Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen said on his podcast on Friday that the former president’s media company, which owns Truth Social, has shown “signs of serious trouble.”
Last week, Shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC), an existing shell company, completed a merger with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), a company founded by the former president. The stock price of TMTG rose 16 percent the day after the merger at about $58 a share and climbed even higher, up to $66.22 on March 27. However, the stock price plummeted this week, hitting its lowest point since the merger at $40.10 on Friday. The stock price did slightly increase to 40.59 when the stock market closed on Friday.
Cohen warned in the latest episode of his podcast Mea Culpa that “even before the company went public, there’s signs of serious trouble.”
Cohen served prison time after pleading guilty to eight criminal counts, including campaign finance violations related to an alleged hush money scheme involving Trump and adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign. Cohen has emerged as a fierce critic of Trump, often appearing on MSNBC for his unique perspective as a former member of Trump’s inner circle.
Newsweek reached out to TMTG via online form for comment.
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“I don’t understand this valuation at all. It makes zero sense,” Cohen said on his podcast. “As of February, there were a mere 5 million active daily users. Compare that to 245 million active daily users on X, formerly known as Twitter…Truth Social doesn’t even begin to compete. In fact, Truth Social is smaller than some people’s Instagram, TikTok or their X accounts.”
He added: “It’s never been profitable. And since 2021, the only thing that kept Truth Social alive was a series of emergency loans, get a load of this, provided in part by a Russian-American businessman who’s now under investigation for federal insider trading and money laundering.”
Cohen was referring to Anton Postolnikov, who according to a report from The Guardian helped keep Trump’s company afloat.
The newspaper said that TMTG took emergency loans, two of which were worth $8 million, in the form of convertible promissory notes, from an entity called the ES Family Trust, which opened an account with Paxum Bank that is co-owned by Postolnikov.
Postolnikov is also the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over his role in the TMTG merger, The Guardian reported.
Neither Trump nor TMTG has been accused of any wrongdoing, and there is no sign that they knew about the background to the loans. A lawyer representing TMTG told The Guardian that it was “a false narrative that TMTG has these fake connections to Russia.”
TMTG said in a previous statement to Newsweek: “The Guardian‘s defamatory reporting on TMTG is already the subject of ongoing litigation, through which the full extent of their malicious falsehoods will become clear.”
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