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In February 2019, Michael Cohen enraged Donald Trump and his team by testifying before the House Oversight Committee and making a series of damaging allegations about the then-president. The lawyer’s testimony was, among other things, the first domino that led to Trump’s indictment in New York.
It was a week later when Cohen went further, filing a civil lawsuit against the Trump Organization, alleging that the business owed him quite a bit of money. Today, as NBC News reported, that case was resolved.
Former Trump personal lawyer-turned-ferocious critic Michael Cohen has settled his lawsuit seeking $1.3 million in legal fees from the Trump Organization, sources told NBC News. Attorneys for Cohen and the Trump company were in New York state Supreme Court in Manhattan on Friday working out the final terms of the deal, which were not disclosed.
The litigants appear to have waited until the last minute: Jurors had already been selected for this case, and opening arguments were set to begin on Monday.
Note, this now-settled case filed by Cohen is separate from a related lawsuit filed against Cohen: In April, Trump sued his former fixer, seeking at least a half-billion dollars — no, that’s not a typo — over alleged breaches of contract and “unjust enrichment.”
Whether today’s settlement touched on the former president’s $500 million case is, at least for now, unclear.
But as one of Team Trump’s many legal disputes fades away, I’m reminded of something then-candidate Trump said in 2016. “I don’t settle cases,” the Republican bragged during a primary debate in 2016. “I don’t do it because that’s why I don’t get sued very often, because I don’t settle, unlike a lot of other people.”
And yet, the Republican appears to settle cases with some regularity. Last fall, for example, he reached a settlement with a group of protesters who claimed his security guards assaulted them outside Trump Tower in 2015.
Three years earlier, he also settled a case regarding his fraudulent charitable foundation, paying $2 million in penalties, and shuttering the entity altogether.
The settlement came after the then-president publicly declared, “I won’t settle this case!”
None of this, of course, should be confused with the $25 million settlement Trump had to pay in the Trump University case, in which the president ran a “school” that was little more than a scam created to take advantage of unsuspecting students who trusted the Republican.
He also vowed not to settle that case, shortly before he settled the case.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.