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- Ex-Trump lawyer and convicted felon Michael Cohen celebrated current Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s legal troubles.
- “We have no idea how expansive this investigation is going to ultimately reveal itself because Rudy’s an idiot,” he told CNN.
- Cohen also predicted that if prosecutors tighten the screws on Giuliani, he’ll flip on Trump “in a heartbeat.”
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Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime former lawyer and a convicted felon, didn’t mince words on Thursday when reacting to news that the former president’s current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is facing mounting legal troubles of his own.
“Two things came straight to mind,” Cohen told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota in an interview. “The first is that I’m no longer the only one. And two, my parents always told me it’s not nice to gloat, but Rudy, I told you so. I told you so!”
Cohen was responding to the FBI executing search warrants on Giuliani’s home and office on Wednesday and seizing his electronic devices as well as a computer belonging to his personal assistant, Jo Ann Zafonte. Zafonte was served with a grand jury subpoena, and The New York Times reported that federal agents also raided the Washington, DC, home of Victoria Toensing, a fellow lawyer and associate of Giuliani’s.
The raids are part of a wide-ranging investigation by the US attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York into whether Giuliani broke foreign lobbying laws in his dealings with Ukraine.
Cohen said that he told Giuliani, “Donald Trump doesn’t care about anyone or anything” and that Giuliani “will be the next one to be thrown under the bus.”
“And that’s exactly what’s going to happen,” he told CNN.
Cohen is currently serving a three-year prison sentence under house arrest after pleading guilty to multiple counts of campaign-finance violations, tax evasion, and lying to Congress as part of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election. After it surfaced that Cohen was going to cooperate with prosecutors on Mueller’s team and in the Manhattan US attorney’s office, Trump skewered his longtime fixer as a “rat” and a liar.
On Thursday, Cohen recalled what it was like when the FBI raided his properties in 2018, a few months before he struck a plea deal. He said investigators sifted through millions of documents on his electronic devices and that the probe expanded as a result. If that happens in Rudy’s case, Cohen said, the investigation could start touching on others in Trump’s close circle.
“What happens is, they may be starting the investigation looking at things like the Ukrainian conversations between himself, Lev Parnas, and others,” Cohen said. “You may end up finding that Jared Kushner was involved, that Don Jr., or a host of other individuals in Trump’s orbit. And what happens then is that the Southern District, they end up expanding the probe.”
Cohen added that Giuliani has “been shady for a long time” and that the investigation into whether he broke foreign lobbying laws could expand “into other areas that Rudy doesn’t even possibly remember. Or if he does remember, he certainly didn’t want it released.”
He concluded, bluntly: “We have no idea how expansive this investigation is going to ultimately reveal itself because Rudy’s an idiot. And that’s the problem. Rudy drinks too much, Rudy behaves in such an erratic manner that who knows what’s on those telephones or what’s on his computers.”
Camerota then asked Cohen what he thought Giuliani might do if prosecutors start tightening the screws on him, and whether he would “flip” and offer up information about Trump in exchange for leniency.
Cohen noted that before Trump became president, he and Giuliani did not like each other. “So do I think Rudy will give up Donald in a heartbeat? Absolutely,” he said. “He certainly doesn’t want to follow my path down into a 36 month sentence for something as innocuous as a hush money payment, right, to a porn star … at the direction and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump.”
-Alisyn Camerota (@AlisynCamerota) April 29, 2021
Cohen also said it was ironic that Giuliani is now being targeted by the US attorney’s office he once led.
“What’s ironic here is the fact that these tactics of the Southern District of New York in terms of bullying you into a plea deal were created by Rudy Giuliani going back 30 years ago,” he told CNN. “And it’s just ironic that the tactics that he created for that office are now going to be employed against him” and could result in Giuliani giving up information about “all of the individuals in that garbage can orbit of Donald Trump.”
-Alisyn Camerota (@AlisynCamerota) April 29, 2021
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