REVENGE

The former president’s former counsel rages against his former boss.

“Donald Trump is the mirror into the depth of the soul of government corruption,” writes Cohen. “He is the standard bearer for corrupt dictator wannabes. He is the poster boy for fascism.” The author was one of countless Trump staffers to be thrown under the bus when legal trouble threatened, in this case because of a payment to Stormy Daniels. Cohen clearly seeks revenge for the time he spent in a country-club federal prison—nicknamed Camp Cupcake—where, “if you wanted to break out, you merely needed to call an Uber.” But revenge cuts both ways: Cohen argues that the Justice Department was wholly under the sway of a vengeful Trump and weaponized to punish anyone he targeted. In Cohen’s case, punishment came in the form of imprisonment for tax evasion—even though, he insists, it was a “tax omission.” The IRS was the weaponized agency, argues the author, that illegally leaked information about him to other agencies, but leading the charge was the FBI, which “was corrupt, vindictive, and intellectually lazy.” Moreover, he insists, everyone in the FBI at the time of his trial was “guilty of subverting justice.” Given recent, deeper-diving reports on the wholesale compromise of DOJ under the reign of William Barr, Cohen’s accusations are often glancing. Still, when he’s not spitting bile (of his work for Trump, for example, he writes, “the biggest part of my job was covering for his fat ass”), he hits a few points: It’s a fact that when Trump—“an orange-faced piece of shit who ran roughshod over the Constitution”—called for Russia to investigate Hillary Clinton’s emails, Russia did so instantly, and it’s a fact that the disproportionate sentencing so common in justice circles can be, and is, used as a political weapon.

Angry and sometimes scattershot, a footnote to more comprehensive accounts of Trumpian malfeasance.