Michael Cohen suit against Trump Org gets underway with jury selection

MANHATTAN (CN) — Five years after Donald Trump cut ties with his longtime "fixer" Michael Cohen, a civil trial will convene in New York next week to decide if the company owes Cohen more than $1 million in legal costs and fees.

Jury selection in Manhattan Supreme Court commenced shortly before noon on Monday, with the trial beginning in one week, on July 24.

Cohen, once considered among the most loyal figures in Trump's inner circle, is now one of the former president's most vociferous critics and a key witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal probe of Trump’s finances. 

Before Trump's state court indictment this past March, his now-disbarred former lawyer met with Manhattan prosecutors some 20 times with respect to the investigation. Cohen previously pleaded guilty to federal campaign finance violations for facilitating hush-money payments to two women on behalf of Trump in the buildup to the 2016 presidential election. Trump now is accused 34 felony counts for falsifying business records — each count pertaining to an individual check, invoice or general ledger entry — to cover up those payments.

Cohen brought the lawsuit at issue meanwhile years earlier, arguing that the Trump Organization had agreed to indemnify him for his legal troubles in July 2017 — well before the FBI’s raid on Cohen's home, hotel and office threw both men into legal jeopardy.

“As a result of the Trump Organization’s unfounded refusal to meet its indemnification obligations under the indemnification agreement, Mr. Cohen has incurred millions of dollars in unreimbursed attorneys’ fees and costs, plus additional indemnifiable amounts, and continues to incur attorneys’ fees and costs in connection with various ongoing investigations and litigation,” the 2019 civil complaint states.

One day before Cohen filed the suit, The New York Times reported that Cohen was denied a pardon from then-President Trump and had agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation.

Cohen did not attend the in-person jury selection on Monday.

Trump himself will not be a witness at Cohen’s trial, but the former president's eldest son, Trump Organization CEO Donald Trump Jr., agreed to answer questions as a fact witness.

The trial before Justice Joel Cohen is expected to last four days.

The Trump Organization is represented by James D. Kiley with Kiley, Kiley & Kiley.

Other trial witnesses expected to be questioned include Trump Organization Chief Legal Officer Alan Garten, Trump Organization defense attorney Alan Futerfas and Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s lead attorneys during his first impeachment trial.

Allen Weisselberg, the former longtime Trump chief financial officer who pleaded guilty to 15 tax fraud counts and then testified as a witness in the company’s New York criminal trial, will not be called as a witness, Cohen’s lawyers confirmed Monday.

Cohen served one-third of his three-year sentence at Federal Correctional Institution, Otisville, in Orange County, New York, before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic when he was transferred to home confinement.

In summer 2020, Cohen took to social media to promote his upcoming book about working with Trump. One week after he used the hashtag #WillSpeakSoon, the former attorney was served with a gag order banning him from speaking to the media or posting on social media. After Cohen asked for clarification from the Federal Location Monitoring Program, three U.S. marshals came in with an order to remand Cohen back into custody on the basis that he had failed to agree to the terms of his location monitoring.

Cohen spent the next 16 days in solitary confinement back at Otisville before U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein granted him a preliminary injunction, agreeing that the incarceration was retaliatory.

More recently, Trump sued Cohen this past April for breach of contract, claiming the ex-lawyer caused him “vast reputational harm” while speaking too freely about company business on his “Mea Culpa” podcast.

Seeking in excess of $500 million, Trump brought the suit in the Southern District of Florida, where the former president has taken up residency at his resort home Mar-a-Lago. Separate from his state prosecution in New York, Trump was indicted in that federal court last month for mishandling classified documents after his single term in office.

Forbes Magazine estimates Trump’s net worth as of March 2023 to be $2.5 billion.

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