Authored by Emel Akan via The Epoch Times,
President Donald Trump appeared on Michael Cohen’s radio show and commended his former attorney for recanting his previous statements.
Their conversation marked a surprising thaw years after their relationship collapsed amid public feuds and legal battles. Part of the interview with Cohen’s show “When You Know, You Know” aired on 770 WABC Radio at 6 p.m. Thursday. The rest will be released on Aug. 23.
“They weaponized you. They weaponized a lot of people,” Trump told Cohen. “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said, and that’s a big thing that you did.”
“You’re going to go down as a man of courage, great courage, because you did something that a lot of people wouldn’t have the guts to do,” Trump told Cohen.
“I guarantee your family greatly respects what you did.”
This was Cohen’s first public conversation with Trump in eight years.
Cohen shared a Substack article that served as a recollection of the public feud the two had, which included Cohen’s testifying against Trump in his New York City criminal trial in 2024. Cohen served as one of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s star witnesses, alleging the president was involved in a plan to pay off a former adult film actress, Stormy Daniels, during his 2016 campaign.
“Eight years of silence. Hundreds of thousands of headlines. Fifteen years of history fractured in an instant, and somehow, against almost every expectation, here we are,” Cohen wrote.
Ever since he announced that Trump would appear on his radio show, Cohen stated that his inbox became a “digital battlefield.”
“It has been flooded with hatred, anger, disbelief, and some of the most spectacularly vicious things imaginable,” Cohen wrote.
In 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations, tax evasion, bank fraud, and lying to Congress. He completed his sentence and supervision requirements in November 2021.
Speaking to Politico on Aug. 19, Cohen answered a question about whether he would seek a presidential pardon.
“We’ll see,” he said in response. “Will I make that request down the road? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.”
Trump, who was convicted in a jury trial on 34 counts of falsifying business records, denied the charges against him and pleaded not guilty. He has long said that the Manhattan district attorney’s case and cases that were brought against him in Georgia, Washington, and Florida were a “political witch hunt.”
The judge who oversaw the case, Juan Merchan, sentenced Trump to an unconditional discharge in January 2025, about two months after Trump won reelection.
In his first term, Trump often criticized Cohen in response to claims his former lawyer made about him, writing on X in 2018, “If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!”
During the interview with Cohen, Trump also talked about the economy, Venezuela, and the Iran conflict.
He said that if he ran again, “I think I’d win by 25 points.”
“The economy has never been stronger,” the president said.
Regarding Iran, Trump said, “It’s not easy to make a deal” with the regime.
“Nobody knows who’s leading,” he said.
Trump also defended his military decisions, telling Cohen, “I would have done it again a hundred times.”
Tyler Durden Fri, 08/21/2026 - 12:05ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis sat before the Committee on House Administration, the House Oversight Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday and declined to answer a single substantive question during a closed-door deposition that reportedly lasted less than half an hour. DeBergalis invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and left. DeBergalis joins a growing list of ActBlue executives who have chosen silence over testimony as Republicans dig into whether the Democratic Party's primary fundraising platform let foreign money slip into American campaigns.
ActBlue has raised roughly $20 billion for Democratic candidates and liberal causes since its founding.
House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil opened the Committee's investigation into ActBlue in 2023. The original complaint centered on a simple but significant security gap: ActBlue did not require a credit card CVV number to process donations. This policy made it easy to run stolen or fabricated card numbers through the platform undetected.
"ActBlue executives and staff are aware that both foreign and domestic fraudulent actors are exploiting the platform but do not take the threat seriously," a committee report released in April 2025 concluded. ActBlue rejects that characterization, and has called the investigation politically motivated and denies breaking any law.
Whether the platform has genuinely tightened its standards since then is the question Steil says he still cannot answer. In an interview with Fox News ahead of Thursday's deposition, he laid out the committee's core uncertainty. "It's unclear how serious ActBlue is now taking fraud," Steil said. "We know that they weakened their fraud standards previously. Did they make the changes that are needed to root out foreign funds from coming into U.S. Elections?"
DeBergalis is not the first ActBlue official to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones previously pleaded the Fifth during a public hearing before the House Administration Committee In June.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan pressed her directly on a figure attributed to her own board chairman. "Your board chairman said ActBlue accepted up to $38 million in contributions in 2024 that had the signs of foreign origin," Jordan said. "How much fraud is too much for all?"
Wallace-Jones declined to answer.
"What is so frustrating for me, and I think countless others - they have a right to not answer our questions,” Steil said. “But I think the American people also have a right to know exactly what's taking place on this platform that has raised roughly $20 billion for Democratic candidates and liberal causes since its creation," he said.
ActBlue board chairwoman Kimberly Peeler-Allen offered the closest thing to a public defense back in April, when she told The New York Times that "less than 1%" of contributions during the 2024 cycle showed signs of foreign origin, a cycle in which ActBlue raised $3.82 billion. That percentage, applied to a number that large, still lands somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars, which is roughly the figure Jordan cited to Wallace-Jones two months later. ActBlue's own lawyer, Vincent Cohen, wrote to the committee chairs that same April, defending the platform's technical safeguards and insisting the organization "built a robust platform with anti-fraud technology."
The Justice Department is also investigating whether ActBlue adequately policed fraud on its donation portal. ActBlue maintains it has done nothing wrong and frames the entire multi-committee, multi-agency effort as a partisan exercise aimed at hobbling the left's most important fundraising infrastructure ahead of the midterms.
That defense gets harder to sustain each time a key person from ActBlue, who has knowledge of the platform's internal decisions, won’t answer questions by invoking their constitutional right against self-incrimination.
Tyler Durden Fri, 08/21/2026 - 11:45