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.”
Emily Jane Fox writes for Vanity Fair:
It 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.”
