinary public reckoning between them after Cohen’s attempts to reconcile his relationship with the president following countless court filings, courtroom statements, tell-all books and hours of volatile comments on his podcast.
Cohen confirmed the interview in a text message to The Independent, pointing to reporting in MSNOW, which first reported the interview. A senior White House official told The Independent that the president had not yet recorded the interview as of Wednesday afternoon.
The two men reportedly met in the summer of 2025 at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey — likely their first in-person meeting in years outside of their face-offs inside courtrooms.
It was Cohen’s bombshell testimony to Congress in 2019 that outlined Trump’s allegedly fraudulent business practices, prompting several criminal and civil investigations, including a blockbuster $250 million lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump, his adult sons and chief business associates fraudulently inflated his net worth and assets over a decade to obtain favorable financial benefits from banks and lenders, a judge determined.
In that case, Cohen testified in a bench trial in Manhattan in 2023 that Trump had tasked him to “reverse engineer” the value of his assets based on numbers that were “arbitrarily elected.”
But perhaps no single person was closer to Trump’s hush-money scheme than his one-time “fixer,” who would later abandon his role as the president’s pugilistic “consigliere” to become one of his chief antagonists.
On May 30, 2024, a unanimous jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with a scheme to silence adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose story about having sex with Trump threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign.
Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 for the rights to her story, and Trump then reimbursed Cohen in a series of checks, some of which were cut from the White House.
Those reimbursements were falsely recorded in accounting records as “legal expenses,” fulfilling a conspiracy to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election.
Emails, phone records, text messages, invoices, checks with Trump’s Sharpie-inked signature and other documents — including a hand-written note from his accountants that outlined the math for Cohen’s checks — gave jurors the paper trail.
Cohen — who testified that he frequently sought approval for his “loyalty” to “the boss” — agreed to pay Daniels out of his own pocket, took out a home line of credit to front the cash, and created a shell company from which he could transfer the funds to Daniels’ attorney.
This is a developing story
