WASHINGTON — The addresses and phone numbers of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's family members were posted to a doxxing website after presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in connection with a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election.
Cohen, Trump's former "fixer," played a key role in the plot to keep adult film actor Stormy Daniels quiet during the 2016 election and testified against Trump at trial. According to Cohen, Trump said the revelation of Daniels' story of an affair would be a "total disaster" and "catastrophic" for his 2016 campaign.
Trump, who has denied an affair, was convicted of falsifying business records related to Cohen's hush money payment to keep Daniels from telling her story. "What I was doing was at the direction of and for the benefit of Mr. Trump," Cohen, who served time in prison, said at trial.
Phone numbers and addresses for 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 nonprofit research group.
“What sad times we are living through when people resort to this type of doxxing stupidity to redress their grievances,” Cohen said in a statement to NBC News about the attempts to spread his family's personal information.
In an interview with Joy Reid on MSNBC on Thursday night, Cohen said that his family had received "unwanted phone calls and emails and text messages" and unwanted Domino's pizzas were delivered to his building at around 11 p.m. on Sunday night.
Trump supporters tried to dox jurors last week after his conviction, and they also targeted prosecutors and the judge in the case with threats. During the trial, the mother of a former police officer who was nearly killed on Jan. 6, 2021, by rioters who believed Trump's lies about the 2020 election was "swatted" after her son called Trump "an authoritarian" with "a violence fetish."
"Our researchers are regularly scanning for potential threats and instigations of political violence," Daniel J. Jones, the president of Advance Democracy, said in a statement. "During our most recent scan, we identified personal details online — doxxing— for Michael Cohen, his wife, and his children. The individual who shared the information online, on a site known for doxxing, likely had an intent to harm Cohen— providing these personal details on the Cohen family in the context of calling Cohen a 'lying bastard' and identifying him as someone who 'betrayed Trump,' presumably for testifying for the prosecution in former President Trump’s NY criminal trial."
Last month, Trump and his allies in Congress falsely claimed that there was a plot to kill Trump during the 2022 FBI search of Mar-A-Lago, even though the FBI purposefully chose to search the facility 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 had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, attacked an FBI field office in Cincinnati while armed with an AR-15 style rifle before he was killed after a chase.
