Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Stay Tuned In Brief, I’m Preet Bharara. All eyes continue to be on Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, which means all eyes are on his lawyers too. And in case after case, in investigation after investigation, the former president has repeatedly expressed frustration with lawyer after lawyer, all of which raises the question, who is Trump’s ideal lawyer? Well, he’s told us. It’s a man named Roy Cohn.

During Trump’s early years as a real estate developer in New York City, Cohn was Trump’s attorney, advisor and friend. He first rose to prominence as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. He died in 1986 before which he was indicted four times and disbarred for unethical and unprofessional conduct. As Trump cycles through attorneys lamenting their alleged disloyalty, I thought it would be interesting to explore who Roy Cohn was, the influence he had on Trump and why the former president misses him so much. Joining me to dig into this history is Michael Kruse. He’s a senior staff writer at Politico who’s written about Cohn and what he meant to Donald Trump. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Kruse:

Thanks, Preet. Good to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

So let’s start at the beginning. Tell us how Roy Cohn rose to prominence and what kind of a lawyer he was.

Michael Kruse:

So the way that most people still, I think, know Roy Cohn, the name Roy Cohn stems from the 1950s when he was the most important advisor, the chief legal counsel, the top aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the red baiting Wisconsin senator in that time in our history. And Roy was never not by his side. He turned what could have been, should have been in many ways, was a disgraceful episode in our nation’s history and certainly in his personal history into opportunity in the 60s and 70s he became, once he went back to New York, sinister force, not just an attorney, but a power broker of sorts, a connective tissue between the legal worlds and the worlds of celebrity, the worlds of political power, of judicial power. There was nobody in the 1960s and 1970s in New York or anywhere for that matter, quite like Roy Cohn. And this is where the personal history of Roy Cohn and the personal history of Donald Trump intersect.

Preet Bharara:

What’s interesting to me is, it is in fact the case that the red baiting you described done by Joseph McCarthy and spearheaded and aided by Roy Cohn was literally a classic witch hunt, which is a phrase that Donald Trump employs with respect to anyone who attempts to investigate him. Some irony in that?

Michael Kruse:

For sure. I mean, this is part of the Cohn and now Trump MO, but a part, but the projection, the turning around of charges against one against the other, right? The Cohn MO that now has become in so many ways, the Trump MO in some sense starts there. I mean, more broadly speaking, there is a line, there is an absolute throughline from the episode of Joseph McCarthy and today, what we’re watching today, I mean this is an arc of what, 75 years at this point, and from Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump and the intermediary, the connector of these two important men, consequential men in our country’s history is Roy Cohn.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So describe for a moment how they met, what he meant to Donald Trump, how he assisted Donald Trump in his business and in his life.

Michael Kruse:

So the first chapter of the Roy Cohn tutorial in the life of Donald Trump was what I call the DOJ race case, right? This started in 1973. The Department of Justice sued Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, and also Donald Trump, the son for racist rental practices in their apartment complexes in the New York boroughs. Donald, not Fred, but Donald, who at that time is three years shy of 30 years old, hires Roy Cohn as their attorney. He does that at a place called Le Club. This member’s only restaurant for social scenesters at the time and power brokers, or would be power brokers.

He brings in Roy Cohn and Roy Cohn immediately starts to employ tactics to fight back against this case, against the government that today should feel very familiar. Deny, delay, attack the prosecution, both individual prosecutors, the system itself, undermine the system, never stop undermining the system and always play the victim. This is something the government is doing to my clients because of X, Y, and Z. And so what we see right now, what we frankly have seen Donald Trump do in various ways, various moments through the last 50 years, but certainly in this particularly vivid way right now with all of his legal travails. This starts in the mind of Donald Trump in the mid-1970 thanks to Roy Cohn.

Preet Bharara:

Roy Cohn was famous for saying something that you’ve written about and others have. “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.” Now that’s not a terrible statement in part, I’ve spoken on this podcast many times about how significant the judge’s role is in a case in a matter, I’ve written about it myself. What did he mean by that?

Michael Kruse:

It’s interesting. Roy’s father was a judge, and so he knew how power worked. He knew that the legal system, while it is the best we have, is also not free of potential corruption and influence. Things can be done, relationships can be had and stoked and used to get what you want out of a system. You know that this system is made of people, including judges who are susceptible to soft power or susceptible to various forms of corruption.

He knew this partly, this is another irony that you have to understand to understand Roy Cohn and also to understand Donald Trump. They both assumed Trump’s case assumes still this posture as some outsider, a wronged victim of the system when in fact they are very much part of the system. They’re very much insiders. They know how the system works. They know how the system works so well that they can use and abuse the system. They know its soft spots. And this is part of the evil genius of Roy Cohn, that he always was seen as this sneering outsider, when in reality he more than most knew how to operate within that system because he was a total was within that system, right?

