Sources Say Michael Cohen Now Voluntarily Working With Mueller in Russia Probe

A new report from ABC News gives us a look into how special counsel Robert Mueller may be finally driving the Russia probe home.

The belief is that he has worked his way up, and the “big fish” could be former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and longtime “fixer.”

Both men have agreed to cooperate with Mueller.

We don’t know what Manafort’s cooperation will look like, at the moment. We just know he made some sort of deal.

As for Cohen, the ABC report suggests that in the past month, he has participated in hours of questioning, centered on Donald Trump’s financial or business arrangements with Russia. They also discussed the issue of a pardon, as in, has Trump or anyone associated with him talked to Cohen about a possible pardon?

What’s perhaps most fascinating is that Cohen’s participation is voluntary, according to those familiar with the arrangement. He’s sitting for these interviews, in both Washington D.C. and New York City with no promise of leniency from prosecutors.

Besides the federal investigators,  prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York are sitting in.

ABC News has also learned that Cohen is also cooperating with a separate probe by New York state authorities into the inner workings of the Trump family charity and the Trump Organization, where Cohen served as an executive vice president and special counsel to Trump for 10 years.

The charge there has been that rather than an actual charity, the Trump Foundation pretty much served as the personal piggy bank of the Trump family. It was just one more scam, like Trump University.

In June, the New York Attorney General, Barbara Underwood, filed a civil lawsuit accusing Trump’s charitable foundation and its directors of having “operated in persistent violation of state and federal law governing New York State charities” for more than a decade by paying off legal bills with charitable funds, promoting Trump hotels, and purchasing personal items.

Along with the president, his three oldest children – Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump – are named as co-defendants in the lawsuit.

Underwood’s office has not ruled out launching a state criminal investigation into the foundation if the evidence warrants it. And she has also asked the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission to look into the charity’s operations.

I’ve said it on several occasions, and I’ll say it again, here: Michael Cohen may be the one Donald Trump truly regrets taking a dump on.

Trump treated Cohen shabbily, by all accounts, even though Cohen is said to be the one who “knows where the bodies are buried.”

Seriously. If you have anyone like that in your life, those are not the ones you want to take for granted or get on their bad side.

Donald Trump is the kind of man who uses people and discards them, at will. His arrogance will be to his detriment.

“Both of these guys want to be loved and they both want loyalty,” says a person close to both President Trump and Cohen, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely. “Cohen’s disavowal of Trump has triggered a series of events that turned once very good friends into permanent enemies. The consequences for both will be ugly.”

Cohen pleaded guilty in August to eight felonies, including tax evasion, wire fraud, bank fraud, and the campaign finance violations that included the payoff of two of Donald Trump’s mistresses, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

At a plea hearing in August, Cohen told a federal judge that he had arranged for the payments to two women “in coordination with, and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” referring to then-candidate Trump, and added that he participated in the transactions with the principal purpose of influencing the election.

Those statements, under oath, were an about-face from Cohen’s public comments about his role in the deals with Karen McDougal and Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. Cohen had previously insisted that he’d paid Clifford with his own money, on his own initiative and without the knowledge of Trump.

President Ranty took to Twitter to lash out on the day of Cohen’s court appearance.

“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!” the president wrote.

You kept him on for a decade because he was the kind of morally and ethically “loose” shyster you needed to handle your business.

Cohen has also been attacked by Trump’s current attorney, Rudy Giuliani.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s current personal attorney, who in May called Cohen “an honest, honorable lawyer,” has more recently claimed that Cohen is fabricating stories about Trump in order to protect himself.

“There’s nobody that I know that knows him that hasn’t warned me that if his back is up against the wall, he’ll lie like crazy, because he’s lied all his life,” Giuliani told CNN in July.

There’s no doubt that Cohen is looking after his own best interests, at this point. He has a wife and children. He’s looking at years in prison and a mountain of debt.

Just what he has that may be of value to prosecutors remains to be seen. Cohen was involved with attempts to strike a deal for bringing a Trump Tower to Moscow. In the early months of the 2016 election, negotiations were ongoing.

Ultimately, nothing came of those talks. That doesn’t mean prosecutors have no interest, now.

Cohen has confirmed he attended a lunch meeting with a Ukrainian politician one week after Trump took office, where the two men discussed the potential for Cohen to share a Ukraine peace proposal with his contacts at the White House.

Cohen’s name also popped up in multiple places within the Russia dossier, put together by former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele.

Cohen’s sentencing is scheduled for December 12, 2018. What he tells prosecutors between now and then could be crucial to how the Russia probe eventually wraps up.