Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

What Did Michael Cohen Do With $774K In Secret Loans During Trump Campaign?

Michael Cohen reportedly took out a whopping $774,000 in loans during the presidential campaign, raising big new questions about whether he made illicit donations to President Trump’s White House push.

The Wall Street Journal reported Friday night that Trump’s personal lawyer increased a personal credit line by $245,000 in early 2016, and shortly before that he accessed $529,000 from a new mortgage on a condo at Trump World Tower.

Cohen has already admitted to making a six-figure hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the campaign — and he and Trump and new adviser Rudy Giuliani have given several contradictory accounts of that payoff.

The new information suggest that Cohen may have made other similar payoffs to keep damaging information about Trump secret.

Giuliani and other sources have claimed that Trump repaid Cohen for $420,000 in unspecified expenses but have not said what they were for besides the Stormy payoff.

Any payments to help Trump’s campaign could be considered illegal campaign donations and even if they weren’t Cohen likely did not tell banks what the true purpose of the loans were.

Cohen is under investigation by federal prosecutors after special counsel Robert Mueller referred information about his alleged shady deals to the southern district of New York.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.