We told you Michael Cohen is going to flip on Donald Trump
In the week since it was first reported that Michael Cohen was going to flip on Donald Trump, Cohen’s words and actions have all but confirmed that this is the case. He’s getting the biggest headlines for his resignation letter to the RNC yesterday, in which he specifically cited Trump’s immigrant child cages as one of his reasons for quitting. But he quietly made an even more definitive move on Tuesday. Palmer Report caught it at the time, and now a legal expert is confirming our interpretation.
After dumping his legal team, Michael Cohen hired a new attorney on Tuesday who previously spent years working for the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York. Here’s how Palmer Report characterized this development at the time: “If you’re cutting a plea deal with SDNY, your best bet is to hire a lawyer who has a good working relationship with the SDNY.” We got some pushback on this, with some readers offering other plausible – though in our view far less likely – explanations.
Norm Eisen, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former Obama White House Ethics Lawyer, is now weighing in on Michael Cohen’s new hire: “An overlooked clue to the likely coming Cohen flip: his new lawyer is a former SDNY prosecutor who worked with Comey & for Preet. And every single one of his partners in his firm is an SDNY USAO veteran who either worked for &/or with Comey or Preet. They were hired to do a deal.”
In other words, Eisen sees it like we do. Keep in mind that by all accounts, including his own, Michael Cohen is broke. He can’t afford to keep this new high priced attorney for long. There’s no way he could afford to keep paying this guy through a years-long trial. Cohen can only afford this particular attorney for the short term – in other words, just long enough to negotiate the best plea deal he can get.
