July 10, 2018

Ari Melber dropped some Michael Cohen news on Tuesday's episode of The Beat:

Michael Cohen has declared his independence from Donald Trump. Publicly. He is done. It is going to be a messy breakup, y'all.

MELBER: Breaking news. Michael Cohen's new lawyer, Lanny Davis, the long time Clinton ally, is speaking out in his first on-camera interview and he says his client as made a "declaration of independence" from Donald Trump. adding this.

(clip)

DAVIS: There is a reason he said at the end of the interview with Mr. Stephanopoulos that he took these contrary positions to Mr. Trump that he previously said he would take a bullet for. The reason he said is "I will not be a punching bag as part of somebody else's defense strategy" strategy.

(end clip)

MELBER: I have Nick Ackerman. As the saying goes, "here we go."

ACKERMAN: This is not good news for Donald Trump. If, in fact, Michael Cohen enters into a deal with Mueller's office and actually has evidence relating to the Russian conspiracy, relating to the election campaign, he is going to be a very powerful witness mainly because he is somebody that can be corroborated by the millions of documents they've seized in that search warrant.

MELBER: What if it has nothing do with alleged Russian collusion and it's just Michael Cohen saying "five or ten years ago I helped my client do something bad, maybe illegal, there's the thing called the crime fraud exception to our privilege and i'll tell mueller about it". what does that do?

ACKERMAN: Probably not much because if it's five years, ten years, past the statute of limit faces I think where he has information is, did he go on the trip to Prague? Was he dealing with the Russians? He is the person that came up with the plan for Ukraine, which is a key piece of what I think Flynn will testify to about dropping sanctions on Russia.

MELBER: And if he did go abroad or do anything hinky with regard to the election, he knows it and Donald Trump probably knows it.

ACKERMAN: And his lawyers know it because they went through this charade of looking at his records to determine whether there was anything covered by the attorney/client privilege so they know what Michael Cohen can say and can't say.

MELBER: Do you think that Lanny is taking a few pages out of Michael Avenatti's book? Are we seeing an evolution in TV lawyering here?

ACKERMAN: I don't think so. He hasn't done that much. He's made a few statements. Michael Avenatti was constantly on every single show he could get on, constantly doing kind of showman types of activities, showing up at Judge Kimba Woods' courtroom to make statements even though he didn't have standing there. I don't think that's happening here. I think for whatever reason, Michael Cohen wants it to be known that he is done with Trump and open to cooperating and I think he wouldn't do that unless he knows he has information Mueller would be interested in and can corroborate it with information in those records.

Let's see if he actually testifies or if this is just all for show. Time will tell. It's never a good sign when your "fixer" of over a decade has decided he isn't on your side anymore, though.

Can you help us out?

For nearly 20 years we have been exposing Washington lies and untangling media deceit, but now Facebook is drowning us in an ocean of right wing lies. Please give a one-time or recurring donation, or buy a year's subscription for an ad-free experience. Thank you.

Discussion

We welcome relevant, respectful comments. Any comments that are sexist or in any other way deemed hateful by our staff will be deleted and constitute grounds for a ban from posting on the site. Please refer to our Terms of Service for information on our posting policy.
Mastodon