Trump lawyer: I’d take a bullet for the president

President Trump’s longtime lawyer said he would “take a bullet” for his boss in a new interview with Vanity Fair published on Thursday.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, professed his loyalty to the president and recalled a time when Breitbart News executive chairman Steven Bannon, who was then part of the Trump campaign, accused Cohen of leaking to the press.

“I’m thankful I sat on my hands that day,” Cohen told the magazine. “I’m the guy who stops the leaks. I’m the guy who protects the president and the family. I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president.”

“And I told him that before he comes here with his anger and his conjectures, I strongly recommended he think twice before doing it again.”

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Cohen added that he turned down an offer near the end of the campaign to write a tell-all book about Trump and his family — but not before toying with the publishers.

“During the campaign, towards the end, I was offered $10 million to write a tell-all book,” Cohen said. 

“I said, ‘How about $100 million.’ They asked if I’d do it for that much and I told them no, I just wanted to see how high I could get them up and then say no. There’s no money in the world that could get me to disclose anything about them,” he added.

Cohen’s proximity to Trump has ensnared him in an ongoing investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russia. In June, Cohen hired his own attorney, and it was revealed that he had been involved in negotiations with a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin to ask for help with a stalled Trump development project in 2016.

In August, The New York Times reported that another Trump associate, Felix Slater, told Cohen that they could “engineer” Trump’s victory with the help of Putin.

“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote to Cohen in 2015. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”