Donald Trump's ex-attorney Michael Cohen teases explosive revelations in new tell-all book
Donald Trump's former personal attorney Michael Cohen has vowed to reveal the private secrets of the US president’s past life in a new tell-all book which he wrote from prison.
Cohen was Mr Trump’s fixer and confidant for more than a decade but flipped on Mr Trump during the Russian election meddling investigation and was ultimately jailed for lying to Congress.
On Thursday, Cohen announced the imminent release of a new memoir, titled Disloyal, and published the 3,700-word foreword that teased explosive revelations to come.
“This is a book the president of the United States does not want you to read,” Cohen said as, in an extract packed with hyperbole, he hinted at the supposedly explosive details that would be made.
Cohen describes in the foreword how he feared that Mr Trump wanted him dead before he was going to testify before Congress after turning on his former boss.
“The President of the United States wanted me dead. Or, let me say it the way Donald Trump would: He wouldn’t mind if I was dead,” Cohen writes at one point.
At another point he claims that Mr Trump will not leave office “peaceably”, a comment that will add to concerns that the US president may not accept a narrow loss in November’s election.
Cohen describes how he began writing the book on yellow legal pads while in prison, getting up early to put down his recollections without being disturbed by other inmates.
He writes: “I had to report to the sewage treatment plant where some of us worked for 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 that have 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.”
Cohen was Mr Trump’s right-hand man for more than a decade, including during his run for the US presidency in 2015 and 2016, which shot him into the White House.
Cohen described in his foreword how he would go in and out of Mr Trump’s 26th floor office in Trump Tower “as many as 50 times a day” and would make many calls for his boss.
“Apart from his wife and children, I knew Trump better than anyone else did,” Cohen writes, promising to detail what the now US president used to get up to in his professional and private life.
Any revelations held in the book are only hinted at in the foreword, which was released along with a new website for the book and a call from Cohen for people to pre-order it.
Cohen has vowed to release the book in September. Mr Trump and the White House are likely to push back hard on any controversial allegations made in the book, given the US president has repeatedly called Cohen a liar.
