“Where’s My Roy Cohn?”: Film Explores How Joseph McCarthy’s Ex-Aide Mentored Trump & Roger Stone

[00:00:00]and this is democracy now democracynow.org the war and peace report I'm Amy Goodman on Friday federal agents raided the home of president Trump's ally and former advisor Roger stone prosecutors from special counsel Robert mullahs team charged the longtime Republican operative with obstruction witness tampering and lying to Congress about his communications with WikiLeaks an indictment unsealed Friday reveals a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact stone ahead of the 2016 election to see what other leaks about Hillary Clinton in the Democratic National Committee were coming from WikiLeaks Roger stone was released later Friday on a 250 thousand dollar bond and spoke to the press Roger stone will be arraigned on Tuesday stone and Donald Trump share a unique history both were heavily influenced by the infamous attorney Roy Cohn who served as a chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare in the 1950s and would later become a leading mob attorney Roy Cohen represented Donald Trump for years and once claimed Trump considered him to be his best friend where a Cohen is the subject of a new documentary here at the Sundance Film Festival titled where's my Roy Cohn I spoke to the film's director matt turn our on sunday i began by asking him to explain who Roger stone is and his connection to Roy Cohn he was a protege of Roy Konya something in common with Donald Trump other than being friend and often on political adviser to Donald Trump he Trumper both the protegees of Roy Cohn their origins in politics and really in all of the way they deal with life and business come from the same place and that's the late Roy M Cohn so before we go to the later I M Cohen talk about your feelings on Friday on that day that the that began with a raid of Roger stones house and just who Roger stone is Roger stone is a political dirty trickster whose methods and persona really dovetail with and pre-staged of the Trump administration they're cut from the same cloth and again they have the same mentor I can't overstate the importance of that this comes from the dirty pool kind of illegitimate political world that work home personified Richard Nixon toiled in and Donald Trump is the kind of delayed re-emergence of this dirty pool transactional type of politics that now really is verging on to a type of fascism that I think has been incipient in our Republic for a long time but has emerged and the point of the film is that the seeds for this were planted long ago and Roy Cohn was a major seller of those seeds let's go to a clip of Roger stone from your film talking in the same way you're talking interestingly about Roy Coen Donald Trump and well Roger stone himself Roy would always be for an offensive strategy those are the rules of the war you don't fight on the other guy's ground you define what the debate I think learned that from Roy I learned that from Roy that's Roger stone talking about Roy and Cowan so Matt turn our take us there take us to who Roy M Cohen is and how you became so fascinated with him Roy Cohn would have been I think a very bold footnote in American history if it hadn't been for the surprising result of the election of 2016 he was at a very young age the handmaiden of Joseph McCarthy in the early 50s on through the mid-50s he was most famous for those photographs of him whispering into the ear of McCarthy during the infamous Senate subcommittee witch-hunting hearings where McCarthy demagogue of his era was trying to root out mostly imaginary communists in the State Department and other branches of the government Cohn was a son of great privilege who become an attorney in fact he graduated from law school so young he couldn't take the bar exam for another year he was a prodigy and he was a very brilliant man it turned out through the course of his life he used his brilliance for mostly the dark arts of manipulation and self enrichment and certainly later in his career even literally mafia activities he was became the number one mob lawyer and in this country but he was also the great I called the CEO of the favor Bank he was the great political fixer of his time so well the mob is where Donald Trump comes in in his early years of being a developer in Manhattan but go back even further to the Rosenbergs from before the McCarthy here sure Roy Cohn cut his teeth in public life as the junior prosecutor in the Rosenberg spy case which was an infamous trial of to do Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were accused of and convicted of sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union conspiring to yes and Cohn was among a group of Jewish lawyers and judges who were appointed to give the impression that it was not an anti somatic prosecution he proved himself to be incredibly aggressive and very very savvy at gaining publicity for himself and for the cause that he was pushing and he is perhaps most famous in this for engaging in a very questionable collusion with the judge who was judge Kaufman and judge Kaufman legend has it would call Roy Cohn the prosecutor in the case outside of his synagogue Park Avenue synagogue in New York to ask what Cohen the junior prosecutor for guidance on what kind of sentencing he should hand down Roy Cohn and just to be clear ex parte communications between the judge and a prosecutor are illegal you said and Cohen was occur encouraging