Donald Trump filed a $500 million lawsuit on Wednesday that he may come to regret. He filed a lawsuit against his former “fixer,” Michael Cohen, alleging Cohen violated his duty of confidentiality as Trump’s former attorney.
There is reason to assume that the victor of this competition will be America’s right to freedom of information regarding the 2024 presidential election. In his relentless pursuit of vengeance, Trump has opened the door to divulging evidence of his abuse of the justice system for retaliatory purposes during his final year in office.
The ex-president can’t stop.
It is not difficult to extrapolate from there the threat to equitable and equal justice that Trump poses if re-elected. As he campaigns, voters should have access to the facts, and Trump may have just helped assure that we do.
Trump has vengeance in his DNA, whether he learned it from his emotionally abusive sociopath father, Fred, or from his disbarred lawyer mentor, Roy Cohn, who was a master tyrant.
Michael Cohen cooperated voluntarily with Manhattan prosecutors investigating Trump’s actions in this instance. Cohen testified before the Manhattan grand jury that indicted Trump on March 30 on 34 counts of false business entries after multiple interviews with the district attorney’s office. On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, the former president is accused of covering up a $130,000 settlement money payment to Stormy Daniels.
There are two indications that Trump’s lawsuit against Cohen is retaliation for Cohen’s testimony against his former employer.
First, Trump did not sue Cohen until he was indicted. Trump could have filed his lawsuit at any point during the three years since Cohen testified publicly against him before Congress in 2019.
Second, Trump’s attorneys stumbled repeatedly when attempting to explain why they filed their complaint now. They stated that Cohen’s actions had “reached a crescendo, leaving [Trump] with no choice but to seek legal redress.”
The crescendo, you idiot!
When we look at Trump, we see a vindictive personality with an evident retaliatory motive; our eyes do not deceive us. Trump’s pursuit of retribution frequently places him back in the crosshairs of his targets. His lawsuit against Cohen will likely have this effect.
Cohen had sought discovery and information for the public in a different lawsuit, which a judge reluctantly felt constrained to dismiss last November due to Supreme Court law restricting personal actions against government officials. Trump has just opened a path to discovery and information for the public.
Cohen is reincarcerated by William Barr’s Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons in May 2020, following his parole. Cohen served a year in prison for violating federal campaign finance laws at the direction of “Person No. 1.” Trump’s Department of Justice, which included the Bureau of Prisons, asserted that Cohen had violated a parole condition by composing his anti-Trump memoir, Disloyal, while in home confinement.
Cohen was placed in solitary confinement for sixteen days as a form of retribution. A federal court awarded Cohen’s habeas corpus petition, releasing him on the grounds that his reincarceration was “punitive for his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights.”
Does this sound familiar?
Cohen sued Trump in December 2021 for orchestrating the reincarceration. In November 2022, federal Judge Lewis Liman expressed regret that Trump’s status as a government official in 2020, at the time of his reincarceration, prevented courts from granting him relief.
In dismissing Cohen’s lawsuit, Liman wrote that it “alleges an egregious violation of constitutional rights by the executive branch—nothing short of the use of executive power to lock up the president’s political enemies for speaking critically of him.” Liman was appointed by Trump.
At the time of the lawsuit’s dismissal, Cohen made it clear in a statement that his primary loss was information regarding Trump’s subversion of the rule of law: “Granting this motion prevents me from obtaining documents that would expose what happens when you have a corrupt president who weaponizes the DOJ through a complicit Attorney General.”
Trump is now giving Cohen a second opportunity to expose the same truth through discovery. Cohen, as a defendant in the new lawsuit, should have the right to compel documents and testimony to demonstrate to the jury that the action against him is part of Trump’s pattern and practice of silencing his opponents through illegal means.
Cohen may also be able to file a countersuit if he believes Trump retaliated against his right to voluntarily speak with prosecutors. In any event, neither party is likely to emerge unscathed from their most recent legal dispute.
We do know that when information about past abuses of the justice system emerges, the American people will emerge victorious.
