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Cohen's main defense is both mental illness and that he was addicted to chump like heroin or cocaine. Also that while he did do it, it's an unfair and biased that he was charged.

'It wasn’t just as if I was an alcoholic or a drug addict refusing to get help. It was exactly that.'

While plainly revisionist history, I think it's a valiant attempt on his part to rescue his and his families/loved ones reputation even though at this point it's doubtful his can ever be salvaged.

Cohen is a self identified fixer, that's his skill and not the law. This book is clearly an attempt 'to fix' the damage caused by his behavior and association with chump.
Cohen's father is a Holocaust survivor. He heard chump say that neo-nazi's who chanted, 'jews will not replace us' were 'fine people'. He treated this behavior, a hate crime, like it was a reasonable difference of opinion.
He knew better than most how dangerous world leaders who behaved that way were and still he did it, defended it and even gloried in it.

'Trump stepped up on the makeshift stage we’d installed and he let rip in an hour-long tirade that was breathtaking in its lack of structure, compassion, or coherence.
Trump was spewing things that I found repulsive. Mexicans were rapists...
For an hour I listened as I cringed, inwardly, but swelled outwardly...'

After completing 2 free projects for chump, Cohen accepts a position in which he makes LESS money than he was making before.
For the life of me I can't figure out why employees like Cohen and others want to give labor and cash to billionaires?????????
Make it make sense🤷🏾‍♀��

Cohen uses a strategy to attempt to obfuscate chumps racism in which he tokenizes marginalized identities. Cohen doesn't explicitly say this but he doesn't need or want to appeal to marginalized voters. What he wants and needs are enough self-hating marginalized folks willing to speak publicly in support of chump.
All a racist is seeking is one single individual of the marginalized group who agrees with their racism. By default they can feel they no longer need to address their own racism.
This is crucial in supporting white supremacy.

'I was all in for Trump, and I eagerly set about proving the case that he wasn’t racist by finding folks from different racial and ethnic and religious groups to speak in his defense.'

Cohen's unbelievably sexist in his treatment of Hope Hicks, Ivanka and Stormy Daniel..
He repeatedly refers to Stormy as a 'porn star' whether a title is required in the discussion or not.

Cohen is liar and he's not at all subtle about it, Examples of his contradictory bullshit:
'I was going to be truthful, but I also had good reason to be economical with the truth.
Of course, as you know, I was lying. I had been reimbursed for the payments, plus money for income tax on the sum, plus a bonus, but that was no one’s business, as far as I was concerned.
If you’re caught in a lie, double and triple down. It was the opposite of Occam’s Razor: instead of the simplest explanation being the likeliest, this strategy involved complicating the narrative, throwing sand in the eyes of the onlooker, claiming that transparently implausible stories were true unless proven otherwise, and even then denying the obvious truth. It was a variation of the old joke: Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes? It was surprisingly effective over time...'

This fucking liar is pissing on our legs, so to speak, and insisting it's rain.
Just playing right in our faces.
This is primarily Cohen's strategy.
He separates the chapters where he admits to his lies from the chapters where he is being arrested and held accountable for his shady deals, at which time he insists on his innocence. Innocence on the shady deals he already fully admitted to making.

Then he begins to brag about how much money and connections he made post chumps election.
'Was I cashing in on my relationship with Trump? Of course I was. What would you do? By March of 2018, to give but one example, I was brokering deals at the level of global, multi-billion-dollar transactions.
These were super-yacht types of people, and that constituted my reality under President Trump.
There I was, going into Mar-a-Lago as the power broker who’d set up a meal between one of the richest men in the world and the President of the United States, and I’d done it with incredible ease.'

Until the FBI show up to arrest him, lol! 'I was now on the other side of the power dynamic I had exploited so often on behalf of Donald Trump.
Over the course of the next several weeks, Trump continued to make statements putting more and more distance between us...
... testified to Congress, for the first time, and I’d lied and lied and lied.'
So here he admits that he is wrong and that his arrest was justified and valid.

'Staying on message meant calling the investigation a witch hunt, no Russian connections, all of the various ways to delegitimize the investigation.'

This becomes his strategy, bizarrely, in this book as makes the case that he was unfairly prosecuted.

“They want you to plead guilty to tax evasion, lying to Congress, and misrepresentation to a bank...If you refuse, on Monday they are going to file an eighty-five-page indictment,�� Petrillo said. “They are going to drag you out of your apartment on national television. They are also going to indict Laura.'

The way I cackled!
Why did Cohen think he was above the law? He goes on about how he never committed tax fraud, all his taxes are paid. He never disputes lying to Congress or bank fraud.
Messy, messy.

However if memory serves he falsely inflated the value of his property for loans and then devalued that same property for tax purposes.
That sounds like tax fraud to me as well as bank fraud.
The sheer entitlement of this rich asshole.
He really thinks it's unfair that he be arrested for crimes he committed.
He lied to Congress for fuckssake. He can stop the woe is me bullshit at any time.

'I kept asking, over and over, why I was facing these charges when I was always a legitimate local businessman who followed the letter of the law and only dealt with respectable banks and financial institutions.'

