Several months before Donald Trump rolled down an escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his presidential bid, a contractor showed up at the building to collect a payment from the Trump Organization. Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney at the time, gave the guy $12,000 to $13,000 — in cash — stuffed inside a Walmart bag.
Because this was the Trump Organization and Michael Cohen was Michael Cohen, the payment was well short of the $50,000 the contractor, John Gauger, claimed he was owed. Because this was Team Trump gearing up for a White House run, Gauger’s work involved trying to rig a pair of online polls to make it appear that respondents believed Trump was a leading business figure and a top Republican presidential contender. And because all of this took place in Trumplandia, Gauger also runs the information technology department at a prominent Christian educational institution, Liberty University — and he met Cohen because the university’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., is an avid Trump supporter who has described the president as “a good, moral person.”
