Donald Trump once called Michael Cohen a ‘rat.’ Now they’re having a public conversation

By Kevin Liptak, Kit Maher, CNN

(CNN) — First, Michael Cohen was Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and self-described “pit bull.”

Then he became a bitter foe, exposing what he called “dirty deeds” and earning him the level “rat” by a president scorned.

Now, after burying the hatchet, Cohen is becoming something else: a radio interviewer seeking public détente.

“They weaponized you, they weaponized a lot of people. I respect the fact you recanted, everything you said,” Trump told Cohen in a taped phone interview for Cohen’s program on WABC on Thursday.

It was their first open conversation since the collapse of their professional and personal relationship more than eight years ago. Cohen told CNN the interview — which is airing in full on Sunday — lasted 40 minutes.

“How is it possible after all of what took place, all of the name-calling, the years of the public war, the verbal missiles that we threw at one another? How is it possible that the two of us can ever sit down again?” Cohen asked CNN’s Jake Tapper on “The Lead” on Thursday ahead of his interview airing.

“The answer is that we forgave,” he said. “But remember this: Forgiveness does not require amnesia. It requires the courage to stop allowing yesterday to dictate tomorrow.”

Asked how his relationship with the president is now, Cohen said it’s “being resuscitated,” later revealing that while he hasn’t personally asked Trump for a pardon, he has submitted an application, on which he intends to follow up on Friday.

It was on August 21, 2018, that Cohen pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to eight criminal counts — and implicated Trump — in a payment scheme designed to silence women who claimed affairs with the then-candidate in the 2016 election.

Thus began the two men’s downfall. Cohen, after serving time in prison, would go on to act as the star witness in Trump’s criminal trial in New York. In 2024, Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film performer, to keep her quiet about an alleged past tryst with Trump. (Trump, who has denied the affair, was sentenced to no jail time and has appealed the conviction.)

Trump was wounded by the betrayal and for years called Cohen — who once claimed he would take a bullet for Trump — a rat and a liar.

Cohen, meanwhile, made little secret he felt Trump and his associates had left him out to dry. He was the only person to serve prison time for the hush money scheme. He wrote two books in the years after his release: “Disloyal” and “Revenge.”

Asked on CNN if Trump apologized to him, Cohen elected to keep that private, though he said he was “comfortable” with the words that were exchanged. Pressed on the idea of forgiveness, Cohen said he doesn’t want the chapter when he went to prison to “be the defining moment” of his life.

Once Trump returned to office, things in their relationship began to shift. Cohen has claimed New York prosecutors, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, had pressured and coerced him into testifying against Trump.

And a quiet reconciliation with Trump got underway.

It started with an unexpected text from someone Cohen has described as a “White House friend and an insider,” who relayed a message from the president, Cohen said on a radio show this year.

Cohen declined to name the insider, but said the person “expressed to me the president’s genuine empathy for the hell that I was being dragged through, yet again, and I deeply appreciated that text.”

“I thanked him, expressed my sincere hope that this long, exhausting feud between the two of us could finally end, and what was, I found, even more interesting is that he replied almost immediately, agreeing that it was actually time for us to meet,” Cohen said, adding he was “very surprised” by the text.

The two men have met in private over the past year at Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The airing of their conversation Thursday evening will cap the remarkable rapprochement. And the next day, Cohen said he will call about his pardon application, which he said he updated from the one he submitted under the Biden administration.

“I have not received an acknowledgement that they have the application, which is on my to-do list, which I intend to call tomorrow to find out what happened,” Cohen said. “I did send it by FedEx, so I do have a receipt.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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CNN’s Kara Scannell contributed to this report.