What the hell is Michael Cohen doing?

| 8:37 pm EDT July 20, 2018
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The Reverend Al Sharpton appeared on MSNBC this evening and revealed that he’d had breakfast with Michael Cohen this morning. This isn’t all that surprising, considering that Sharpton and Donald Trump have both been operating out of New York City for decades, and thus Sharpton and Cohen apparently have a long history of such meetings. Sharpton said that Cohen gave him the usual speech he’s been giving to everyone: he’s troubled, he feels Trump has abandoned him, and he wants to do the right thing. So what?

What is Michael Cohen trying to do here? There is precisely one thing he can do in order to make things right for all the years he spent doing the wrong thing on Donald Trump’s behalf, and that’s to cut a plea deal against Trump now. There is nothing else on the table. Until Cohen formally sells Trump out to the Feds, no patriotic American is going to care what Cohen says to Good Morning America, or to Al Sharpton, or what pot-shots he takes at Trump on Twitter.

This morning the New York Times reported that the FBI long ago seized Cohen’s secret tapes of his incriminating conversations with Trump. It appears Cohen had his breakfast with Sharpton before this story was published. But Cohen has known all along that the FBI seized his Trump tapes, so this wasn’t news to him. In fact the deeper the FBI gets into the evidence without Cohen’s cooperation, the more Cohen loses leverage in a potential plea deal. By waiting, he’s not helping himself in a legal or PR sense.

And yet Al Sharpton said that Michael Cohen told him he’s going to do “what’s right” and that he simply wanted to explain himself first. So maybe Cohen really is just trying to take a last ditch shot at publicly positioning himself before he cuts a deal and has to go silent. But considering how quickly things are now moving overall, Cohen’s decision to keep putting off the inevitable is just… strange.