Michael Cohen May Have Been a Witness to Collusion

By Emily Jane Fox, Vanity Fair

28 July 18

What might Cohen know about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Don Jr., Kushner, Manafort, and a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who promised to provide them with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton? “When Michael says that he wants the truth out there, and that the truth is not the president’s friend, he is not talking about marginal issues,” says a person close to Cohen. “He’s talking about core issues at the heart of the Mueller probe.”

t was early afternoon on Valentine’s Day when Michael Cohen’s cell phone rang as he sat in the office that he maintained in 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Donald Trump was on the line. A day earlier, Cohen had given a statement to the Federal Election Commission acknowledging that he paid $130,000 to adult-film star Stormy Daniels to keep her mum about her alleged affair with then-candidate Trump. In the recent past, Cohen had publicly reiterated his loyalty to his client, telling me on the record that he would take a bullet for the president. But beneath the public proclamations, the two men hadn’t spoken much in the months after Trump’s inauguration. The Daniels affair, in some regard, provided a bizarre reunion. After The Wall Street Journal broke the story about the non-disclosure agreement, the president had begun calling again with some regularity. Now, according to someone familiar with the call, Trump wanted Daniels’s claims refuted. (The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Cohen and Trump are, in many ways, cut from the same cloth—street fighters, tough-talkers, hardly conflict-averse. Subsequently, their relationship has not been without traces of transaction and self-preservation. As The New York Times reported on Friday, Cohen pointedly taped his conversation with the president about payments made to Karen McDougal, a former Playmate who had alleged an affair with Trump. That recording, along with 11 others collected by New York prosecutors during an F.B.I. search of Cohen’s properties in April, is now at the center of an escalating public war between Cohen, the president, and their respective legal teams.

For months, friends and advisers have been telling Cohen that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and Rudy Giuliani, among other people in Trump’s inner circle, have been eroding his relationship with the president. People close to Cohen speculated over the weekend whether the release of the recording was part of such a strategy. The recording was deemed privileged by an appointed special master in the S.D.N.Y. investigation, meaning that it would not have seen the light of day if Trump and his lawyers had wanted it to remain private. Giuliani told me on Friday that the president’s legal team waived privilege on the recording (a detail that was confirmed by two people close to Cohen), which effectively allowed the government access to the conversation. Giuliani called it “powerful exculpatory evidence.”

Giuliani asserted that the recording confirms that Trump did not know about the McDougal arrangement beforehand (a claim that Cohen’s camp has denied): “People always wondered how he could make the Stormy payment without permission, and this shows that Cohen had the authority to do things like that.” He added that the payment was never made because “Cohen wasn’t able to make the deal.” People close to Cohen have disputed some of Giuliani’s characterization of the conversation, such as his claim that Trump suggested he make the payment with a check, rather than cash, so that it could be documented. (Those around Cohen said that it was, in fact, the other way around.) Two people familiar with Cohen’s thinking believe that Trump’s lawyers decided to waive privilege to undercut Cohen, who could have potentially used the exclusive possession of the material as a bargaining chip to cut a deal with prosecutors. (Cohen has not yet met with the government, according to these people, but he suggested that he may be open to the possibility during a recent interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Giuliani told me that while he did not leak it, he was glad it got out.)

Despite the tape’s release, however, people familiar with Cohen’s thinking are confident that his value as a potential cooperating witness is undiminished. “It’s not the recording that is valuable,” one person said. “It’s the backstory.” Another person close to Cohen said that he was privy to information that could be valuable to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s attempt to interfere in the 2016 election. “When Michael says that he wants the truth out there, and that the truth is not the president’s friend, he is not talking about marginal issues. He’s talking about core issues at the heart of the Mueller probe,” this person continued. Three people familiar with the situation believe that Cohen has discussed information about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, during which Don Jr., Kushner, and Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who promised to provide them with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. (Cohen declined to comment.)

As the newfound silence between Trump and Cohen turns into a potential cold war, Cohen has told friends that one of his biggest regrets is the embarrassment heaped upon First Lady Melania Trump. This weekend, the First Lady’s spokeswoman said that she was “focused on her role as a mother and as First Lady” and would have no further comment regarding the tapes. Cohen has said he hopes to apologize to her someday. Meanwhile, his feelings toward her husband, and towards those he believes are part of the strategy to discredit him, are chillier. “If they think for a second that the efforts to discredit me aren’t known to me, they are sadly mistaken,” he has told friends. “Did they think I was just going to roll over and die?”