U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman would have wanted "more than the bare-minimum proof of probable cause" before authorizing Monday's raids on President Trump's lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, Preet Bharara, who held the Manhattan federal prosecutor job before Berman, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Tuesday night. "And so I predict, as we saw with Paul Manafort, that if they decided they had enough evidence to engage in a very aggressive, a very aggressive move, that the likelihood that Michael Cohen is going to be charged is high."
That's very bad news for Trump, lawyer Michael Avenatti told Cooper. Avenatti said that he and his client in a case against Cohen and Trump, porn star Stormy Daniels, are fully cooperating with the federal prosecutors, and he predicted that Cohen will fold under the pressure.
Avenatti called Cohen's decision to talk to CNN's Don Lemon "moronic," explaining that "any experienced attorney would tell a client not to be speaking to the press the day after the FBI executes three search warrants on your homes and your offices. I mean, this is just crazy." It's also nuts that Trump "effectively put his own personal attorney in the crosshairs" by publicly denying all knowledge of the Daniels hush payment and referring all questions to Cohen, he added.
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"He has set Michael Cohen up to be the fall guy, in my view," Avenatti said, "and there is now a false sense of security, I think, on behalf of the president that Michael Cohen's going to take the fall for this." A good "fixer" is smart and willing to go to jail for you, and "in my view, Michael Cohen doesn't fit either one of those requirements," he added. Trump "picked the wrong fixer, he trusted too many personal secrets with Michael Cohen, and I think Michael Cohen is going to fold like a cheap deck of cards on Mr. Trump and the results are going to be very, very bad." Peter Weber
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