Trump’s former consigliere, Michael Cohen, is reported to be writing a tell-all book. Whether he’ll be writing in in a jail cell or at home is still not clear, as his pandemic-related release from prison was suddenly, unceremoniously, and suspiciously rescinded just days after it was announced in late April 2020.\u00a0 One thing is certain, though: He’s got the goods on Trump and his circle.<\/p>\n
This article first appeared on this site in 2018, just after to the FBI raided Trump fixer Michael Cohen\u2019s office, home and hotel room,\u00a0 where they found and seized a cache of old cell phones\u2014sixteen cell phones,<\/a> to be precise.\u00a0 The parody song at the end of this post could be the theme song for his new book.<\/p>\n You have to wonder why Cohen held onto all of the phones. It is possible, after all, to transfer one\u2019s contacts to a new phone. It\u2019s possible, too, to destroy a phone and its memory, if it contains things you don\u2019t want discovered. One could speculate that he kept them for sentimental reasons, or because he thought that someday a Blackberry would be a valuable collectors\u2019 item. Not likely, though. A more plausible explanation would be that Cohen hung onto his old phones because they house, in their micro-memories, some important things that didn\u2019t transfer over to the next generation of mobile phone. And what might those things be? Could they be saved voice mails and \u201ctaped\u201d conversations with people Michael Cohen worked with? Cohen is known to record conversations<\/a>\u2014perhaps to retain them to play back in the future as embarrassing evidence or leverage, perhaps to use them as gossip fodder, or perhaps to play them for the merriment of his friends.<\/p>\n Whatever his reasons, the seized cell phones are now in the hands of the special master appointed to evaluate the attorney-client privilege-ness of what they and other documents contain. Are they the 21st<\/sup> century equivalent of the incriminating Nixon tapes? We may never know. Suffice it to say, though, that Cohen is probably sweating\u2014as are all the people he may have talked to over 16-phones-worth of conversations.<\/p>\n So, in honor of the 16-phone seizure, I\u2019ve composed a parody of Tennesse Ernie Ford\u2019s, \u201c16 Tons<\/a>.<\/p>\n