him by Cohen's own admission to give the death penalty not only to Julius who turned out was indeed guilty and fo who was no one's ever proven guilt for the couple were sentenced to death and executed in the electric chair it was a truly traumatic moment for certainly the Jewish community of the United States but also really the United States at large in the film unearths footage contemporary footage that was actually very shocking to me I didn't realize how violent and emotional the protests were in the streets of New York City on the day of the execution and this was what June 21st 1953 that's right and Cohen at the time was I believe 23 and of course the message that was sent all over the country with the execution of this couple at sing-sing putting them in the electric chair interestingly you have a clip of Roger stone that we want to turn to right now remembering what Roy Cohen said to him about their execution when you would try to get him to talk about Joe McCarthy or the army McCarthy trials or that whole period J Edgar Hoover you couldn't get much out of him on the Rosenbergs I asked him how he felt about it I told my read of the case and he said and I quote if I if I could have pulled the switch I'd have done it myself that doesn't sound like like remorse I think Roy was a hardliner to the end that's Roger stone and from the documentary where is my Roy Coen talking about Roy and Coen and the execution of the Rosenbergs Matt turn our it seemed to me that someone in their early 20s who had killed a mother of two who was almost certainly not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted and murdered by the state might have some feelings of remorse for this later in life as he was on his own deathbed for instance I asked stone that and stone gave the answer that you just saw on the phone club so let's move forward down to the McCarthy hearings in Washington Roy M Cohen becomes his right-hand man famously and you show this so beautifully in the film constantly in the ear of McCarthy you've got two sets of hearings you've got the original McCarthy hearings going after communists and then you've got the army McCarthy hearings and you describe this as an early reality TV very trumpian explain what took place army McCarthy is a byword in our culture the McCarthy era of course is the dictionary definition of witch hunting and and demagoguery and the big lie in politics the army McCarthy hearings details and the nuances I really feel have been lost to history and lost in the the very poorest education system we have in this country that just doesn't teach history thoroughly so I wanted to show a granular portrayal of this peculiar episode that occurred that really riveted the nation at the dawn of the age of television what happens in the complex army McCarthy scenario is that cone is McCarthy's protege Cohn as a string puller and favored doer wants to do a particular favor for someone a certain someone special to him that is a young man named G David shine who is the scion of a wealthy hotel family and it was just Roy Cohn's type sexually speaking it turns out Cohn we haven't mentioned yet was gay and very deeply in the closet in this period he clearly has a romantic crush on David shine and gets him on Joseph McCarthy's committee as a junior aide at a certain point in the Korean War period David shine is drafted into the Army as a private this incenses not only David shine but Roy Cohn so Cowan who was powerful at the time but not as powerful as he thought he was did what every wealthy spoiled child might do except this one happened to be occupying a Senate post he called the Secretary of the army and he threatened the Secretary of the army and he said either David shine is given a commission as a general not a private and posted in the penthouse of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York the city that Roy Cohn would happen to be his hometown or we were Cohn and Joseph McCarthy will go after the army and accuse them of being run by secret gay communists cabal the army didn't react well to this bizarre threat coming from a relative political nobody the one with great connections and a connection to the leading demagogue of the day Joseph McCarthy so the army pushed back we have to remember also that the president of the time was an army man Dwight Eisenhower was general and he didn't say much at the time but behind the scenes was did like these accusations being leveled against his branch in the military so what unfolds then is I believe the first instance of reality television unwitting reality television I think TV in its infancy was trying to find its footing and whatever was good spectacle and would ever get people to tune in flu at the time this was a open televised hearing with a sensationalistic charge and a secret homosexual subplot it made the stuff of perfect television drama really although no one really knew what was going to happen it was an open-ended narrative which it really is the definition of reality TV so talk about the really the climax of these hearings with the counsel for the Secretary of the army what ended up happening was the army lawyered up and went after McCarthy and Cohn and they hired a very good lawyer a very folksy telegenic avuncular man who was a Boston Brahmin attorney named Joseph Welch Welch played his cards beautifully on TV and in the hearing room here and he paced himself he's sort of lüt his fellow questioners pick apart this bizarre scenario