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Clinton fixer engineers Michael Cohen’s turn against Trump

The PR blitz orchestrated by Lanny Davis is calculated to present Trump's longtime attorney as someone who will tell truth to power.

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN

Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen, the man who once boasted he would take a bullet for his boss, is trying to repackage himself as someone who’s on a mission to tell truth to power — and he’s leaning on the Clintons’ former scandal manager to help him do it.

Lanny Davis went on “Good Morning America” on Wednesday and asserted that Cohen had “turned a corner in his life” since the April raid on his New York office and apartment in which federal investigators seized tapes, documents and other materials related to Cohen’s work for Trump.

The “GMA” interview came hours after Davis let CNN broadcast a 2016 audio recording of Trump and Cohen discussing the logistics of making payments to the publisher of the National Enquirer to silence a former Playboy model who claims to have had an affair with Trump.

Mike McCurry, who served as President Bill Clinton’s press secretary, said Davis’ media blitz looks like it’s taken directly from Davis’ 1999 book, “Truth to Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself.”

“It’s pretty good and lays out the formula for exactly what he is doing now,” McCurry said. “Don’t let the other guy define the terms of the debate, define them yourself.”

Cohen, whose business practices relating to taxi medallions and real estate are under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York, is potentially a valuable witness to special Russia prosecutor Robert Mueller — and has been targeted by Trump, who tweeted Wednesday about the man he once treated as part of his extended family: “What kind of lawyer would tape a client? So sad!”

Davis told POLITICO that while he couldn’t answer questions about whether Cohen had been cooperating with the U.S. attorney’s office in New York or with Mueller, the former Trump lawyer was “committed to telling the truth to whoever asks.”

“The word flip is not a word I’d ever use, but I’m allowed to say that he’s going to tell the truth and the truth is on his side,” Davis added.

But conservatives have been quick to pounce on Davis’ Clinton connections.

“I don’t mean to harp on the Clinton connection here, but it is interesting that Cohen chooses the longtime confidant, booster, defender of the Clintons, after everything that happened during the campaign, to represent him here,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said on Tuesday night during an interview with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. “It’s an odd choice of lawyering, in my view.”

Speaking with POLITICO on Wednesday, Giuliani described the Cohen-Davis alliance as “a strange marriage.”

“I don’t know, maybe he’s trying to get even for Clinton?” Giuliani asked.

A former Clinton White House official who worked with Davis during the 1990s reluctantly agreed with the conservative television host. “I think Lanny is absolutely the worst person to do this,” the former Davis colleague said. “It’s very easy for the pro-Trump defenders to just lump him in with Hillary.”

Davis openly acknowledged the aisle-crossing aspect of his work for Cohen. “This is absolutely one of the few times where Rudy Giuliani or Laura Ingraham ever made a fair point,” he said in an interview.

Davis explained that he decided to represent Cohen after spending two weeks in private conversations with him and hearing about how he was willing to speak up about his time with Trump — but not defend Cohen blindly. “I would not have worked for Michael Cohen if I thought it was adverse to my political beliefs, much less people I’ve worked for,” Davis said.

But former prosecutors said that while Davis’ PR blitz might help win Cohen fans among anti-Trump liberals, it could hurt his standing with the federal prosecutors who are investigating him.

“This spectacle is doing nothing to help Cohen get a better deal from prosecutors,” said Renato Mariotti, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago.

“No prosecutor wants a witness to stake out many public positions on issues he might be asked to testify about,” added Mariotti, who is a paid CNN contributor. “By looking so eager to flip, Cohen is reducing his leverage. He should at least pretend like he needs a better deal to convince him to turn on Trump.”

Davis told POLITICO that Cohen’s team of lawyers debated whether they were putting their client in legal jeopardy by releasing the tape into a media frenzy. While he said they did not contact federal investigators before sharing the audio recording with CNN, they nonetheless made the determination that its contents had “nothing to do with the issues under investigation.”

He said they wanted the tape available to the public in order to rebut claims by Trump attorneys about a portion of the otherwise garbled audio involving a discussion over what form of payment they could make to buy the rights to a story from the Playboy model, Karen McDougal, from American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer.

“It was not a decision made lightly,” Davis told POLITICO. “This was an issue involving my client’s reputation being attacked.”

Cohen reportedly considered representing himself in a court fight over the materials seized in the early April FBI raid of his office and residences but instead used Stephen Ryan, a veteran white-collar attorney from Washington whom he initially retained in June 2017 to help him navigate the Russia probe.

Davis signed on with Cohen earlier this summer alongside Guy Petrillo, a former head of the criminal division in New York’s Southern District, which has jurisdiction over Manhattan.

Some of Davis’ past work and commentary surrounding Trump has raised eyebrows. He briefly served as a crisis manager last summer for AMI as it handled an inquiry from The Associated Press about the suppression of negative Trump campaign stories. And he told POLITICO last month that he’d spoken by phone, email and text with at least four Trump associates and lawyers, including Steve Bannon, who were looking for advice in the wake of Mueller’s appointment last May about how the Clinton team weathered its own wave of scandals.

Davis said he checked with the AMI general counsel before taking on Cohen as a client and came away believing it was not a substantive problem because the work was for only one meeting.

“There’s no conflict whatsoever,” he said, noting his work with AMI didn’t involve the McDougal story.

And Davis said his interactions with Trump allies, including Bannon, were friendly back-and-forth discussions that didn’t entail anything beyond his giving the advice in his books and public speeches, including get the truth out and don’t attack the motives of the investigators.

Some close to Trump shrugged off Cohen’s newfound alliance given the legal jeopardy he’s in.

“I think Michael Cohen has done nothing wrong, and he has no reason to change his image,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump adviser who, like Cohen, has been pulled into the Mueller probe. “But I can understand where it might have some value during the investigation.”