On Thursday evening, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo effectively incinerated the news cycle with his second riveting disclosure of the week—the sort of tantalizing reveal that was perfectly scheduled for cable news during prime-time hours. On Tuesday, Cuomo had been the first to play a grainy audio tape in which Michael Cohen and Donald Trump briefly discussed the exigencies surrounding a payment to the president’s alleged former paramour—a staccato, shorthand exchange that included some uncertainty about who wanted to pay by check (Cohen’s people told me it was him; Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, told me the opposite) versus cash. Nights later, the scoop was an order of magnitude larger. From a studio on the seventh floor of the Time Warner Center, Cuomo reported a triple-bylined CNN story suggesting that Cohen was ready to share one of his most valuable secrets with federal prosecutors in order to cut a deal in the ongoing criminal investigation into his business dealings.
According to the CNN report, Cohen has claimed that then-candidate Trump had advance knowledge of the infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower during which a Kremlin-tied lawyer initially offered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The meeting, which was arranged by Donald Trump Jr. and included Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, has been of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. President Trump has repeatedly denied knowledge of the meeting. “He wasn’t aware of it,” Don Jr. testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. He also attested to his dad’s ignorance on Hannity last July.
Murmurs about the Trump Tower meeting have, of late, loomed large within Cohenworld. As I reported on Monday, a person close to Cohen told me that Cohen was privy to information that could be valuable to Mueller. Three people familiar with the situation believe that this information pertained to the Trump Tower meeting. “When Michael says that he wants the truth out,” one person familiar with Cohen’s thinking said, “He’s talking about core issues at the heart of the Mueller probe.”
But Cohen and his lawyer Lanny Davis were surprised to learn that Cohen’s alleged knowledge of Trump’s involvement with the Russia meeting would be splashed out on CNN’s chyron, and then across the cable-news and social-media landscape. According to people familiar with their thinking, they were frustrated that one of Cohen’s most valuable potential pieces of information had now been publicized, perhaps nullifying a presumable bargaining chip with investigators. “Fury! Fury is what we felt,” one person familiar with Cohen’s thinking told me.
On Thursday evening and into Friday morning, some pundits suggested that it could have been Cohen’s side who leaked the tapes, perhaps swayed by an ulterior motive. They argued that the motivation could have been Cohen attempt to send a smoke signal to Trump that he ought to pardon him in order to prevent the release of further damaging information. But a person close to Cohen suggested that this theory was nonsense. “Is the best way to get Trump to give you a pardon to spend weeks pissing him off and sticking him in the eye?” the person said. Another person familiar with Cohen’s thinking told me that Cohen is not seeking a pardon or a pre-pardon, because he would still be called to testify, and if he were pardoned, he would be unable to plead the Fifth. People close to Cohen strenuously denied that they had played a role in the information’s release, in general. “Why would we want this out there now,” this person continued, “if we were going to use this information? They tried to hurt us with this to undercut our credibility.”
Cohen, who once told me he would take a bullet for Trump, has lately developed a more adversarial view of his former boss. As I’ve recently reported, he has become upset by what he believes is an attempt—led by Don Jr., Kushner, and Giuliani—to discredit him, distance him from Trump, and turn his life upside down. Cohen has lost 15 pounds, and his wife dropped 9, since the feds performed their search and seizure in April, on account of the related stress. Now the bond between Trump and Cohen appears to be irrevocably torn asunder. And as he watches Trump’s surrogates attempt to assail his credibility, there is a sense that Cohen is ready to torch his old boss. “Maybe Cohen is going to be the thing that’s going to pull this whole thing apart and unravel the myth behind the man,” one person familiar with Cohen’s thinking told me. “Maybe he is the next John Dean.”
According to these two people, Cohen viewed Thursday’s disclosure as the latest in a series of attacks that effectively began when Trump called into Fox & Friends in late April and claimed that Cohen had done only a small portion of his legal work. “This is what he’s doing: attacking me. And if he attacks me, I’m going to attack you now,” he has said, according to these people. “Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone. Stop poking the bear. You want to keep leaking stuff? That’s a dangerous game,” Cohen has said, this person told me, referring to a “treasure trove” of information that he says he could unleash in order to reciprocally complicate the president’s life. “There’s a lot more to come. There’s a lot. You’re with someone for 10 years, you don’t think there’s a lot? The Trump Organization is a big business, and nobody in that place made a decision without his knowledge.” (Both Cohen and Davis declined to comment.)
Giuliani, in particular, has become a source of immense frustration. And people in the Cohen orbit grew incensed, on Thursday, when they saw the president’s lawyer appear live on set with Cuomo to discuss the report. It was the sort of coincidence, the person familiar with Cohen’s thinking said, that suggested the provenance of the scoop. “This is the same man who lied about the Stormy Daniels situation from the get-go, who waived privilege on the recording released last week, and lied about what was on the recording when he crafted the initial narrative on Friday,” the person close to Cohen said. “You tell me who is more credible.” This person continued: “The biggest problem for [Trump’s legal team] is that Rudy hasn’t told the truth since he took the job, and Trump hasn’t told the truth since the day he took office.”
In a phone interview on Friday, Giuliani denied the suggestion that he leaked this information. “I found out about this about 10 or 15 minutes before the show,” he told me. He also denied the occurrence of the briefing meeting alleged in the story. (He said that he first asked Trump and Don Jr. about this weeks ago, as they were determining whether or not they would sit for questioning with Mueller. According to the CNN report, Cohen has said that he attended the meeting, but there is no hard evidence.) Giuliani added that he believes Cohen’s motivation for saying that such a meeting happened resulted from desperation—the fact that, as he put it, “all other avenues are cut off for him.” He can’t, for instance, claim that Trump knew about the Stormy Daniels payment, according to Giuliani, because Cohen is on a nearly two-hours-long recording he made with Cuomo, during which he repeatedly denies that Trump knew about it. Based on what Giuliani has heard, he said, “I am guessing that the tapes don’t have anything on them about this meeting, so that gives him room to say what he wants.”
Trump, too, appeared to be frustrated by the news break. On Friday morning, he tweeted, “I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr.” The tweet continued: “Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?). He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!” referring to Cohen’s ill-fated pre-Uber investment in taxi medallions, and Davis, who served as a White House lawyer defending President Bill Clinton during his impeachment scandal. This is the second time this week that the president tweeted disparagingly about Cohen. On Wednesday, he wrote, “What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? So sad! Is this a first, never heard of it before? Why was the tape so abruptly terminated (cut) while I was presumably saying positive things? I hear there are other clients and many reporters that are taped – can this be so? Too bad!”
Meanwhile, Cohen has reached out to another Trump foe. According to two people with knowledge of the situation, on Friday morning Cohen texted Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist who was forcibly ejected from the White House after making a series of inflammatory remarks about the president and his family to Michael Wolff in his book Fire and Fury. In one claim, Bannon told Wolff that Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr. and the Russian lawyer. “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero,” Bannon told Wolff, calling the meeting “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” The people with knowledge of Cohen’s outreach said he sent Bannon a text asking if he was still staying at the the Regency, the hotel where Cohen has been living and where Bannon often stays in New York, because Cohen had run into members of Bannon’s crew. Bannon replied that they should only speak lawyer to lawyer, but that they should catch up once the storm passes. (Bannon did not respond to a request for comment.)
