Recently, reporting emerged that former longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen would be writing a “tell-all” book about his time working for the eventual president and his family. Cohen used to work closely with the Trumps, but he’s fallen out big time amidst the controversy surrounding a hush money scheme that helped land Cohen in prison for helping Trump try and silence women with whom he had affairs. Now, ABC News is reporting that a Trump Organization lawyer named Charles Harder has written Cohen a pointed letter admonishing him against the publication of his planned book. Harder suggests that the book could violate nondisclosure agreements that Cohen signed prior to working for Trump.
The reference to the nondisclosure agreement could open the door for the president’s team to bring a legal challenge against Cohen in the near future — the book has been discussed as dropping before the general election this coming November. ABC News reports:
‘[On] Thursday, Cohen received a letter from lawyers representing the Trump Organization demanding Cohen halt writing a “tell-all book” about his time working for the president, according to sources familiar with the matter. Charles Harder, the attorney representing the company, writes that Cohen signed a non-disclosure agreement when he joined the Trump Organization and thus it would prohibit him from disclosing certain information about the president, his family and the company.’
The president isn’t the only conservative interest that Harder has recently represented, interestingly enough. He’s also the lawyer who sent a recent letter to The New York Times on behalf of Sean Hannity, who alleged that the publication had unduly defamed him by tying his rhetoric on Fox downplaying Coronavirus to death from the Coronavirus among Fox News viewers who — in line with what Hannity and his colleagues were pushing — didn’t seem to worry about the virus.
It’s unclear if Harder will be successful in stopping the publication of Cohen’s book. A source explained to the Daily Beast:
‘Michael’s stories about Trump are incredible. He has saved a lot of them for when the time is right and the time is now right. Michael spent a long time with Trump — he is going to go into everything and he’s not going to hold anything back. He has paid his dues and he’s pissed he had to go to jail for this.’
Cohen has already told some of those stories. He’s publicly testified before Congress, to whom he revealed stories of a slew of financial frauds on the president’s part. Separately, stories from Cohen have also already emerged chronicling years on-end of often virulent racism from Trump — although considering his public behavior, that’s not exactly a surprising revelation.
Throughout his time in office, Trump has repeatedly freely thrown current and former associates under the bus. The turnover rate among senior staff members in his administration has been especially sharp. Now, ahead of the 2020 elections, he’s consistently losing to former VP Joe Biden in poll after poll of their likely match-up. Biden’s leads carry over into swing states, many of which Trump won in 2016.