McCarthy and Cohen are demagoguing and trying to show that there are communists and gays in the army and that they're bad for the United States and and bringing down the Republic and the democracy basically the army was able to poke holes in that eventually near the end McCarthy CiCi's losing this battle and he wants to fight back there had been a backroom deal made at a certain point that one of the people that they were going to drag through the mud was an associate of Welch's in his Boston law firm who may or may not have been a member of a group that may or may not have had some communist leanings it wasn't even a communist front it was it was really nothing as most of the charges McCarthy leveled were and Cohen had told Welch I'll trade you not implicating this guy for something else and McCarthy missed that meeting and he started to bring this young man's name into the hearings on television and Welch realized that he'd broken the agreement and went after McCarthy and he says words it turned out to be immortal very few words but they'll always be remembered among anyone who is a student of history and even people who were casual TV viewers at the time and it's I'll miss some of these words but it was basically senator you've done enough and he's sort of winding up like a pitcher would wind up at long last have you no sense of decency it's the Russell hearing room of the Senate which was where Neetu Hills draw a trial hearing took place bursts into applause you can see McCarthy's face just collapses basically he goes pale and this caught the conscience of an entire nation because of television and it led to the very quick discrediting and downfall and eventual censure of Joseph McCarthy in the Senate and it destroyed work hone as well as a Senate aide and that really ended the McCarthy era Joseph Welch it should have ended Roy Cohn but it did not let's leap forward to his relationship with Donald Trump how he came to know Donald Trump so Cohn has an immediate success as a lawyer in New York and people have said to me journalists have asked me how could someone so discredited worm his way to the top echelon of New York society after having crashed and burned so badly and humiliated himself and everyone around him in the McCarthy in army McCarthy period my answer is have you ever met New York Society it's the most transactional place in the world and Roy Cohn was the king of relationships I call him the CEO of the favor Bank and that's the way he operated and and to great success all through the 60s all through the early 70s and there comes a day a fateful day when roy cohn power broker mob lawyer meets a young man who was the just starting out son of a major real estate developer in queens in brooklyn and Donald J Trump Trump was pure outer-borough material he had the money but he didn't have the status he was considered to be very uncouth and was not welcome in the important places in New York City business and society but he had a burning aspiration to rise to those levels he did find his way to a chic nightclub at that time called La Club on kind of Midtown East and Manhattan which existed until relatively recently in fact in that kind of Swing II proto disco environment he meets the famous work home at that precise moment the Justice Department was going after Trump's father and Trump himself who was a junior partner in the Trump family real estate business for racial discrimination at the time it was very provable that the Trump Housing Company was taking the rental applications of minority applicants and marking them with a code word which was c4 colored and then denying them rental apartments the Justice Department was going to come down very hard on them and Trump was worried and wanted to help his father and help himself out of this nasty predicament he explained the predicament to Roy Cohn that night and said hey can you help me get out of this and Cohn said absolutely come see me tomorrow morning Trump did and Cohn in the room with him outlined a strategy for conquering this Justice Department suit against them which really was the game plan that Trump followed every day for the rest of his life and into our own lives and our daily lives now fully provable that they were engaging in racist practices but they never admitted it that's right so they settled and settling is not technically an admission of guilt now Trump says he never settles but of course he settles all the time and Cohen says he never settled or never pleaded and he pleaded and settled all the time but Cohen's premise was never admit guilt and the settlement is an admission of guilt and if you don't admit guilt you can go to the press and admit and claim victory pure Roy Cohn so Roy Cohen was not only his lawyer that he turned to one of his lawyers but he was considered him one of his best friends he was constantly Ari and best friend in in Cohen's eyes he in the film on on an interview that he gives in the early eighties brags that Donald Trump and a letter to him says that he's his best friend when Trump buys the Bonwit teller building this massive concrete building historic and then in its place builds Trump Tower talk about the blueprint basically that involves the mob and Roy Cohen the Trump Tower story is exemplary it's just that's the pattern for the way Trump and the Trump Organization did business and again it's torn from the PlayBook of Roy Cohn it probably didn't need to be this way the corners were cut to generate maximum