WASHINGTON — The addresses and phone numbers of family members of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen were posted on a doxxing website after presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was convicted of 34 counts in connection with a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 elections.
Cohen, Trump’s former “fixer,” played a key role in the plot to silence adult film actor Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election and was tested against Trump during his trial. According to Cohen, Trump said revealing Daniels’ affair story would be a “total disaster” and “catastrophic” for his 2016 campaign.
Trump, who has denied any affair, was convicted of falsifying business records related to Cohen’s secret payment to prevent Daniels from telling his story. “What I was doing was for the benefit and benefit of Mr. Trump,” Cohen, who served time in prison, said during the trial.
The phone numbers and addresses of Cohen’s wife and children were posted early Monday on a site that has been used to target other figures involved in Trump’s various legal issues, according to Advance Democracy, a group of non-profit research.
“What sad times we live in when people resort to this type of doxxing stupidity to redress their grievances,” Cohen said in a statement to NBC News about attempts to release his family’s personal information.
In an interview with Joy Reid on MSNBC Thursday evening, Cohen said his family received “unwanted phone calls, emails and text messages” and that unwanted Domino’s pizzas were delivered to his apartment building around 11 p.m. Sunday night .
Trump supporters attempted to harass jurors last week after his conviction, and they also targeted prosecutors and the judge in the case with threats. At trial, the mother of a former police officer who was nearly killed in January. On December 6, 2021, by rioters who believed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election had been “crushed” after his son called Trump “authoritarian” with “a fetish for violence.”
“Our researchers regularly look for potential threats and incitements to political violence,” Daniel J. Jones, president of Advance Democracy, said in a statement. “In our most recent analysis, we identified online personal information – doxxing – about Michael Cohen, his wife and children. The person who shared the information online, on a site known for doxxing, likely had intending to harm Cohen – providing these personal details about the Cohen family in the context of Cohen being called a “lying bastard” and being identified as someone who “betrayed Trump”, presumably for testifying for the prosecution during former President Trump’s criminal trial in New York.
Last month, Trump and his allies in Congress falsely claimed that there was a plot to kill Trump during the FBI’s 2022 Mar-A-Lago raid, even though the FBI deliberately chose to search the establishment at a time when Trump was known to be hundreds of miles away and out of state. After the FBI searched Mar-A-Lago, a Trump supporter who was at the Capitol in January. On December 6, 2021, he attacked an FBI field office in Cincinnati while armed with an AR-15-style rifle before being killed after a chase.