Michael Cohen says his testimony was still truthful, even as Trump claims he fully recanted it.
President Donald Trump declared on September 4th via Truth Social that his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had “fully recanted” his testimony in two major New York legal cases. Trump claimed Cohen was pressured and coerced into saying things that were not true. He also accused New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of abusing their offices to target him politically.
Cohen served as a central witness in both cases. He testified in James’ civil fraud case and later acted as the star prosecution witness in Bragg’s 2024 criminal case, which involved business records tied to the Stormy Daniels matter. Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in the Manhattan case and received an unconditional discharge in January 2025, while continuing to contest that conviction.
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The Trump-Cohen relationship had collapsed years earlier after Cohen became a cooperating witness and a vocal Trump critic. But the two had been exchanging increasingly friendly words for months before Trump’s September post went public.
As originally reported, Cohen had indeed accused both prosecutors’ offices of applying pressure, but he stopped well short of saying his sworn trial testimony was false. When asked directly in February whether the coercion he described meant his testimony was untruthful, Cohen rejected that framing outright. He said that feeling pressured should not imply the information he provided was anything other than “truthful and accurate.”
Cohen first aired the coercion claim publicly in a January 16th Substack post titled “When Politics Blind Justice.” In it, he wrote that from his earliest meetings with lawyers from both Bragg’s and James’ offices through the trials themselves, he felt pressured and coerced to provide testimony that would help prosecutors build their cases against Trump. He also accused prosecutors of favoring testimony that fit their theory of the case and said he encountered leading questions when his answers did not support the points they were trying to make.
Trump, however, treated Cohen’s statements as a total repudiation of both prosecutions. “Now we are asking that any remnant of those Politically Weaponized Cases against me be immediately terminated and dismissed,” Trump wrote. He added that Cohen had confirmed everything prosecutors did was wrong and unlawful, and he accused James and Bragg of breaking the law to stop him from returning to the White House.
The gap between Trump’s characterization and Cohen’s own words became even sharper after the two reconciled publicly over the summer. During an August radio interview, Trump told Cohen he respected him for having “recanted everything you said.” When CNN’s Jake Tapper later asked Cohen directly whether he was withdrawing his prior sworn statements, Cohen declined. His answer was plain: “What I said was said and that’s where I stand with it.”
