In the three-ring circus swirling around Donald Trump and the $130,000 hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels, the one person we're not hearing much from is the guy who actually facilitated that payment: Michael Cohen.
Cohen, by many counts, isn't the sharpest tool in the legal shed, but he probably has a decent sense of when he's getting screwed. And, well, it's pretty clear that Trump is waving him around like a matador waves a cape in front a bull to distract it.
Last week, Trump wanted America to know that Cohen is a businessman, first and foremost, not a lawyer.
Let me just tell you that Michael is in business. He's really a businessman at fairly big businesses, I understand.
In other words, federal prosecutors should really look into Cohen's business dealings, which Trump assured us, "I have nothing to do with."
This week, as Trump backed up Rudy Giuliani's assertions about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, he tweeted, "Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer..." In other words, Cohen's my lawyer, which means attorney-client privilege, so back off bitches!
Finally, on Friday morning, we got a little insight as to how this is all sitting with Cohen, from Donny Deutsch on MSNBC's Morning Joe.
“I spoke with Michael Cohen yesterday, and his remark about Giuliani is that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Deutsch said on Morning Joe Friday morning. “He also said that ‘Look, there are two people that know exactly what happened, myself and the president and you’ll be hearing my side of the story,’ and he was obviously very frustrated at what had come out yesterday.”
He's obviously very frustrated and we'll be hearing his side of the story soon.
That doesn't sound like a guy who's getting ready to "take a bullet" for Trump. That sounds like a guy who's getting hung out to dry and he knows it. In fact, the big Giuliani bomb was just the latest Fox & Friends interview that left Cohen’s mouth agape. Vanity Fair's Emily Jane Fox writes:
According to two people familiar with the situation, he had not initially been watching as Trump gave his unscripted, and occasionally unhinged, phone interview to Fox, in which he contended that Cohen performed “a tiny, tiny little fraction” of his overall legal work. But he was surprised by the comments, which he listened to as the fire alarm in the Regency Hotel, where he and his family are living, beeped in the background. (The hotel was merely testing its system, these people said.) Cohen, according to three people familiar with his thinking, was baffled about why Trump even made the remarks in the first place. He did not see the benefit and was not sure what purpose it served, which frustrated him, especially as he’d been spending 10 hours a day fighting these allegations.
Trump’s comments certainly did not simplify matters for Cohen, these sources noted.
No, no they did not. And neither did Giuliani's. Seems like Cohen might have an interest in clarifying things to the court.