It turns out Michael Cohen has been selling out Donald Trump all along
Back when Michael Cohen agreed to plead guilty to eight felonies which could send him to prison for a good chunk of the rest of his life, the deal did not officially include any cooperation requirements. Palmer Report pointed out that these kinds of deals nearly always result in unofficial cooperation, as no one who pleads guilty wants to serve out the full term. Sure enough, Cohen made his intentions clear when he walked into court hours later and named Donald Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator. But now Cohen has officially sold Trump out.
There was scattered buzz last week that Michael Cohen had been meeting with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, but the details didn’t make clear precisely what was going on. Now the picture has become very clear. ABC News is reporting that Cohen has spent the past month conducting multiple interview sessions with Mueller’s team, on every topic under the sun, including Donald Trump and Russia. The key here is the timeframe.
Cohen pleaded guilty one day shy of a month ago, and now we have confirmation that he’s been giving information to Mueller for the past month. That means Cohen began selling Trump out the minute he pleaded guilty. There was no hesitation and no consternation on his part; from the minute he cut the deal, he was intent on selling Trump out all along. This tells us two things.
The first is that Michael Cohen clearly wanted to cooperate, and he apparently couldn’t get a cooperation deal. Although he was prosecuted by the SDNY, any such deal would have been unofficially signed off on by Robert Mueller. This suggests that Mueller now feels he’s in such a position of strength when it comes to Donald Trump’s underlings, he doesn’t even feel like he has to give them a cooperation deal in order to get them to cooperate. Second, because Mueller did give a formal cooperation deal to Paul Manafort, at a time when Mueller isn’t rolling out the red carpet for other eager cooperators like Cohen, it tells us that Manafort must really have the goods on Trump.
