The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned From Roy Cohn

The unrepentant political hitman who taught a younger Trump how to flout the rules didn’t get away with it forever.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Politico, September 19, 2019

One of Donald Trump’s most important mentors, one of the most reviled men in American political history, is about to have another moment.

Roy Cohn, who has been described by people who knew him as “a snake,” “a scoundrel” and “a new strain of son of a bitch,” is the subject of a new documentary out this week from producer and director Matt Tyrnauer. It’s an occasion to once again look at Cohn and ask how much of him and his “savage,” “abrasive” and “amoral” behavior is visible in the behavior of the current president. Trump, as has been well-established, learned so much from the truculent, unrepentant Cohn about how to get what he wants, and he pines for Cohn and his notorious capabilities still. Trump, after all, reportedly has said so himself, and it’s now the name of this film: “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”

What Cohn could, and did, get away with was the very engine of his existence. The infamous chief counsel for the red-baiting, Joseph McCarthy-chaired Senate subcommittee in the 1950s, Cohn was indicted four times from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s—for stock-swindling and obstructing justice and perjury and bribery and conspiracy and extortion and blackmail and filing false reports. And three times he was acquitted—the fourth ended in a mistrial—giving him a kind of sneering, sinister sheen of invulnerability. Cohn, Tyrnauer’s work reaffirms, took his sanction-skirting capers and twisted them into a sort of suit of armor.

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“I decided long ago,” Cohn once told Penthouse, “to make my own rules.”

He was acquitted in ??64, and he was acquitted in ’69, and he was acquitted in ’71, all the while thumbing his nose at the feds, but Cohn’s screw-you stance was a lifelong philosophy, entitlement plus boldness.

He was “an incredibly spoiled princeling of an only child,” Cohn cousin David Lloyd Marcus told me. “He always got his way,” recalled his favorite aunt. As an adult, the resting expression on his face, which was marred by a scar that ran like a scrape down the middle of his nose, was a mixture of “arrogant disdain” and a “whipped-dog look,” people observed, “caught somewhere between a pout and a challenging glare.”

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/19/roy-cohn-donald-trump-documentary-228144

The Ghost of Roy Cohn

BY TERRY MELANSON · AUGUST 24, 2014

EXCERPT...

In an interview with former NYPD detective James Rothstein, this author discovered that such operations do exist and go far back into America’s secret history. Rothstein is no conspiracy theorist. He is a legend in American law enforcement and speaks from experience. Furthermore, he gave me two notable examples from his time as a detective. Rothstein had an opportunity to have a sit-down with infamous McCarthy committee counsel Roy Cohn. During this sit-down, Cohn admitted to Rothstein that he was part of a rather elaborate sexual blackmail operation that compromised politicians with child prostitutes (Rothstein, no pagination). Cohn told Rothstein that this operation was being carried out as part of the anticommunist crusade of the time (no pagination).

Rothstein also had an opportunity to speak to infamous Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis. During this conversation, Sturgis revealed one of the reasons for breaking into the Watergate. According to Sturgis, there was a “Pedophile Book” hidden away at the Democratic National Committee headquarters (no pagination). The book was supposed to have a list of pedophiles on the American political scene (no pagination). One can only imagine the power G. Gordon Liddy would have held over the government if he had such a book in his possession.

I asked Rothstein if Roy Cohn was a real anticommunist or just using the fear of communism to justify his sex ring. It seemed like a fair question. After all, Cohn had argued against homosexuals being schoolteachers when he himself was a homosexual. Perhaps Cohn’s hypocrisy extended to his anticommunism. Rothstein made it clear that Cohn was a genuine anticommunist (no pagination). Anticommunist sentiments aside, evidence suggests that the sex ring operation started by Cohn was used for more than fighting the threat of domestic communists. Fugitive ex-CIA officer Frank Terpil has claimed that sexual blackmailing operations directed by the CIA were intensive in Washington during the Watergate era (DeCamp 179). Terpil also asserts that his former partner, Ed Wilson, was coordinating one of these sexual blackmail operations (179). In a letter to author Jim Hougan, Terpil revealed Wilson’s modus operandi:

“Historically, one of Wilson’s Agency jobs was to subvert members of both houses [of Congress] by any means necessary…. Certain people could be easily coerced by living out their sexual fantasies in the flesh…. A remembrance of these occasions [was] permanently recorded via selected cameras…. The technicians in charge of filming… were TSD [Technical Services Division of the CIA]. The unwitting porno stars advanced in their political careers, some of [whom] may still be in office.” (Qtd. in DeCamp 179)

According to John DeCamp, a former Nebraska Senator and Vietnam War hero, Wilson’s operation was merely a continuation of the one set up by Cohn (179). When I asked James Rothstein if Palfrey’s outfit was a continuation of the sexual blackmail rings that began with Cohn, he answered in the affirmative (Rothstein, pagination). The NYPD veteran made it clear that Palfrey’s outfit could not exist in Washington unless it was a tool for the power elite and sinister factions of the intelligence community (no pagination). Somewhere in a Queens cemetery, the corpse of a high-powered attorney is smiling in his grave.

SOURCE:

https://www.conspiracyarchive.com/2014/08/24/the-ghost-of-roy-cohn/

... Who knew what when? In Palo Alto, after Epstein’s conviction, he was a guest at a dinner for the MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden that was hosted by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. At the same dinner Elon Musk introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg. Is money so powerful that it tramples all other considerations? As James Baldwin put it, “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”

One of the most remarkable moments in Tyrnauer’s documentary comes near the end, when it’s no longer possible to pretend that Cohn isn’t a liar and a fraud, when it’s no longer possible to deny that he lacks both shame and conscience. When Cohn was about to be disbarred in 1986 for defrauding his clients and for taking advantage of a dying and incompetent man, character witnesses began to emerge. There were letters to the court from William F. Buckley Jr., Barbara Walters, William Safire, and, of course, Trump, who wrote that Cohn “has been extremely loyal and extremely honest.” Were Cohn’s parties—was his protection—really that good?...

Source: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/money-and-power/a29130905/roy-cohn-documentary-wheres-my-roy-cohn/