Michael Cohen, Disloyal - Foreword

09/02/20

Foreword


Bản dịch:
https://www.vietbf.com/forum/showthr...84#post4024584

The president wanted me dead. Or let me say it the way Donald Trump would: He wouldn’t mind if I was dead. That was how Trump talked. Like a mob boss, using language carefully calibrated to convey his desires and demands, while at the same time employing deliberate indirection to insulate himself.

Driving south from New York City to Washington, DC on I-95 on the cold, gray winter morning on February 26th, 2019, en route to testify against President Trump before both Houses of Congress, I knew he wanted me gone before I could tell the nation what I knew about him. Not the billionaire celebrity savior of the country or lying lunatic, not the tabloid tycoon or self-anointed Chosen One, not the avatar@realdonaldtru mp of Twittter fame, but the real Donald Trump – the man very, very, very few people know.If that sounds over dramatic, consider the powers Trump possesses and, imagine how you might feel if he threatened you personally.

Heading south, I wondered if my prospects for survival were also going in that direction. I was actually aware of the magnitude of Trump’s fury aimed directly at my alleged 6 betrayal. I was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses and I kept the speedometer at eighty, avoiding the glances of other drivers.Trump’s theory of life , business and politics revolved around threats and the prospect of destruction – financial, electoral, personal, physical – as a weapon. I knew how he worked because I had frequently been the one screaming threats on his behalf as Trump’s fixer and designated thug.Ever since I flipped and agreed to cooperate with Robert Muller and the Special Counsel’s Office, the death threats had come by the hundreds. On my cell phone, by email, snail mail, in tweets, on Facebook, enraged Trump’s supporters vowed to kill me, and I took those threats seriously.

The president called me a rat and tweeted angry accusations at me, as well as my family. All rats deserve to die, I was told. I was a lowlife Judas they were going to hunt down.I was driving because I couldn’t fly or take a train to Washington. If I had, I was sure I would be mobbed or attacked. For weeks, walking the streets of Manhattan, I was convinced that someone was going to ram me with their car. I was exactly the person Trump was talking about when he said he could shoot and kill someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it.

My mind was spinning as I sped towards DC. For more than a decade, I had been at the center of Trump’s innermost circle. When he came to my son’s bar Mitzvah, a generous gesture that I found touching, he told my then thirteen-year-old boy that his Dad was the greatest and that, if he wanted to work for the Trump Organization when he grew up, there would always be a position for him.“You’re family,” Trump said to my son and I. And I f****** believe him.Sitting in the green room on the morning of my testimony before the House Oversight Committee, I began to feel the enormous weight of what was about to happen. For some reason, after all that I’d been through, and all I’d put my family and the country through, waiting in that room was the moment when the gravity of what was about to happen truly hit home. The United States was being torn apart, its political and cultural and mental well-being threatened by a clear and present danger named Donald Trump, and I had played a central role in creating this new reality.To half of Americans, it seemed like Trump was effectively a Russian-controlled fraud who had lied and cheated his way to the White House;…

7-To the other half of Americans, to Trump’s supporters, the entire Russian scandal was a witch hunt invented by the Democrats still unable to accept the fact that HillaryClinton had lost fair and square in the most surprising upset in the history of American presidential elections.Both sides were wrong. I knew that the reality was much more complicated and dangerous. Trump had colluded with the Russians, but not in the sophisticated ways imagined by the detractors.

I also knew that the Mueller investigation was not a witch hunt.Trump had cheated in the election, with the Russian connivance, as you will discover in these pages, because doing anything – and I mean anything – to “win” has always beenhis business model and way of life. Trump had also continued to pursue a major real estate deal in Moscow during the campaign. He attempted to insinuate himself into the world of Vladimir Putin and his coterie of corrupt billionaire oligarchs.

I know because I personally ran that deal and kept Trump and his children closely informed of all updates,even as the candidate blatantly lied to the American people saying, “there is no Russiancollusion, I have no dealings with Russia…there’s no Russia.”The only thing I can say with absolute certainty is that whatever you may have heard or thought about me, you don’t know me or my story or the Donald Trump that I know. For more than a decade, I was Trump’s first call every morning and his last call every night. I was in and out of Trump’s office on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower as many as fifty times a day, tending to his every demand.

Our cell phone had the same address books, our contacts so entertwined, overlapping and intimate that part of my job was to deal with endless queries and requests, howeverlarge or small, from Trump’s countless rich and famous acquaitances.I called any and all of the people he spoke to, most often on his behalf as his attorney and emissary, and everyone knew that when I spoke to them, it was as good as they were talking directly to Trump.Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did. In some ways, I knew him better than even his family did because I bore witness to the real man,in the strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.There are reasons why there has never been an intimate portrait of Donald Trump, the man. In part, it’s because he has a million acquaintances, pals and hangers on, but no real friends. He has no one he trusts to keep his secrets.

For ten years, he certainly hadme, and I was always there for him, and look at what happened to me.I urge you to really consider that fact: Trump has no true friends. He has lived his entire life avoiding and evading taking reponsibility for his actions. He crushed or cheated all who stood in his way, but I knew where the skeletons are buried because I was the onewho buried them.
8- When Trump wanted to reach Russian President Vladimir Putin, via a secret back channel, I was tasked with making the connection in my Keystone Kop fashion. I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power.From golden shower in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deal with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the presidential rise – I was an active and eager participant.As you read my story, you will no doubt ask yourself if you like me, or if you would act as I did, and the answer is no to both of those questions. But permit me to make a point:If you read stories written by people you like, you will never be able to understand Donald Trump or the current state of the American soul.More than that, It’s only by actually understanding my decisions and actions that you can get inside Trump’s mind and understand his worldview. As anyone in law enforcement will tell you, it’s only the gangsters who can reveal the secrets of organizedcrime.

If you want to know how the mob really works, you’ve got to talk to the bad guys.I was one of Trump’s bad guys.In these dangerous days, I see the Republican Party and Trump’s followers threatening the constitution – which is far peril than commonly understood – and following one of the worst impulses of humandkind: the desire for power at all costs.Now sitting alone in an upstate New York prison, wearing my green government-issued uniform, I’ve begun writing this story longhand on a yellow legal pad. I often wrote before dawn so not to be disturbed in my thoughts when my fellow inmates awoke. I had to report to the sewage treatment plant where some of us worked on a wage of $8 a month.As the months passed by and I thought about the man I knew so well, I became even more convinced that Trump will never leave office peacefully. The types of scandals thathave surfaced in recent months will only continue to emerge with greater and greater levels of treachery and deceit. If Trump wins another four years, these scandals will prove to only be the tip of the iceberg.I’m certain that Trump knows he will face prison time if he leaves office, the inevitable cold Karma to the notorious chants of “Lock Her Up!” But that is the Trump that I know in a nutshell. He projects his own sins and crimes onto others, partly to distract and confuse but mostly because he thinks everyone is as corrupt and shameless and ruthless as he is; a poisonous mindset I know all too well.

9-Whoever follows Trump into the White House , if the president doesn’t manage to make himself the leader for life, as he started to joke about – and Trump never actually jokes -- will discover a tangle of frauds and scams and lawlessness. Trump and his minions will do anything to cover up that reality, and I mean anything.I have lost many things as a consequence of my decisions and mistakes, including my freedom, but I still retain the right to tell this story about the true threat to our nation and the urgent message for the country it contains.

Michael Cohen
Otisville Federal Prison,
Otisville, New York,

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