Michael Cohen is very unhappy.
So unhappy, he’s “willing to give” information about his former boss, president Donald Trump, to federal investigators, his friends are telling CNN.
Cohen has plenty to be upset about. He’s under a high-profile investigation by the FBI, huge suspicious payments have been found flowing through his shell company, and his legal team is being overhauled. Now, Cohen “associates” are telling the Wall Street Journal that the former Trump Organization lawyer is upset that the president isn’t paying his legal fees.
The message seems pretty clear: “Pay my lawyers or I flip.”
The Trump campaign already paid nearly $230,000 to Cohen’s lawyers between October and January, to cover fees related to the Russia investigation. The Trump family also helped pay for a review of documents seized by the FBI from Cohen’s office and home, according to the Journal.
However, the president isn’t footing the bill for Cohen’s regular fees in the New York probe. Those fees have been mounting ever since the FBI probe into Trump’s Russia ties apparently discovered something incriminating related to Cohen and turned them over to New York prosecutors some time before the FBI raided (paywall) his offices on April 9.
Trump has been publicly blasé about his former lawyer’s ordeal. “I always liked Michael Cohen,” he told reporters on Friday, in a much-remarked-upon use of the past tense. “I haven’t spoken to Michael in a long time.”
Cohen is widely believed to know where all the Trump Organization’s figurative bodies are buried. He has long played fixer to the president, notably paying hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels before the election, and the FBI raid itself signals that prosecutors believe he has plenty interesting of information to share.