Emily Jane Fox, a Vanity Fair reporter who speaks to Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen regularly, appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe as part of a panel discussing the momentous events of August 21st — two former close associates of Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign being found guilty of crimes.
Host Mika Brzezinski asked Emily what was going through Cohen’s mind as he unexpectedly struck a plea deal Tuesday, then quickly appeared in court and purposefully implicated Donald Trump in the campaign crimes that he committed. Ms. Fox’s answer was absolutely stunning:
It was an emotional day for him. I believe last night he tried to live life as normally as possible, I think he went out to dinner with his wife… I was in the courtroom yesterday, and I watched him go through count by count and describe what he did wrong for each count, and he absolutely got emotional as he was describing them. And clearly it’s a hard thing to do, to admit to a packed courtroom full of mostly reporters, ‘Here are the eight illegal things that I did and I’m going to explain what I did and how I did them.’ It was very striking to me that on counts seven and eight, the counts related to payments made to women, first of all, he was under oath. And second of all, no one forced him to implicate the President.”
That certainly was a striking part of Cohen’s testimony — none of the charging documents even called out Donald Trump by name, so the inclusion of the President specifically in his statement was a decision that he made outside the plea deal, as it regarded anything actually in the criminal charge.
Fox went on:
He, when he started going through each count, stood up and said, first of all, ‘Can I stand,’ and second of all, ‘Will you allow me, judge, to read from a set of prepared notes? Because I want to make sure that I’m focused.’ So implicating the President in counts seven and eight was a deliberate choice, a choice that he wrote out ahead of time, and spoke to a courtroom filled with reporters. So that, I think, tells you more about his mindset and how he feels about the President than any interview he’s done.”
Boom. Michael Cohen threw Trump under the bus because he finally, at long last, realized that his family was worth more to him than any fake loyalty Donald Trump ever gave him.
Watch the video here:
Featured image via screen capture
