‘I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,’ the president told his former attorney-turned-nemesis.
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump appeared on Michael Cohen’s radio show and commended his former attorney for recanting his previous statements.
Their conversation marked a surprising thaw years after their relationship collapsed amid public feuds and legal battles. Part of the interview with Cohen’s show “When You Know, You Know” aired on 770 WABC Radio at 6 p.m. Thursday. The rest will be released on Aug. 23.
“They weaponized you. They weaponized a lot of people,” Trump told Cohen. “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said, and that’s a big thing that you did.”
“You’re going to go down as a man of courage, great courage, because you did something that a lot of people wouldn’t have the guts to do,” Trump told Cohen.
“I guarantee your family greatly respects what you did.”
This was Cohen’s first public conversation with Trump in eight years.
Cohen shared a Substack article that served as a recollection of the public feud the two had, which included Cohen’s testifying against Trump in his New York City criminal trial in 2024. Cohen served as one of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s star witnesses, alleging the president was involved in a plan to pay off a former adult film actress, Stormy Daniels, during his 2016 campaign.
“Eight years of silence. Hundreds of thousands of headlines. Fifteen years of history fractured in an instant, and somehow, against almost every expectation, here we are,” Cohen wrote.
Ever since he announced that Trump would appear on his radio show, Cohen stated that his inbox became a “digital battlefield.”
“It has been flooded with hatred, anger, disbelief, and some of the most spectacularly vicious things imaginable,” Cohen wrote.
In 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations, tax evasion, bank fraud, and lying to Congress. He completed his sentence and supervision requirements in November 2021.
Speaking to Politico on Aug. 19, Cohen answered a question about whether he would seek a presidential pardon.
“We’ll see,” he said in response. “Will I make that request down the road? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”
Trump, who was convicted in a jury trial on 34 counts of falsifying business records, denied the charges against him and pleaded not guilty. He has long said that the Manhattan district attorney’s case and cases that were brought against him in Georgia, Washington, and Florida were a “political witch hunt.”
By Emel Akan
