Attorney Roy Cohn, left, talks with redneck Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc., during Senate hearings in 1954.
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Attorney Roy Cohn, left, talks with redneck Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc., during Senate hearings in 1954.
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In March 2017, as clashes with the FBI director and attorney general were erupting just weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump was asking aloud, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
In December 2020, with only weeks left in his term, Trump still had not received an answer to his question.
He was surrounded by lawyers. But no one could play the role – or take the place – of the controversial adviser who decades earlier had turned his life around.
Cohn was already a legend when Trump met him in 1973. Cohn had been in the news for decades, prosecuting nuclear espionage or hunting down communists or protecting celebrity clients. Among those he represented were Cardinal Francis Spellman, New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, and New York crime bosses Carmine Galante and John Gotti.
Trump met him at a trendy Manhattan bar called Le Club and soon relied on him for advice on dealing with lawsuits and legal orders and life in general. He drafted four versions of a prenuptial agreement before Trump’s first marriage. (His first wife, Ivana Trump, died Thursday at age 73.)
Cohn was known to tell clients to fight all charges, contest the lawsuit when sued, and never admit defeat. Trump has been following his formula for half a century, and it has become of great importance to the nation.
While the former president has left office, he has not left the stage. He continues to stir the political waters by denying he was defeated in 2020 and teasing a new run for 2024. Additionally, he could still face criminal charges for what he did to try to stay in office after losing his.
The commission is closing
Last week, the hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 Inquiryth The attack on the Capitol took us back to the day the attack was set in motion.
It was December 18, 2020, four days after The Electoral College convened in 50 state capitals and elected Joe Biden the 46thth president, obeying the results of the elections held in each state.
So even though his defeat was by then official, Trump was still trying to find a way to stay in power.
His efforts to overturn the 2020 results had made no headway in state or federal courts, even when the judges were Trump’s own appointees. Law firms signed on to fight election fraud found none and signed on. Trump couldn’t even find a willing fighter within his White House legal team.
However, the frustrated president still would not accept the reality. He went looking for someone else—outside lawyers, freelancers—who might be open to his claims of a stolen election or ready to take his case and suggest strategies.
That’s what led to the Dec. 18 meeting at the White House, when two such lawyers — Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell — and other supporters talked to Trump about declaring martial law, using the military to seize voting machines or to make Powell a “special adviser.” with calling powers.
When White House counsel Pat Cipollone heard the meeting was underway, he and others in his office stepped in and strongly objected. They said the moves in question lacked legal basis or justification, especially given the complete lack of evidence of fraud. There was no “theft” to stop.
But the outside team had a different picture.
“I would categorically describe it as, ‘You guys are not tough enough,'” Giuliani reported in taped testimony to the committee Jan. 6.
However, the lawyers’ fight continued, according to the testimony, for six hours. It started in the Oval Office and continued upstairs to the personal residence. At one point, the committee was told, Trump motioned to his White House team and asked, “Do you see what I have to deal with?”
Trump was still looking for someone who would fight by a different set of rules. All-in, no holds barred, no holding back. Someone for whom the only consideration was profit for the client. Someone like Roy Cohn.
A miracle and a legend
Cohn was a prodigy, the son of a New York judge who knew street politics as well as City Hall. Young Roy grew up immersed in both worlds. He would later be known for saying “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.”
After attending college and Columbia Law School, he was appointed an assistant US attorney in New York at age 20 (not old enough to vote at the time). Four years later he prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of helping the Soviet Union access nuclear weapons secrets. Both went to the electric chair.
In the early 1950s, Cohn would be a top adviser to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy when the first-term Republican from Wisconsin was chairman of a Senate committee looking for Communists in government. Cohn was on his side as McCarthy was dominating the news and being mentioned for the Republican national ticket in 1952.
Although McCarthy never exposed any actual communists, he destroyed many careers and lives. Along the way, his name became synonymous with an era and the tactic of making baseless but damaging accusations that caused real damage despite being untrue.
Cohn was still with him when the senator took over the military in 1954, claiming the Pentagon was protecting “reds” and Soviet sympathizers. This led to televised hearings that failed and cost McCarthy much of his GOP support. McCarthy was censured by his colleagues in a highly unusual vote on the Senate floor. He left the room, never spoke there again, and died a few years later.
Cohn, however, returned to New York and thrived. He had developed a reputation for being tough to the point of being ruthless. And in the world of high-stakes lawsuits and prosecutions, that reputation was gold. And it was won many times over.
Along the way, he met a young real estate developer on the move who would, in all likelihood, turn out to be his most famous client of all.
A fateful meeting in a bar
From left, Donald Trump, Ivana Trump, Elizabeth Trump, Mary Anne Trump and Roy Cohn attend the 38th Annual Horatio Alger Awards Dinner in 1985 in New York. images)
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From left, Donald Trump, Ivana Trump, Elizabeth Trump, Mary Anne Trump and Roy Cohn attend the 38th Annual Horatio Alger Awards Dinner in 1985 in New York. images)
Ron Galella Collection/Ron Galella via Getty Images
In her 2017 profile of Trump and Cohn’s relationship in Vanity Fair, journalist Marie Brenner quoted Trump recalling his first meeting with Cohn at Le Club in 1973.
She quotes Trump as saying he filed a racial discrimination lawsuit the US Department of Justice had filed against the real estate company he and his father ran. He asked Cohn whether they should agree or try to compromise. Cohn shot back: “Tell them to go to hell and fight the case in court and prove that you were discriminated against.”
The Trumps hired Cohn and soon announced they were suing the Justice Department for $100 million for “defamation.” They later dropped that lawsuit and took action to prevent it the future discrimination in their properties. Running for president, Trump would answer questions about all of this, stressing that he had “not pleaded guilty.”
As successful as he was during his 40-year career, Cohn eventually ran afoul of the law itself. He was investigated by federal authorities for perjury and witness tampering, among other charges. In 1986, a panel of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court disbarred him for unethical and unprofessional conduct. A little later, Cohn died of complications from AIDS (although he always insisted in public that he was suffering from liver cancer).
What none of Cohn’s clients were left to question was whether or not Cohn was their champion. This may have been what shocked Trump the most about being president. He expected the lawyers around him to work for him, to be his champions. He found that they saw their loyalty as being to their job, their oath of office or the Constitution. Sometimes they agreed with him, sometimes they were put off.
In his first weeks in office, Trump met with FBI Director James Comey and repeatedly asked for a pledge of personal loyalty. Comey was scorned and quickly fired. Trump had nominated Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who had been his first supporter in the Senate, as his attorney general. So he was stunned and outraged when Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Nearly four years later, after countless confrontations with the law and his obligations to enforce it, Trump was still looking for a way out. After the six-hour feast on December 18 was over and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had personally escorted Giuliani out after midnight, Trump didn’t even wait for dawn to take to Twitter.
“The big protest in DC on January 6thth“, the president wrote on Twitter. “Be there, it’s going to be wild.”