Preet Bharara:

He was an insider, in fact.

Michael Kruse:

More than almost anybody in some weird way.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. There are a couple of things that Donald Trump has over the years said about Roy Cohn that I guess evidence what he was looking for and has always been looking for. And he said it admiringly at one point he told Newsweek, “If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy.” He also said to author Tim O’Brien about Roy Cohn, “He brutalized for you.” Is that what Trump longs for in a lawyer, in a campaign manager, in a staffer, in an advisor, someone who brutalizes for him?

Michael Kruse:

For sure. He wants somebody who is an attorney, who is his attorney, to push the limits to get really close to that line of legality of ethics. Maybe not cross it, but know where that line is and tempt fate. This is certainly what Roy did and did in a way that nobody since has done on Donald Trump’s behalf, because frankly there was and will always be only one Roy Cohn. I mean, one of the things that I’ve written about Roy Cohn in the context of Donald Trump, repeatedly, recurringly every few years it seems because something comes up.

First piece I wrote about Roy Cohn was in 2016, the spring of 2016, earlier this year returned to the topic. And one of the things I heard in reporting most recently on this Roy Cohn, Donald Trump connection that I found really interesting thing to think about is that ever since Roy Cohn died in 1986, Donald Trump has been looking for another Roy Cohn. And finally, in the last however many months or years in the estimation of many who’ve watched both men, has studied both men, Donald Trump has become his own Roy Cohn. He’s given up on trying to find the next Roy Cohn. He is…

Preet Bharara:

Without the legal degree.

Michael Kruse:

Exactly. He is the closest approximation to what Roy Cohn was in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s. He is his own Roy Cohn at this point.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, one way in which he quite literally approximates and mirrors Roy Cohn is that just like Roy Cohn, he has also been indicted four times. Do you think in his mind he thinks…

Michael Kruse:

It’s crazy, right?

Preet Bharara:

“If Roy beat four raps, I can beat four raps.”

Michael Kruse:

Definitely. I mean, look, if you know the story of Roy Cohn, you can’t help but see on an almost daily basis at this point, the echoes, I mean, a few days ago down at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump caught some flack for using the phrase Gestapo tactics in relation to the…

Preet Bharara:

He got it wrong.

Michael Kruse:

… Biden administration.

Preet Bharara:

I think one of his biggest supporters, Marjorie Taylor Greene correctly calls it Gazpacho tactics.

Michael Kruse:

That’s right, that’s right. But he uses that phrase because Roy Cohn used that phrase. Roy Cohn used that phrase on his behalf in that DOJ case back…

Preet Bharara:

He also used that tactic.

Michael Kruse:

He also used that tactic. I mean, Roy Cohn in his trials, he would make it a habit of coming out onto the courthouse steps. In some cases, the very courthouses Donald Trump has been in over the last however many months, he would come out, Roy would be on the steps and hold these impromptu press conferences. Knowing that as important as the actual court is, the court of public opinion can be as important or even more important. And here you have Donald Trump doing almost exactly the same thing. I mean, whether he’s conscious of it or not, there is an absolute echo. Beyond echo, a pattern of behavior that Roy Cohn certainly modeled 75, 70, 60, 65 years ago that we now see Donald Trump doing on an almost daily basis in Manhattan, in sometimes the literal places where Roy Cohn did the same things.

Preet Bharara:

So if we move to the recent period of time, the last number of years since Trump has entered politics and has had legal problems and has been in the business of selecting lawyers, what does his experience with Roy Cohn tell you about the selections he has made? Did he see a little bit of Roy in, for example, Giuliani or in, for example, a bellicose lawyer like John Dowd? Talk about that for a second.

Michael Kruse:

Yeah. He’s looking for attorneys who will fight on his behalf, will fight in ways that are un-lawyer-like, more combative, less tied to convention. The attorneys that worked with Roy Cohn would say at the time, certainly said after he was gone, that Roy really wasn’t an attorney in a traditional sense. He was just a user, a manipulator of the system, a combatant. And I think that is what Donald Trump wants and looks for in attorneys. Not the by-the-book attorney, but an attack dog, somebody who will say the things on his behalf that he can’t say necessarily. And in some cases he does anyway, which we’ve seen over the last weeks and months and years.

Preet Bharara:

So what’s he doing with a guy like Todd Blanche, who is not like that?

Michael Kruse:

Sitting there wondering why he doesn’t do something else, why he’s not more like Roy? “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Right.

Preet Bharara:

Is there anybody on the scene or who has been in Trump’s orbit that most resembles Roy Cohn?

