Donald Trump was warned that Michael Cohen may be wearing a wire
The saga of Donald Trump and Michael Cohen already involves affairs with porn stars and Playboy playmates, hush money paid with home equity lines, ridiculous aliases, an alleged mystery man who threatened the safety of the porn star, an FBI raid, something about a fleet of taxi cabs, and the National Enquirer. If it needed to find a way to get even stranger, it just did.
Immediately after the FBI raided Michael Cohen’s office and residence, Donald Trump began calling around for legal advice. Instead of calling competent and professional legal experts, he called the kind of guy who gave him advice and then ran to tell a newspaper about that advice. Trump phoned Jay Goldberg, who told him not to trust Cohen under any circumstances. Goldberg also told Trump, apparently without basing it on any actual inside information, that Cohen might be wearing a wire.
Goldberg has now gone and told the Wall Street Journal what he told Trump, which is not how these things are supposed to work. Once again, Trump has chosen to trust someone who would rather see his name in the newspaper than keep things confidential. So now we know that Trump, assuming he believed Goldberg, is under the impression that Cohen may be wearing a wire. Why does this matter?
Donald Trump and Michael Cohen are still mounting a joint legal defense, which means that, by rule, Cohen can’t possibly have already cut a plea deal against Trump. So no, Cohen is not wearing a wire at this time. However, because Trump took some bad legal advice, he now has the thought in the back of his mind that maybe Cohen is wearing a wire. That’ll make it far more difficult for Trump and Cohen to communicate, let alone trust each other, as this gets worse for them both. In other words, the odds of Cohen ultimately cutting a plea deal probably just went up.
