U.S. President Donald Trump has proven yet again via a new ABC report to perpetually fail to peddle accurate readings of situations. Earlier this year, in a move that sent him into a rage, authorities raided the home, office, and hotel room of his lawyer Michael Cohen and in the aftermath of that, he insisted that Cohen would not flip and cooperate with prosecutors.
Now, ABC is reporting that Cohen is expected to flip. Ahead of a quickly incoming Friday deadline for the Cohen team to complete a review of materials seized in the raids meant to let them set aside anything possibly covered by attorney-client privilege, with their decisions subject to review, ABC says that Cohen isn’t even going to have a legal team going forward. Stephen Ryan and Todd Harrison, a pair of lawyers with the McDermott, Will & Emery LLP firm, are abandoning him, and the outlet notes:
‘No replacement counsel has been identified as of this time.’
Cohen isn’t just going to be representing himself, however. Sources told ABC that the longtime Trump associate is “likely to cooperate with federal prosecutors in Manhattan.” After the aforementioned raids on Cohen, it was revealed that he had been under criminal investigation for months with a probe hanging over him reported to be looking into a whole host of his activities.
The reported subjects of the investigation range from his work in the New York taxi business to his work for Donald Trump, which has included such notable instances as him paying $130,000 in hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels covering an affair with Trump.
Daniels has been pursuing legal action against Cohen and Trump for some time, suing with the help of her attorney Michael Avenatti to be free from the nondisclosure agreement associated with the previously mentioned hush money and also filing defamation claims against Trump and Cohen.
Daniels and Avenatti are among the many likely to be intrigued — and happy — with the development of Cohen possibly cooperating with prosecutors should ABC’s report prove prescient. Cohen is one of those who is on the inside of the president’s inner circles and has been there for some time; for him to cooperate means that yet again the walls will have moved that much closer to Trump himself.
At present, he is continuing to try and avoid any and all legal scrutiny for past actions through such means as evading a sit down with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, but he can’t run from the justice system forever.
Trump has already been implicated in some of Cohen’s activities under scrutiny by investigators through such means as the infamous moment of his lawyer Rudy Giuliani revealing on Fox News that Trump had repaid Cohen for the Daniels hush money after all. That revelation upended past claims from the Trump camp of the president having had nothing to do with the payment at all.
Cohen wouldn’t be the first associate Trump has faced choosing to cooperate with authorities. Perhaps most prominently, his former national security adviser Michael Flynn chose to do so as well.
In other words, it’s an established trend at this point for Trump to surround himself with people who commit acts for which they’d want to use cooperation with authorities to get out of facing full accountability.
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