Michael Cohen Said Ready To Cooperate With Feds In Egregious Blow To Trump’s ‘Beleaguered’ Legal Team

Well, bad news for Donald Trump.

Or at least, not the best news he could get when it comes to personal fixer, sorta-lawyer, and man who made grandma’s sofa into a blazer, Michael Cohen.

Cohen was of course the subject of an FBI raid back in April and that raid was conducted on orders from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein (a.k.a, “Mr. Peepers“) after Robert Mueller referred evidence to federal authorities in New York.

The involvement of “Peepers” is the direct result of Jeff Sessions’ recusal, which Trump blames for everything under the sun. In angry comments delivered just after news of the Cohen raid hit, Trump explicitly mentioned Sessions and since then, Jeff has been battling to keep his job and has endured withering criticism from Trump’s increasingly unhinged Twitter feed.

Two weeks ago, Trump essentially told his 54 million Twitter followers that he wishes Jeff had never been born.

Meanwhile, Michael Cohen has been fighting to fend off a deluge of truly horrible press and damning revelations about payments made to a consulting firm he ran – payments which included money linked to a Russian oligarch with whom Cohen met at Trump Tower just 11 days before the inauguration.

Well on Wednesday, ABC is out reporting that ahead of Judge Kimba Wood’s Friday deadline to wrap up a review of nearly 4 million documents seized in the April raid, Cohen is now likely to cooperate with federal prosecutors. To wit:

A source representing this matter has disclosed to ABC News that the law firm handling the case for Cohen is not expected to represent him going forward.

To date, Cohen has been represented by Stephen Ryan and Todd Harrison of the Washington and New York firm, McDermott, Will & Emery LLP.

No replacement counsel has been identified as of this time.

Cohen, now with no legal representation, is likely to cooperate with federal prosecutors in New York, sources said. This development, which is believed to be imminent, will likely hit the White House, family members, staffers and counsels hard.

Oops. Let’s ask a former FBI counterintelligence agent what she thinks, shall we?

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1006919699282751488

What else is there to say? Maybe this?

"Whaddaya mean 'Cohen's cooperating'?" pic.twitter.com/3K5NFTZhpl

— Ivan the K™ (@IvanTheK) June 13, 2018

I think this is a fantastic time to reprint a piece we ran back in late April when Trump insisted on Twitter that Michael Cohen would never flip…

From “Trump Wakes Up, Says ‘Flunkie’ Haberman Is Conspiring With ‘Drunk Losers’ To Get Cohen To ‘Flip’”, as originally published April 21, 2018

On Friday evening, around 45 minutes to midnight, Donald Trump decided that, after a series of celebratory tweets about North Korea’s stated intention to halt nuclear tests, he should send America off to bed with a message about “special council” shenanigans.

In a tweet blasted out at 11:13 New York time, Trump questioned the legitimacy of the Mueller probe, suggesting that James Comey was behind it, an assertion which is correct, only not quite in the way Trump meant. Trump fired Comey and so, special counsel time.

Anyway, the President posed a question before removing his wig and dentures to dream about porn stars spanking him with magazines:

 Really, does everybody know what that means?

The answer is definitively “no”, because i) he was lying to suggest that somehow it wasn’t his own decision to fire Comey that got him into trouble in the first place, and more amusingly, ii) he spelled “counsel” wrong, and because there’s no such thing as a “special council” as it relates to Trump, it would be impossible for “everybody” to “know what that means.”

Again, that was just before midnight.

Well, apparently Trump woke up with his phone still in his hand and immediately launched into a diatribe aimed at the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman who, for those unfamiliar, Trump absolutely despises.

He appears to be upset about a piece published yesterday called “Michael Cohen Has Said He Would Take a Bullet for Trump. Maybe Not Anymore.” In that piece, Haberman says the following about Trump’s personal attorney who of course is in all kinds of trouble on all manner of fronts:

For years, a joke among Trump Tower employees was that the boss was like Manhattan’s First Avenue, where the traffic goes only one way.

That one-sidedness has always been at the heart of President Trump’s relationship with his longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, who has said he would “take a bullet” for Mr. Trump. For years Mr. Trump treated Mr. Cohen poorly, with gratuitous insults, dismissive statements and, at least twice, threats of being fired, according to interviews with a half-dozen people familiar with their relationship.

“Donald goes out of his way to treat him like garbage,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s informal and longest-serving political adviser, who, along with Mr. Cohen, was one of five people originally surrounding the president when he was considering a presidential campaign before 2016.

Now, for the first time, the traffic may be going Mr. Cohen’s way. Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers have become resigned to the strong possibility that Mr. Cohen, who has a wife and two children and faces the prospect of devastating legal fees, if not criminal charges, could end up cooperating with federal officials who are investigating him for activity that could relate, at least in part, to work he did for Mr. Trump.

Needless to say, Trump is furious. Here’s the President, tweeting in between bites of a McDonald’s hash brown:

It’s hard to know where to start there, but the reference to a “drunk/drugged up loser” is obviously to Sam Nunbergwho briefly became the most famous person on the planet last month when he embarked on a drunken press junket for the ages. Here’s Haberman quoting Sam:

“Ironically, Michael now holds the leverage over Trump,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Mr. Trump who worked with Mr. Cohen and Mr. Stone. Mr. Nunberg said that Mr. Cohen “should maximize” that leverage.

“The softer side of the president genuinely has an affection for Michael,” Mr. Nunberg said. For instance, Mr. Trump attended the bar and bat mitzvahs of Mr. Cohen’s children. “However, the president has also taken Michael for granted.” Mr. Nunberg added that “whenever anyone complains to me about Trump screwing them over, my reflexive response is that person has nothing to complain about compared to Michael.”

The other thing you should note about Trump’s tweets is that they again seem to betray some sense of guilt. He’s careful to hedge that by saying “even if it means lying or making up stories”, but why even say that? Why not just shut up? There is no way in hell that his lawyers would approve of those three tweets, especially coming as they do, on a Saturday morning.

I guess the first question we have here is for Rudy Giuliani: are you regretting this yet?

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