What Did Michael Cohen Do With $774K In Secret Loans During Trump Campaign?

Image by Getty Images

By Dave Goldiner May 5, 2018

Michael Cohen reportedly took out a whopping $774,000 in loans during the presidential campaign, raising big new questions about whether he made illicit donations to President Trump’s White House push.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday night that Trump’s personal lawyer increased a personal credit line by $245,000 in early 2016, and shortly before that he accessed $529,000 from a new mortgage on a condo at Trump World Tower.

Cohen has already admitted to making a six-figure hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the campaign — and he and Trump and new adviser Rudy Giuliani have given several contradictory accounts of that payoff.

The new information suggest that Cohen may have made other similar payoffs to keep damaging information about Trump secret.

Giuliani and other sources have claimed that Trump repaid Cohen for $420,000 in unspecified expenses but have not said what they were for besides the Stormy payoff.

Any payments to help Trump’s campaign could be considered illegal campaign donations and even if they weren’t Cohen likely did not tell banks what the true purpose of the loans were.

Cohen is under investigation by federal prosecutors after special counsel Robert Mueller referred information about his alleged shady deals to the southern district of New York.

Dave Goldiner is the Forward’s director of digital media. Dave is a veteran journalist who has spent two decades working at newspapers in the United States and Africa. A native New Yorker, Goldiner wrote for the New York Daily News, where he covered some of the biggest stories of our time, including the attacks of September 11, along with thousands of stories of hope and heartbreak. He also studied and worked in Southern Africa and has written for publications in South Africa and Zimbabwe. He holds masters degrees in journalism and public administration from Columbia University. Dave can be reached at [email protected], or follow him on Twitter @davegoldiner

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO