Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump

by Michael Cohen

I’d never been away from my wife and children before, so that caused melancholy, along with the fact that I truly didn’t believe that I belonged there. Talking to family was difficult because we only got 300 minutes a month of phone calls, which diced down to ten minutes a day, and visiting was complicated because the meeting room often became overcrowded. There was a saying in prison: The days go by slow, but the weeks go by fast. Every Friday night, there was a Sabbath dinner, which I attended, so that was a good way to measure time. But there was another reality, as I developed serious hypertension problems, leading to my hospitalization twice, accompanied twenty-four-hours-a-day by two prison officers. The hospitalizations, along with pre-existing blood clotting conditions from years earlier, eventually provided the basis for my early release during the COVID-19 crisis. But first I had to go through the William Barr Department of Justice kangaroo-court process. As the virus spread throughout the country, including the petri dishes that constituted prisons in a time of plague, I was moved to solitary confinement to quarantine for release on furlough to convert to home detention. As the date for my release neared, though, Bill Barr changed the criteria for release and seventy inmates were returned to the camp, leaving a dozen of us in solitary. It felt like Barr’s sudden amendment of the rules was aimed at me, at the direction of President Trump, which speaks volumes abo...