Michael Cohen, the disgraced former lawyer for President Trump, repeatedly and aggressively lobbied for a job in the White House but was rejected, according to…
Michael Cohen, the disgraced former lawyer for President Trump, repeatedly and aggressively lobbied for a job in the White House but was rejected, according to more than a half-dozen Trump insiders whose accounts contradict Cohen’s sworn testimony to Congress.
Those I interviewed said Cohen aimed high in the beginning, asking to be considered for the White House chief of staff’s position, then lowered his targets for a job in communications or the counsel’s office.
“Michael came in and said, ‘Hey, I want to be chief of staff and would you sort of put in a good word for me,’” David Bossie, an outside adviser to the president who served as a top deputy on the White House transition team, told me.
Bossie said he couldn’t recall the exact date but that the conversation occurred at Trump Tower in New York City between Trump’s election victory on Nov. 8,2016, and the inauguration on Jan. 20,2017.
“I didn’t do anything with it,” recalled Bossie, who described the frenetic two-month window of the transition as a period when “a thousand people a day are asking me for a job.”
Each of the people I interviewed disputed Cohen’s testimony Wednesday to the House Oversight Committee, in which he claimed he had no interest working in the Trump White House. „I was extremely proud to be the personal attorney for the president of the United States of America. I did not want to go to the White House. I was offered jobs,“ Cohen claimed.
Cohen, under repeated challenges by lawmakers who doubted that part of his testimony, doubled-down on his answer.
A former campaign official who was close to the president-elect during the transition said he witnessed Cohen’s lobbying for a White House job and his later complaints of having been passed over.
“There wasn’t a person at the top of the campaign nor the transition who didn’t hear from him or know he wanted to be chief of staff. It just wasn’t going to happen. And later he told people he’d settle for something in the counsel’s office as long as he could have proximity to the president,” the former official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he now works in a private-sector job.
“He kept trying to make the case he needed to be near the president because he was the only one who really understood him and that he was also working on these special projects for the president,” the official recalled.
