Vanity Fair: MCHAEL COHEN GRAPPLES WITH HIS NEW REALITY
“I’D DIE FOR MY WIFE AND MY KIDS. AND THIS IS ALL RUINING THEIR LIVES”: AFTER RUDY’S MELTDOWN, MICHAEL COHEN GRAPPLES WITH HIS NEW REALITY
Besieged by the media and legal bills, and feeling abandoned by Washington, friends say Cohen is in a “dangerous place.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/michael-cohen-grapples-with-his-new-reality
Cohen, people close to him have told me, is a fighter who is determined to prove that he is collateral damage in a larger effort to ensnarl Trump, and that he is not going to hide or cower. Sometimes, he has friends come meet with him in one of the Regency’s meeting rooms. “That is not in his nature,” one friend told me. “None of this is normal, but he’s trying to keep it as normal as he can.”
Cohen’s attempt at normalcy was complicated recently by Trump’s bizarre interview on Fox & Friends, and then exacerbated by a string of equally bewildering comments uttered last week by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s new lawyer. On Wednesday, Giuliani had told Sean Hannity that Trump had, in fact, reimbursed Cohen for the Daniels payment; the next morning, he claimed that Cohen made the payments to protect the Trump family, but also noted that the story would have come out close to the election—a convoluted answer that obfuscated questions about a potential campaign-finance violation. The Washington Post and The New York Times both reported that Trump had known what Giuliani planned to say ahead of time, but on Friday, Trump told reporters that his lawyer was new to the job and needed to get his facts straight, and he would be issuing a statement clarifying what he meant. Giuliani did, in fact, issue that statement, which reiterated that the payment did not violate campaign-finance rules because it would have been made to protect the family regardless of the election. (In March, Cohen told me in an interview: “What I did defensively for my personal client, and my friend, is what attorneys do for their high-profile clients. I would have done it in 2006. I would have done it in 2011. I truly care about him and the family—more than just as an employee and an attorney.”)
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Cohen, for his part, is mostly distraught over the impact on his family, according to the people familiar with his thinking. “I live for my wife and my kids,” he tells friends. “I’d die for my wife and my kids. And this is all ruining their lives.” An inaccurate NBC News report on Thursday saying that the government had wiretapped his phone, which was corrected by the network the same day, was particularly difficult on his children, according to one person. Once they read it, it doesn’t matter if it’s corrected, he has told people. The damage, he has said, is already done. (Though he has said he’s glad they did ultimately correct it.)
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“I am sitting here in this nightmare,” he has told people. He has said he has had no peace since January 2017, when BuzzFeed published the so-called “dossier” that made several claims about Cohen’s interactions with Russians throughout the presidential campaign (claims he has repeatedly denied). Since the raids, however, and following Giuliani’s media blitz, two people said that Cohen feels even more alone. Friends have said that “Washington has made a huge mistake” in hanging him out to dry. “That,” one person said, “is a dangerous place for him to be.”
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