Why you always lying?????? Seriously this is his defense. Expert level gaslighting.

'Petrillo explained that there was allegedly unreported income from my New York City taxi medallions, as well as interest on a loan that I’d made to a private individual.'

So it was true. I can not stop laughing.

'This was the American justice system at work. My lawyers had continually stated that they didn’t see any charges coming, but the truth in this country is that if federal prosecutors want to get you, they will. No matter who you are.'
Ok but Cohen already admitted to the crimes. No one hunted him down relentlessly.
He engaged in crime and rightfully and justifiably had legal consequences.
The sheer ego of this asshole.

'Petrillo said it was unlikely that I would go to prison, based on the charges I had to plead guilty to, but that I’d face significant monetary penalties.'

Ah so he lies and says he never committed the crimes he already admitted to. Then he accepts guilt which he says is to protect his wife but then admits it's really to protect his money.

He goes on to whine about how unfair it is that he's being prosecuted for the crimes he totally admitted and that it was a witch hunt.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Most of this is a curious mixture of furious back pedaling combined with an aggressive attempt to both cover his own ass and save face buttressed by outright lies and gaslighting.

Cohen makes the case repeatedly that his loved ones; wife, kids, parents and even friends were all vocally anti-chump, even before he ran for president.
This is ridiculous and irrelevant at this point. If his kids had spoken out like Kellyanne Conway's daughter, Claudia, maybe, but they didn't. They were fully adults by 2015 and still they stayed silent.
If as the author claims the adult kids were aware of chumps toxic behavior they become complicit like their mother by their silence.
The book describes a scenario in which chump openly lusts after Cohen's daughter Samantha when she is 15, asking her for a kiss and commenting on her body.
Cohen not only doesn't shut this inappropriate commenting down, he reluctantly joins in with nervous laughter.

He describes his 15 yr old daughter's reaction as follows, 'Samantha said she was sick and tired of the way Trump demeaned and degraded me, as if he needed to keep me in my place. She wanted me to quit working for Trump because he was constantly doing things like threatening to cut my pay in half, as he actually did, or withhold my bonus or fire me.
Samantha felt like I had Stockholm Syndrome...'

Now this is a blatant lie. It reminds me of those Facebook posts where parents will attribute a deep thought-quote to their toddler who barely speaks. Teenagers aren't this selfless.
What kind of parent tells their 15 year old kid that their boss demean and degrades them? Who tells their kids about their work pay being cut in half?????
Teenagers aren't spouses or therapists. It's not at all healthy to even involve them in your stress like that.

Now this story/quote I believe, 'Ivanka shunned her in the lobby of Trump Park Avenue, a petty slight signifying that Trump’s daughter believed the Cohen family was beneath her social stature.'

It makes much more sense to me that Cohen's daughter, Sami was socially impacted by her father being a employee of chump. Especially if her daughter and Ivanka are of an age and social circle.
Turns out the daughter is friends with Tiffany.

Additionally Stockholm Syndrome is not a real thing.

The wife has no defense and yes she needs one. She allowed herself to be associated with a racist, sexist criminal. She's not innocent because she stayed married to Cohen and silent as he broke laws to protect this fascist president. She knows who her husband is. Spare me the innocent and ignorant wife routine. She ain't have shit to say as Cohen's star was rising and that same energy needs to be kept now.

Cohen continually compares chump to Jim Jones which is inaccurate as fuck.
First because chump isn't a religious or cult leader. He's a racist the folks following him already believed what he preaches, according to this author that's why chump says it. An example would be abortion. Chump certainly believes in abortion and his position now is a huge about face. He made it to appeal to his base.
So the idea that he's a true believer is bullshit.
Furthermore Jim Jones was a racist and mass murderer. The folks wanting to leave weren't allowed to. The idea that they joyfully drank the koolaid is disrespectful bullshit. The only reason this issue is joked about and treated lightly is because the US and Western world has zero respect for Black lives.
Chump is better compared to Hitler who was also a bit of a bumbling fool. Cohen resists that comparison because his father is a survivor of the Holocaust and his son supported a racist, fascist tyrannical dictator. Chump mirrors the rise of Hitler.
I don't think we'll have official death camps but we already have kids in concentration camps.
I don't blame Cohen for not wanting to acknowledge the part he played in this.
What we're not gonna do though is continue to use a more a palatable to Cohen example and disrespect Black folks further than he already has.
Fuck Cohen's feelings.
He supported the rise of US racist nationalism to historic heights.
I doubt we have death camps but we're on pace for a second civil war.
He needs to stop with this racist nonsense and own his part.

Cohen is guilty and a consummate liar manipulator and gaslighter.
I mean he even lies, gaslights and manipulates in this book using the very same methods he admits to using in earlier chapters of the book.
As if I'm not going to remember what I just read and can be fooled by his late ass defense of his nonexistent innocence.

He is a real character.
Reminds me of Littlefinger on Games of Thrones.
I'm so glad that I pirated this.
This asshole has profited enough already on the strength of his lies.