Earlier this month, in an interview with ABC News, Donald Trump’s personal fixer and sorta-lawyer, Michael Cohen, suggested that when it comes to whether he would defend his former boss to the end at the possible expense of family and country, the answer is “no”.
Specifically, Cohen said this:
My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will. I put family and country first.
That’s obviously not great news for the President.
Cohen was of course the subject of an FBI raid back in April and that raid was conducted on orders fromDeputy 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.
In May, Trump essentially told his 54 million Twitter followers that he wishes Jeff had never been born.
Meanwhile, 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.
Last month, ABC reported that Cohen is now likely to cooperate with federal prosecutors.
Now, in yet another egregious blow to the White House, The New York Times reports that Cohen recorded a conversation with Trump that revolved around payments to Karen McDougal who said she had an affair with then-candidate Trump. Here’s the Times:
The F.B.I. seized the recording this year during a raid on Mr. Cohen’s office. The Justice Department is investigating Mr. Cohen’s involvement in paying women to tamp down embarrassing news stories about Mr. Trump ahead of the 2016 election. Prosecutors want to know whether that violated federal campaign finance laws, and any conversation with Mr. Trump about those payments would be of keen interest to them.
The recording’s existence further draws Mr. Trump into questions about tactics he and his associates used to keep aspects of his personal and business life a secret. And it highlights the potential legal and political danger that Mr. Cohen represents to Mr. Trump. Once the keeper of many of Mr. Trump’s secrets, Mr. Cohen is now seen as increasingly willing to consider cooperating with prosecutors.
For his part, Rudy Giuliani says this is no big deal and in fact, he went so far as to tell the Times that the existence of the recording is actually good news for Trump:
In the big scheme of things, it’s powerful exculpatory evidence.
Whatever you say, Rudy.
Whatever you say.
https://twitter.com/Diane_7A/status/1020338160939790336
Well just like the five bankruptcies or is it six??? our new puppet seems to always blame someone else for his very own fuck-ups. It’s Sessions fault for not recusing himself for our new puppets mismanagement of his own campaign etc, etc, fuck-up after fuck-up people this will not stop until WE make it stop. Vote…