Michael Kruse:

I think that probably is Roger Stone.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Although not in a legal capacity, that’s…

Michael Kruse:

Not an legal capacity. But as a political operative, certainly Roger knew Roy, in some sense met Roy through Trump-adjacent ways during early Reagan days. Roger was very much an admirer of Roy’s, some similar tactics, politics adjacent, legal-adjacent worlds. Roger certainly models some of what he does after the ways that Roy operated, and even people like the guy, bring up Sam Nunberg at this point. I mean, Sam was a very early advisor, political advisor to Trump in the 16 cycle, is no longer really affiliated with the Trump operation, but was such an admirer of Roy Cohn that for a while maybe still haven’t checked in a while, his Twitter avatar was literally a picture of Roy Cohn. So this worldview, this understanding, this capacity, this taste for chaos and flouting the rules, fear-based demagoguery, and the people who were attracted to Roy Cohn, I think also have been attracted to and have seen great potential from very early on in somebody like Donald Trump.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So he was indicted four times Roy Cohn acquitted four times, which is highly unusual and a pretty good track record. But he did not avoid disbarment. What was the cause of that?

Michael Kruse:

I mean, look, the past caught up with Roy Cohn finally in the end, he got away with so much for so long until finally in 1986, as the IRS is closing in on him because of back taxes that he owed the law-abiding legal establishment of New York ended up putting together over the course of years a foolproof disbarment case. And right before his death of AIDS, Roy Cohn was disbarred. I find myself wondering, and for years have wondered this, whether this is something his most prominent mentee thinks about. That even if you are a perfect practitioner of the Cohn MO, in the end, for Roy Cohn, it didn’t work. He couldn’t get away with everything forever. The weight of the misdeeds of his past did come back to get him, and he died disbarred and disgraced. And I wonder at the same time, Roy Cohn for all of his power, the power that he amassed in this dark arts way over the course of decades for all of that power, it goes without saying, he was never as powerful as Donald Trump.

He was never President of the United States. And so there is something different about the levels of levers that Trump can wield and is wielding that Roy Cohn never could have dreamt of having. I mean, even the power that he had, it wasn’t the power that Trump has. It wasn’t the level of support around the country, the level of notoriety. But that matters in terms of political power that matters even in court. So will a similar fate happen? Will Donald Trump have some version of the Cohn comeuppance happened to him in the coming months or years? TBD. While there are similarities that I see and that others see there are differences in the level of power that Donald Trump has amassed.

Preet Bharara:

Well, the good news for Donald Trump is he doesn’t have to worry about being disbarred. He just has to beat the four cases.

Michael Kruse:

But even that, if you’re Donald Trump, that is an advantage. I can’t be disbarred because I’m not an attorney.

Preet Bharara:

So even though he thought of Roy Cohn as a mentor, as a tutor, as a friend, as a fixer, all of those things, he did ultimately break with him. Why was that?

Michael Kruse:

Well, so Roy Cohn, who was a closeted gay man, contracted the HIV virus. Eventually that became AIDS, and eventually that killed him at a time when, of course, that was essentially a death sentence. And when it became clear that this was what was happening with Roy to the people who knew him the best, including very much Donald Trump, as Roy Cohn’s secretary told me at one point, she’s now no longer with us, but when she was still alive, we talked some about this and she said, “Young Donald dropped Roy like a hot potato,” when not just was he sick, which we know is a turnoff, shall we say, for Trump then and now. But his power was waning, his capacities were ebbing. He was no longer as valuable to a young, up and coming Donald Trump. This was a Trump who had just built, finished building Trump Tower with Cohn’s help, partly because of his mob ties.

He was just coming into a different kind of celebrity. The art of the deal was a function of Cohn’s connections. Si Newhouse was the head of the publishing house that did Art Of The Deal of lifelong friend of Roy Cohn, et cetera, et cetera. But even with all of that, as Roy Cohn became less valuable to Donald Trump, Donald Trump started shifting a lot of that legal work and beyond illegal work to others, he learned in some sick way the ultimate lesson of Roy Cohn, we use other users. This is transactional. If you are no longer valuable in this quid pro quo way, I move on. And at Roy Cohn’s funeral, Donald Trump was not among the speakers. He was standing in the rear watching, but not participating.

Preet Bharara:

That final episode of their relationship, to me signals the ultimate example of the MO of Donald Trump, which is loyalty runs in one direction only.

Michael Kruse:

Right. If you are useful to me, we are best friends. If and when you are not, we are not.

Preet Bharara:

Very interesting stuff. Thanks for joining us on the show, Michael Kruse. We look forward to more of your writings about all these things.

Michael Kruse:

Thanks so much, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

For more analysis of legal and political issues, making the headlines, become a member of the CAFE Insider members, get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former U.S. Attorney, Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s cafe.com/insider. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at (669)-247-7338, at (669)-24-Preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producer is Noa Azulai, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.