Trump’s political fixer comes unstuck

US President Donald Trump is sticking by his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen – even as the allegations of a “cash for access” scandal mount up against him. Jane Lewis reports.

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Cohen: allegedly offered Qatari officials White House access for $1m
(Image credit: 2018 Getty Images)

The latest scandal to hit Donald Trump, like many others, centres on his longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen a fellow New Yorker, who once told Vanity Fair: "I'm the guy who would take a bullet for the president." Cohen's firm, Essential Consultants, was used to pay porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 before the US election. It later raked in $2.4m for "strategic advice" from companies that included a Korean defence firm and Columbus Nova a New York investment firm that effectively serves as a vehicle of Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.