On this day in 2021, Britain’s Prince Andrew was served with a U.S. federal lawsuit alleging he sexually abused a teenager, Virginia Giuffre, under the auspices of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The suit was ultimately settled for around $16 million. Last year, Andrew was stripped of his royal title.
We made it to Thursday! It’s Swin again. If you work in political media and you, for a second, bought former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen’s schtick of turning on the president and earnestly seeing the error of his mean and Trumpy ways, you might want to consider early retirement. Find someone less gullible – a 5-year-old, maybe? – to take your place. Somebody whose bullshit-detector isn’t irreparably broken. Your readers or listeners could use the upgrade.
In today’s ’First Draft,’ we’ll dig into Team Trump’s growing interest in weaponizing the man they once dubbed MAGA-land’s premier sniveling snitch. Plus, anti-vax Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the deaths of two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania during a growing measles outbreak are totally not his fault, and Donald Trump has an interview love-in with [checks notes from the Age of Obama] Glenn Beck. At least there are just two days till the weekend. Let’s read on.
‘How Are You, Michael?’
When I was working at the Daily Beast’s Washington bureau in 2015, future President Donald Trump, via his attorney Michael Cohen, threatened to destroy my best friend and colleague, Tim Mak. I vividly recall the moment Tim stepped out of our mini conference room, clicking his little recorder and telling us as he chuckled: You gotta hear this…
Tim had just reached out to the 2016 Trump campaign for comment for a story that would soon be headlined: “Ex-Wife: Donald Trump Made Me Feel ‘Violated’ During Sex.” Trump did not appreciate it, so he sicced Cohen on my future best man. The Trump attorney shouted and swore, vowing to sue Tim and the Beast into oblivion. (You can listen to some of the hilarious audio here, of a reporter standing his ground and of a small man trying to make himself sound big.)
The Beast published the story, Cohen made an ass out of himself by spouting borderline-illiterate bullshit about spousal rape, and his promised world-altering lawsuit didn’t happen. In the years that followed, Cohen got raided by the feds, very publicly fell out with President Trump, cuddled up to the anti-MAGA “resistance,” and became a key witness in New York Attorney General Letitia James’s civil fraud case against Trump, as well as in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal hush-money case against Trump. Bragg’s case, of course, is the reason Trump became America’s first felon president, a label Trump bitterly resents.
In all those years of Cohen claiming he’d seen the light and had made an anti-Trump turnaround, I never once bought it. You can scroll through my public output and social media posts. It was always clear to me (not just as a close friend of someone he profanely threatened with financial ruin, but as a political reporter employing a shred of common sense and instinct) that Cohen was still the same guy: a gross habitual liar. It was just that his circumstances and benefactors changed.
Now Cohen – who is seeking a federal pardon, which Trump has the power to grant – has switched sides again. And the Trump-Vance administration has taken notice.