We told you Michael Cohen had a secret Trump-Russia problem

| 5:08 pm EDT April 28, 2018
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Back when the FBI first raided the home and office of Donald Trump’s “attorney” Michael Cohen, and it became clear that Cohen was eventually going to be indicted on some sort of criminal charges, Palmer Report pointed out that he had a problem no one was talking about. Regardless of what assets Cohen might own, one detail made clear that he wasn’t going to be able to pay his legal bills. Now the mainstream media is confirming the same.

Michael Cohen had a secret: he had no money. The dead giveaway, as far as we were concerned, was that Cohen had to use a home equity line to pay $130,000 to Stormy Daniels. Someone with Cohen’s level of financial assets should easily have that much cash on hand in a savings account. The fact that Cohen had to take out a loan to pay off Daniels was a sign that he was cash-poor, which is to say that he’s overextended or upside down on his assets and investments.

Now Bloomberg has poked around into Cohen’s finances, and come away with the conclusion that he is indeed secretly as cash-poor as we knew he was. Cohen’s taxi cab business is failing and deeply in debt, though in fairness to him, that’s been an industry wide trend since the rise of Uber and Lyft. His real estate investments aren’t doing well either, which come to think of it, reminds us of Donald Trump. If you’re wondering whether you should care about Cohen’s finances, there’s a specific reason why the answer is yes.

Paul Manafort has been nailed to the wall by a mountain of evidence, but he’s using his vast financial wealth to pay for the kinds of lawyers who can try to chip away at the evidence with one technicality after another. It’s why he’s the only person arrested in the Trump-Russia scandal who hasn’t (yet) cut a plea deal. Michael Cohen, who is also up against a mountain of evidence, does not appear to have the resources available to fund the kind of legal defense that Manafort is using. That sharply increases the odds that Cohen will reluctantly flip on Donald Trump.