Michael Cohen’s endgame against Donald Trump just keeps getting weirder

| 10:01 pm EDT June 29, 2018
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Over the past two weeks, three major news outlets have reported that Donald Trump’s longtime fixer Michael Cohen is somewhere down the path of negotiating a plea deal. Last week he resigned his position as a Republican National Committee official. This week he posed for a selfie with notorious Trump detractor Tom Arnold. Now Cohen’s endgame is getting even weirder.

On Monday, federal prosecutors canceled a long-planned interview with Stormy Daniels at the last minute, citing a flimsy excuse about media attention. The meeting was supposed to have allowed Daniels to give the Feds information to help build their criminal case against Michael Cohen. The last minute blowoff raised questions about whether this meant that Cohen was indeed negotiating a plea deal. Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti initially reacted angrily to the cancelation, meaning that if this was about a plea deal, no one told him or Daniels. But Avenatti has since gone silent on the matter. Now it’s Cohen who’s speaking up.

Michael Cohen, who rarely tweets, piped up yesterday and posted this: “My family & I are owed an apology. After 2 years, 15 hours of testimony before House & Senate under oath & producing more than 1000 documents, dossier misreports 15 allegations about me. My entire statement must be quoted- I had nothing to do with Russian collusion or meddling!” Here’s what stands out. While Cohen is definitely being investigated for what he’s describing here, and he’ll eventually be charged for his role in the Trump-Russia scandal if the Feds think they can make it stick, the initial charges he’s about to face are of an entirely different variety.

Michael Cohen isn’t making any effort to publicly defend himself against the financial crimes and fraud that he’s about to be charged with. Instead he’s more concerned with trying to convince the American public that he didn’t participate in a treason plot. He’s not even saying the Trump-Russia collusion plot didn’t happen; he’s merely insisting that he wasn’t part of it. He seems more concerned about his reputation than he does about the prospect of going to prison for the rest of his life. Is this because he’s indeed decided to cut a deal? In any case, this keeps getting incrementally weirder.