By Karen Freifeld and Jonathan Stempel
WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Michael Cohen, the onetime personal lawyer and fixer for Donald Trump, has settled his lawsuit accusing the Trump Organization of failing to cover millions of dollars of legal bills he incurred over his work for the former U.S. president.
Lawyers for both sides disclosed the settlement at a hearing in a New York state court in Manhattan on Friday, three days before a trial was scheduled to begin.
Terms of the settlement were not made public. Cohen and a lawyer for the Trump Organization issued statements that the matter “has been resolved in a manner satisfactory to all parties.”
Once a strong supporter of Trump, Cohen is now a vocal critic, whose 2020 memoir “Disloyal” was a New York Times bestseller.
He claimed that the Trump Organization reneged on its agreement to paying his bills after he began cooperating with several probes into his work for the former president.
These included inquiries into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Trump’s efforts to silence women who claimed they had affairs with him.
Cohen originally sued in March 2019 to recoup $1.9 million in fees, plus $1.9 million he was ordered to forfeit in a criminal case. The fees kept growing, and the Trump Organization has paid some of them, court papers show.
Despite Friday’s settlement, Cohen is expected to be a star prosecution witness against Trump in a criminal trial next March.
That case concerns payments Cohen made, and which Trump reimbursed, to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet prior to the 2016 presidential election about her alleged affair with Trump, which he denies.
Cohen is also seeking the dismissal of a $500 million lawsuit by Trump in a federal court in Florida.
In that case, Trump accused Cohen of breaching ethics rules governing lawyers’ conduct by revealing “confidences” and “spreading falsehoods” in books and media, and damaging his reputation by calling him “racist.”
Trump, a Republican who is again seeking the presidency, faces many other legal problems.
These include a criminal trial next May in Florida on charges he illegally took classified documents from the White House and lied to officials who sought to recover them.
Trump also faces possible charges over his efforts to remain president after his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
Cohen served a three-year sentence, partially in prison and partially in home confinement because of the COVID-19 pandemic, after pleading guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and tax evasion.
(Reporting by Karen Freifeld, Katharine Jackson and Ismail Shakil in Washington, D.C., and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Kanishka Singh, Doina Chiacu, Daniel Wallis and Sharon Singleton)
