Donald Trump\u2019s former fixer Michael Cohen on Monday asked a federal judge to dismiss a $500m lawsuit filed by the former president just weeks after Trump was indicted in New York over hush money payments to adult film star\u00a0Stormy Daniels, contending that it was an unlawful effort to engage in witness intimidation.<\/p>\n

The motion argued the fact that\u00a0Trump\u2019s\u00a0lawsuit only came when he was charged last month by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, instead of when Cohen first made the claims years before, suggested that Trump had sued him out of retribution. Cohen is expected to serve as the star witness for the prosecution at trial.<\/p>\n

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Trump\u2019s lawsuit, which accuses Cohen of spreading false information about him and breaching contractual obligations through his public statements, also directly references Cohen\u2019s role in the hush money case.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe complaint, in this case, is yet another brazen and indeed unlawful attempt to intimidate and silence a key witness against Mr Trump,\u201d Cohen\u2019s lawyers wrote in a 35-page motion\u00a0filed in federal court in Florida. \u201cMr Trump\u2019s campaign of retaliation should be shut down.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Cohen\u2019s suggestion that Trump was engaging in witness tampering against him may face hurdles under New York state law, since the lawsuit was not a direct attempt to influence his testimony and Cohen is unlikely to change course.<\/p>\n

But Trump has a long history of taking legal actions against his perceived political enemies that have later been rejected as frivolous, including when the US district court judge David Middlebrooks\u00a0fined Trump and one of his lawyers nearly $1m for suing his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and others.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit against Cohen was one that Trump had wanted to file for weeks, according to a person close to the former president, angered that Cohen had testified against him to the Manhattan grand jury and appeared on cable news to discuss the hush money case.<\/p>\n

Separate from the witness tampering claim, Cohen\u2019s lawyers \u2013 Benjamin Brodsky and Danya Perry, the former deputy chief of the criminal division at the US attorney\u2019s office for the southern district of New York \u2013 argued in the filing that Trump generally lacked standing.<\/p>\n

The complaint about a breach of fiduciary duty should be dismissed, the response said, because most of the allegations were time-barred by a statute of limitations of two years starting in 2018 when Cohen published his tell-all memoir about the hush money scheme titled Disloyal.<\/p>\n

The claims that Cohen breached other contractual obligations should similarly fail because they did not lay out express violations of the confidentiality agreement that was itself unenforceable due to its vagueness, the response said.<\/p>\n

And as for Trump\u2019s claims that Cohen engaged in unjust enrichment by revealing Trump\u2019s confidential information \u2013 which itself is unclear because Trump simultaneously says those revelations are false \u2013 Cohen\u2019s lawyers argued they should be dismissed because Trump failed to state an actual claim.<\/p>\n

In a statement, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung attacked Cohen: \u201cMichael Cohen is an admitted liar, thief, perjurer, and convicted felon. Michael Cohen has zero credibility, and any and all statements made by him about President Trump should be disregarded.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump for months has been blaming Cohen for his legal troubles with the Manhattan district attorney\u2019s office, according to multiple people close to him, and suggested on Fox News that Cohen at the time had been trying to ingratiate himself to him by arranging hush money payments to Daniels.<\/p>\n

The case centers on $130,000 that Trump paid to Daniels through Cohen in the final days of the 2016 campaign. Trump later reimbursed Cohen with $35,000 checks using his personal funds, which were recorded as legal expenses \u2013 in what prosecutors\u00a0have charged as bookkeeping fraud.<\/p>\n

Cohen later pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal campaign finance violations for arranging the hush money payments, as well as a number of other charges, including lying to Congress about a plan for a Trump property in Moscow. The false testimony is one of the areas Trump\u2019s defense is expected to seize on at trial, people involved with his legal strategy have said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n