AUDIO: Michael Cohen Threatens Daily Beast Reporter

Tim Mak reports at NPR:

Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen is facing legal peril, including an FBI raid of his home and office — and involvement in a civil lawsuit with porn star Stormy Daniels. But in the past, it was Cohen who has sought to put legal pressure on others to solve problems for his boss. For the first time, audio recordings of Cohen’s legal threats, from a 2015 Daily Beast interview, are being published.

I started writing about a 1993 biography of Trump written by former Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt, III. According to the book, The Lost Tycoon, Trump’s first wife Ivana claimed in a sworn deposition during her divorce proceedings that Donald Trump raped her.

As the book was coming out, she said she didn’t mean rape in a criminal or literal sense, and has since praised the president. Trump has called the claim false. When I reached out to campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks about the claim in the book, I got an angry call from Cohen in return. His first tactic was to try and convince me not to run the story — but he did so by falsely claiming that spousal rape was not a crime.

More audio and transcripts of the threats are at the link.

Listen: Lawyer Michael Cohen has used legal threats to protect Donald Trump for years. NPR now has the audio of him doing it. Read @timkmak‘s story here: https://t.co/VC2FuIhY3g pic.twitter.com/8xA43T7pLS

— NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) May 31, 2018