A Harvard University senior says Donald Trump's personal lawyer threatened to have a group of students at the Ivy League school expelled over a joke they pulled on the billionaire businessman as he ran for president.
"He says, you know, 'I'm gonna come up to Harvard. You're all gonna get expelled,'" Tom Waddick, an editor at the school's famous satirical magazine The Harvard Lampoon, said attorney Michael Cohen told him in an interview with CBS News' "60 Minutes" on Sunday.
Cohen apparently blew his stack over a prank Harvard Lampoon staffers pulled by tricking Trump campaign into thinking that The Harvard Crimson student newspaper was endorsing Trump for president.
In the caper, members of the Lampoon used bolt cutters to swipe a wooden "president's chair" from the offices of the Crimson during the summer of 2015.
The pranksters, posing as the editorial board of the paper, offered Trump their "endorsement" and delivered the 150-200 pound chair to Trump Tower in Manhattan.
"He was very nice. He had his hair fixed. While we were there they had sort of hairspray and combed it over and stuff. And he said 'People don't think my hair is real, but you can all testify this is very real,"' Waddick told "60 Minutes."
The Lampoon crew also posed for a photo with Trump, flanking the beaming candidate as he sat in the chair.
"[Trump] said, 'Everyone do the thumbs up,' so we're all doing his sort of signature thumbs up around him," Waddick said.
But a few days later as The Harvard Lampoon was preparing to run a story and photo, the Trump campaign realized they'd been had and the publication got a call from Cohen.
Waddick says Cohen told him, "If this photo gets out you'll be outta that school faster than you know it. I can be up there tomorrow."
"I mean, it was terrifying. He asked me to send my Harvard ID so he could have my identity, my information," Waddick said. "I sent it right away. I was so afraid that if I didn't, he might actually be crazy enough to fly up here."
Regardless of the alleged threat, The Lampoon published its story and photo, headlined "Crimson Endorses Trump for President." The story cheekily dubbed Trump "a celebrity above all" and praised his NBC reality show "The Apprentice" with helping "inactive or troubled" celebrities regain their fame.
It added: "The creative methods and avenues through which Trump has created jobs would likely make (former Crimson editor-in-chief) Franklin D. Roosevelt '03 smile."
Cohen apparently didn't get back to the magazine, but Trump was not amused.
"The students who perpetrated this are fraudsters and liars, but frankly it was a waste of only a few minutes," a Trump spokesperson said in a statement to Boston.com. "Mr. Trump attended the great Wharton School of Finance, a school that has more important things to do."
The Harvard Lampoon — founded in 1876 by seven undergraduates at the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school — boasts such famous alumni as Conan O'Brien, Andy Borowitz, George Plimpton, John Updike and Fred Gwynne.
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