OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
8:13 AM – Saturday, January 17, 2026
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, has claimed that prosecutors from both the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the New York Attorney General’s Office “pressured and coerced” him into testifying against the president.
On Friday, in a personal article on Substack, he specifically mentioned top Democrats New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
“From the time I first began meeting with lawyers from the Manhattan DA’s Office and the New York Attorney General’s Office in connection with their investigations of President Trump, and through the trials themselves, I felt pressured and coerced to only provide information and testimony that would satisfy the government’s desire to build the cases against and secure a judgment and convictions against President Trump,” Cohen wrote.
“Again, I felt compelled and coerced to deliver what they were seeking,” He continued. “Letitia James and Alvin Bragg may not share the same office or political calendar, but they share the same playbook. Both used their platforms to elevate their profiles, to claim the mantle of the officials who ‘took down Trump.’”
The attorney gave a timeline of his participation in two trials involving Trump. The first, in 2023, was a civil trial in New York in which President Trump was accused of fraudulently inflating his assets to secure favorable loans. The second, in 2024, was a criminal action in Manhattan alleging that the president “falsified business records in connection with hush money payments made to Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 presidential election.”
When he first met Bragg, Cohen had been serving a three-year prison sentence for his 2018 conviction of facilitating hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal, for which he pleaded guilty.
In 2020, after one year in federal prison, Cohen was released to serve the remainder of his sentence under home confinement. He recalled how he continued to meet with both prosecutors hoping for his sentence to be shortened in exchange for his cooperation.
“As later came out during President Trump’s criminal trial, one of the very first questions I asked those prosecutors was how I would benefit from cooperating,” he admitted. “The reason was simple: I wanted to do whatever I could to obtain my Rule 35(b) motion, return home to my family and resume my fractured life.”
He explained how both district attorneys leveraged their influence to tailor his responses for their objective of convicting Trump.
“During my time with prosecutors, both in preparation for and during the trials, it was clear they were interested only in testimony from me that would enable them to convict President Trump,” Cohen wrote. “When my testimony was insufficient for a point the prosecution sought to make, prosecutors frequently asked inappropriate leading questions to elicit answers that supported their narrative.”
According to Cohen, James and Bragg damaged their credibility and eroded public trust in the system itself with the way they investigated their cases with an intended political outcome from the outset.
Cohen clarified that his goal in speaking out now was not to “defend Donald Trump, nor to relitigate his conduct.” Instead, he felt it important to have a “serious discussion of how these cases are actually built, who they rely on, and what happens behind closed doors long before a jury ever hears a word,” believing that in the current legal system, “outcomes are shaped well before verdicts are rendered.”
“You may reasonably ask why I am speaking out now. The answer is simple. I have witnessed firsthand the damage done when prosecutors pick their target first and then seek evidence to fit a predetermined narrative,” the lawyer stated.
President Trump reacted in a Truth Social post on Friday evening.
“These horrible Radical Left people, doing everything possible to destroy our Country, should pay a big price for this! It was a SET UP from the beginning,” Trump wrote. “New York Courts, with many fair and wonderful Judges, are embarrassed by what has happened! We cannot let this pass.”
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