profits and I think it was also in that time in New York just part of what you did as a scold augur to kind of get the Mafia involved and you know get special privileges to speed up construction etc etc etc so this was a really corrupt project and I want to give credit to the journalist David Cay Johnston who was doing this reporting and back in the 80s and has been chronicling the the bad business dealings of the Trump Organization for years and we we rely on an interview with David Cay Johnston in the film to explain how something was very peculiar about the construction of Trump Tower which roy cohn helped Donald Trump achieve an engineer and in Trump a rather cone shows off a letter from Trump thanking him for allowing of the the fast realization of the Trump Tower project a few things in particular though Trump towers built of concrete buildings in the 80s in New York were very rarely built of concrete they were built of structural steel usually which is a much more efficient way to build and one reason it was more efficient was that the mob at the time controlled the poured concrete contract business and you need to pay off the mall and also the mob in a bit of subtle skullduggery control the unions so the unions could close the construction fences and keep the cement mixers waiting to come in to the construction site and ruin your cement and cost you you know millions of dollars basically but indeed this building went up made of concrete because Roy Cohn according to Johnston's reporting introduced Trump to all of his mafioso connections that allowed this project to go forward without any interruptions there was another very famous thing which also I believe Hillary Clinton brought up in the campaign which was that the bomb would tell her building which was the building that preceded Trump Tower on that site was demolished by a group of illegal immigrants called the Polish brigade that were brought down to New York City from Rochester New York Trump never paid them so not only was he employing illegal immigrants and not paying appropriate taxes and having any accountability on that in way back in the 70s and 80s but he was also sniffing people again pure Roy Cohn Cohn was an expert tax evader and stiffer of contractors and he Trump Donald Trump really learned this its thought from Cohn so we take this story decades later to just this week where the New York Times in Washington Post a reporting an undocumented immigrants who work at the Westchester golf course of President Trump and though they were honored for being best employee repeatedly one by one they were called in and they were fired they are speaking out and saying the Trump's full well knew that they didn't have the proper documents yes I mean so much of the film really is connecting the dots and giving even more truth to the famous George Santayana aphorism those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it I also like to quote gore Vidal he used to say we live in the United States of amnesia all of this has precedent and sometimes very literal precedent the same people perpetrating the same misdeeds or crimes or telling the same lies and untruth they've been proven and reported on for years and yet it's occurring again now on a international scale with really terrifying long-term consequences so let's go back to your interview with Roger stone in 2017 where he once again quotes Roy Cohen Roy famously argued that all of the expenses of his law firm were were deductible the IRS did not see it this way Roy told me that the whole point of the IRS was to die owing them as much as humanly possible that's Roger stone in that Journal so there's a great interview with Mike Wallace and Roy Cohn where Wallace says to Cohn your attacks avoider and Cohen indignantly says we're all tax avoiders the president's tax a tax of would of course the president that cones talking about at that moment was Ronald Reagan but when you watch it now it has a certain resonance and ring to it and then Wallace brilliantly says well you're better at it than others and then clone says well don't blame me for your inadequacies Trump did the same thing in the debate with Hillary Clinton where she assailed him of tax evasion and he then leaned into the microphone and said that makes me smart and at that moment I my heart sank because I thought I could see that that would be a very populist one-liner and a debate actually conga thought I mean there's something about the public that loves a scoundrel and Cohn played back to the hilt and I think Trump also took that persona from his mentor Roy Cohn so now take us back to Roger stone the man who's now just been indicted in the Muller inquiry and talk about the triumvirate here Roy Cohen Roger stone and Donald Trump one of the people I spoke to off-camera about Roy Cohn and his relationship with Trump said to me not jokingly Donald Trump is Roy Cohn and you could say that about Roger stone I think Roger stone might say it about himself actually they swallowed Roy Cohn whole in a certain way and absorbed all of his incredible abilities at practicing the dark arts of manipulation of politics and media and understanding the nexus between politics and media and how to operate those lovers or really dark and selfish purposes that's really what cones mastery ended up being I think what you convey very well in this film is not just their manipulative nough sweather we're talking about Trump firstone or Cohen but the utter cruelty Roy