THE REAL APPRENTICE

We are overwhelmed with press reports of great significance: Trump is roid crashing, the White House is in disarray, (18 positive tests and counting), covid deaths are rising given the lack of national leadership, and the President, ignoring advice from his own experts, has ordered his Treasury Secretary to abandon negotiations for a financial relief package to save the economy.

I do have opinions (and grave fears!) about all of the above, but I don't know any pertinent non-public FACTS about those subjects. So today's short piece is about a Trump matter about which I do have personal knowledge. Not earthshaking, but as long as truth matters, it is of some importance.

Earlier this week, a friend directed my attention to a NYTimes article pointing out Trump's inclination to forever harbor personal slights, even indirect ones. Referring to a 2016 interview in which Trump defended his deceased lawyer, the disgraced Roy Cohn, the paper reported:

"One episode still ate at Mr. Trump three decades later: Mr. Cohn's disbarment shortly before his death. 'They only got him because he was so sick,' the future president said ruefully. 'They wouldn't have gotten him otherwise.' "

Trump's statement was false. I  was there. I am a first-hand witness as to how we "got" Roy Cohn

In 1980, the court appointed me to head the Committee responsible for disbarring dishonest lawyers. In my first days on the job, I discovered an unattended file of two serious charges against Cohn going back to the 1970's, long before his death in 1986. 

Cohn had been judicially determined to be a crook ten years before my team brought about his 1985 disbarment. In both The Pied Piper Case (SDNY) and the Rosenstiel fraudulent will case (FL appellate court), Cohn was adjudicated to have defrauded his client.

I immediately brought in a new Chief Counsel, re-activated work on the Cohn file, and petitioned the court to disbar him based on the final findings of those two earlier litigated matters. We urged the court to apply a legal doctrine called collateral estoppel, which bars re-litigating facts and conclusions previously judicially determined. 

But the Appellate Division of New York's Supreme Court ruled Cohn was entitled to a new hearing, so we tried those two cases all over again, along with two subsequent instances of Cohn's perjury. The result was Cohn was found guilty of all four counts and disbarred. 

So what we have here is a pre-presidential instance of Trump's allergic response to truth: Cohn was nailed as a crook ten years before he died.

At his disbarment trial, Cohn called to the witness stand his client, Donald J. Trump, who testified under oath, that Cohn "possessed the highest degree of integrity." 

The crooked lawyer was an effective mentor for his crooked client. Indeed, Trump so slavishly channeled Cohn's operations manual, one could fairly consider Trump to have been Cohn's Apprentice:

Consider Trump's practice of personal attacks on his adversaries. He learned that from the master. Cohn's reaction to my Committee's work was classic pre-Trump. Cohn accused me and my prosecutorial trial team of being "crackpot left winger deadbeat yo-yos," 

I muffed my chance. I should've had those words embroidered onto the back of my suit jacket!

A bientot.

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For greater detail of my involvement in the Cohn disbarment, my defeat of Donald Trump in court, and my representation of Jackie Onassis, Vice Presidents Spiro Agnew and Hubert Humphrey, and much more, see my memoir The Client Decides, available at Amazon and on Kindle.