Just hours after President Donald Trump was directly implicated in a criminal conspiracy by his own longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen, who plead guilty to eight felony counts in a federal court on Tuesday, Cohen's own lawyer, Lanny Davis, went on national television with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and said his client has a lot more information that would be of interest to Special Counsel Robert Mueller and that he will be "more than happy" to share it.
According to his remarks on Maddow's show, Davis said that Cohen is willing to tell Mueller what he knows about the "possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election" and also what Trump knew about computer hacking.
Watch the interview:
On ABC's Good Morning America, Davis repeated to anchor George Stephanapolous that his client is prepared to share more about what he knows:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Is Michael Cohen prepared to tell everything he knows about President Trump to special counsel Robert Mueller and other prosecutors?
LANNY DAVIS: Yes.
(via ABC) pic.twitter.com/KUwrr5wbT8— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) August 22, 2018
The guilty pleas from Cohen, and this news that he is willing to speak directly--if he hasn't already--with Mueller's investigators, came on the same day that Trump's former presidential campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was found guilty on eight felony counts of tax and bank fraud by a jury in Virginia.
As Adam Davidson notes in his analysis at The New Yorker, the events of Tuesday, taken together, should end the idea that there is some kind of separation between Trump's personal and business dealings, and the potential criminal acts or violations that may have taken place during his campaign run or since. Davidson writes:
The Cohen plea and the Manafort indictment establish that this separation is entirely artificial. Trump did not isolate his private business from his public run for office. He behaved the same, with the same sorts of people, using the same techniques to hide his actions. It is impossible, after Tuesday, to imagine that a responsible congressional investigation wouldn’t thoroughly examine every deal with which Cohen was involved and wouldn’t even more aggressively seek to understand Manafort’s links to Russian figures. These two men are now convicted financial fraudsters, each found guilty of precisely eight counts of various financial crimes, though nobody, glancing at their record, would imagine this is an exhaustive list. Tuesday was not the end of an examination of their record; it is much more like a beginning. Manafort has another trial ahead, as well as a possible retrial for the ten counts for which the jury could not reach a consensus; Cohen is all but screaming that he has more to share.
With Lanny Davis—despite his long history as among the worst shills in Washington, D.C.—now saying his client knows more about Trump and is willing to share that information with Mueller or other prosecutors, it was not hard to find many observers saying that Tuesday, August 21st will go down as a historic day in presidential history.
Veteran political reporter Charles P. Piece of Esquire, put it this way:
I lived through Watergate. I lived through the Saturday Night Massacre. There never was anything like this: https://t.co/QDkmajMJ0n pic.twitter.com/LKOQz5SgJa
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) August 21, 2018