Cohen willing to destroy lives whether in his anti-communist crusade his anti LGBTQ crusade even though he himself was a gay man ultimately he would die of AIDS though he denied this right that he was dying of AIDS yes he denied it consistently he denied it on camera off camera publicly and privately now President Reagan and Nancy were his dear friends President Reagan wouldn't mention aids for something like seven years of his presidency mm-hmm but in the very end of Roy Cohen's life you report that they got him into a special drug trial at the National Institutes of Health yes I mean this is one of the most bitter ironies and just really diabolical truths of clones life he spearheaded with McCarthy the lavender scare in the 50s ruining the lives of LGBTQ people in government of course he himself was one so that was bad enough he according to Nancy Reagan helped her husband get elected who actually was perhaps the key person for a variety of reasons the Reagan's had many gay friends but they were publicly and on a policy level as bad as you could be for gay rights and handling the hiv/aids plague at the time Cohn appealed to them for special treatment as he was secretly dying of the disease and Ronald and Nancy Reagan got him into an experimental treatment program at the NIH that very few people could get into their telegrams that we show on screen of Ronald Reagan lively ignoring the greatest public health crisis of our time telegram in where I cone wishing him good health and Godspeed as he gets out of the hospital and goes back home after a round of experimental treatment and then talk about how Donald Trump the man who called Roy Cohen his best friend how he dealt with Roy Cohen's suffering from AIDS many people who were witnesses to the relationship cite that Trump did back away from Cohn when he was on his deathbed at the same time Cohn was disbarred very late in his life with almost I think weeks left to live they managed after decades of trying at different levels of government to get him disbarred it was achieved he had late stage HIV illness at that time and it there are many accounts of him appealing to Trump for certain kinds of help and being nervous about what Trump would think and then Trump did according to his cousins who were very much present at the time of Cohn's illness back away left him to die alone as many of Cohen's friends did yes I think this is the the moral the story of being a transactional person in many ways Cohn had many friends but how true were these friends they were friends that were gained through being a master of transactional living transactional politics it was a total transactional figure when he had this travel disease which was a deeply ironic thing for him to die of he lost a lot of friends who were I think backing away because of these dual crises in his life disbarment and an assured death of a terrible and at that time we have to remember really extremely terrifying disease that was very little understood which brings us now to the title of your film where's my Roy Cohn talk about how you came after that where's my roy cohn is not a question it's a complaint issued by Trump in the White House in 2017 when I think he first felt the walls of the mother investigation closing in on him I don't think he could have predicted the length of this I think he thought he would short-circuit it and he was hoping that a roy cohn type would help him short-circuit it he was not able to find that in the person of his attorney general Jeff Sessions or his White House Counsel both of who both of whom have left office it's a fundamental misunderstanding of someone in the executive branch that the Attorney General or the White House Counsel serves him personally these are the these are the employees of a dictator these aren't the employees of a elected president in the United States the Attorney General represents the people the Justice Department represents the interests of the United States people are sovereign in the United States president's not sovereign I I'm not sure anyone's being able to explain that to Donald Trump but Roy Cohn taught him that he was sovereign where I Cohen behaved as if he was sovereign Cohn was sovereign and he convinced Trump that if you follow that playbook of ultimate selfishness and ends justifying means that you could get away with anything we're clone almost did it's Shakespearean an irredeemable his end but he's given us this delayed re-emergence of demagoguery that is the result of a seed he planted in the early 80s I would say and has come back to haunt us and a really unimaginable way Matt turn our director of the new documentary where's my Roy Coen it just premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival will we'll be broadcasting all week Democracy Now is accepting applications for a full time one year paid news fellowship details online at democracynow.org democracy's not produced by Mike Burke Tina Guster Carla wills Academy warned off John Hamilton Ravi Karen honey Massoud Trina dirty Maria studio and Livi Rainey Mike to flip Oh Miguel McGarrett engineer special thanks to Becca Stella Julie Crosby Renee felts Dennis Moynihan and Erin Dooley and to our crew here at Park City TV Danielle Turner Robbie Johnson Diego Romo Brendan O'Leary Kristen Parker you d be a varios and Jacqueline daily to see all of our broadcast from Sundance go to Democracy Now oh oh RG I'm Amy Goodman from Park City Utah thanks so much for joining us [Music] you