Cohen Tries to Walk Back His Guilty Plea?

RUSH: Are you ready for this? Are you ready for this? (interruption) No, I’m not playing any of the sound bites yet because I don’t know if I’m gonna get the entire interview in order or if we’re gonna cherry-pick it here. There’s some confusion back and forth in the email. But we’ll get to it. We’ll get to it quickly. But get this. The Wall Street Journal, just within the last I guess hour or two, published a story saying that Michael Cohen, in a recorded phone call, is now walking back parts of his guilty plea. Michael Cohen…

Remember how excited everybody was when the FBI and the Southern District of New York raided Cohen’s home and his apartment and his office? They were gonna get the goods on Trump, remember? They were gonna finally get everything they wanted, because Cohen was Trump’s bagman. Yeah! Cohen was the guy that knew all of Trump’s secrets. Well, all they found was a bunch of dirt on Cohen. So Cohen, trying to limit the damage to him, started making up stuff about all the things Trump supposedly did.

He would tell Mueller and he would tell SDNY whatever he thought they wanted to hear in order lessen his exposure to prison time, and the effort bombed out. So now Michael Cohen is “disavowing responsibility for some of the crimes to which he has pleaded guilty.” In other words, he called ’em and said (paraphrased), “Hey, wait a minute! You know that thing I told you? I didn’t really do it. You know that other thing over there where I pled guilty? I didn’t really do it. (sputtering)

“I — I — I just told you that ’cause I thought that’s what you wanted to hear. I thought it would help me. I knew you wanted Trump, so I was trying to help you.” Now he’s walking it all back. He was “contending in a recent recorded phone call that he had not evaded taxes and that a criminal charge related to his home equity line of credit was a lie.” These are the kind of people that the Democrats invested everything in to try to get Trump. These are the kind of people. You know, Mueller even passed this guy off.

Mueller listened to this guy a couple of minutes and said, “You know what? I’m gonna move these guys over to SDNY and they can deal with this.” Mueller decided early on that Cohen had nothing for him. But Cohen still would tell anybody, including the Drive-Bys, what he thought they wanted to hear — and he was found guilty on a bunch of stuff, and now he’s trying to say he didn’t do it. (laughing) He’s trying to walk back his guilty plea. I just love it.

RUSH: o the audio sound bites. Just hot off the presses here. I mentioned earlier that Michael Cohen was overheard on the phone trying to walk back, now, his guilty pleas. Let me reset the table. Michael Cohen, “the former bagman for Trump,” is how he was referred to, the former “fixer.” He was a lawyer, and he himself engaged, in I guess, some nefarious activities, and these activities resulted in his office and his home being raided by law enforcement people, the Mueller team and whoever else.

And they were looking for any kind of dirt they could get on Trump, and Cohen knew this. So he knew he was in trouble. He knew he was facing jail time. He offered Mueller, he offered the SDNY, he offered them all kinds of things. Whatever he thought they wanted to hear, he gave them a version of, in an effort to limit his jail time. Well, apparently it didn’t work. It didn’t work. He’s still going to jail.

His jail time has not been significantly reduced and what he did, did not get Trump. So now he’s trying to walk back. He’s trying to say (impression), “Some of that stuff I told them, it wasn’t true.” He’s in heap big trouble. Today the Wall Street Journal website posted a recording of a call made last month between Michael Cohen and Tom Arnold. (chuckles) The former husband of Roseanne! Tom Arnold! The “actor/activist.” He was talking about his plea, and here is the first of two sound bites…

COHEN: (dramatic music) I lost my business, I lost my job, everything — my insurance, my bank accounts. All — all for — all for what? All for what? Because Trump, you know, had an affair with a porn star? That’s really what this is about.

RUSH: Well, you told it! (laughing) Is this not hilarious? I don’t understand the circumstances here. This doesn’t sound like a phone call; it sounds like a podcast. But whatever it is, Tom Arnold is on the other end here, and he admits that all this was ever about was Trump’s supposed affair with a porn star. And look at the other lawyer involved in this, Michael Avenatti, who CNN and the rest of the media turned into this big star. They invested so much of their credibility into Michael Avenatti.

It got so bad, they were telling us that Michael Avenatti could be the best candidate the Democrats could nominate to run against Trump, because he’s as big a reprobate and big a jerk as Trump is. You even had some conservative blogs making this point! Now Avenatti looks like he’s going to jail. Isn’t it funny? All of these people the media invest in and claim have the goods on Trump — that Trump corrupted, that Trump made look bad, that Trump was forcing them to do these illegal things — they’ve got nothing on Trump. Avenatti had nothing to Trump, Cohen had nothing on Trump, and now Cohen’s admitting, “Yeah, all it was, was that porn star Stormy Daniels thing.”

COHEN: (jaunty music) I had a mission that I needed to, (long pause) um, fulfill and — and I needed to get the truth out there. And very hard when, you know, you spent 10 years taking care of somebody and their family. Look, I always knew, you know, who he was and what he was and so on. But it didn’t really matter because it’s — it’s a small microcosm of New York real estate. It’s very different when you start looking to seeing what’s happening now in the country —

RUSH: Awww. So here’s Cohen portraying himself as a martyr, exposing the real Trump to the country. I guess he was hoping to be John Dean, but the poor guy. The poor guy’s pathological. So now they’ve dumped Cohen. Cohen’s no longer of any value. Cohen is no longer of any use. And as I mentioned earlier in the program, the Democrats have now thrown their subpoena eggs in one basket, and that’s the former White House counsel, Don McGahn.

Don McGahn in the Mueller report supposedly said… Remember, he testified for 30 hours with Mueller, Don McGahn. The president didn’t deny anybody their chance to talk with the investigators. The president turned over documents, millions of pages, I’m told — or a million pages — and whoever they wanted to talk to on his staff, Trump said, “Go ahead. No problem.” I don’t know how they arrive at this obstruction business.

But they’re saying that McGahn said that Trump told him to fire Mueller, but that McGahn refused to fire Mueller, and that McGahn’s refusal to fire Mueller is what saved Trump. But that Trump ordering McGahn to fire Mueller is an obstruction of justice. They’re trying to come along now and make McGahn John Dean, the former White House counsel for Nixon, who turned tail and spilled the beans on the Nixon White House and enabled Nixon to be forced out of office.

And the Democrats who cannot look forward and can’t innovate, they look to the past, they look to their playbook in the past, they try to bring back to life everything that’s happened in the past.

Somehow Lanny Davis is no longer taking Cohen’s calls. Who in their right mind would accept a Democrat propagandist as his attorney. Davis actually persuaded Cohen to plead guilty to charges that almost all attorneys felt should have been aggressively fought.

The world has gone crazy. Why in the hell is this guy talking to Tom Arnold..F’n Tom Arnold of all people and it gets recorded.

“I — I — I just told you that ’cause I thought that’s what you wanted to hear. I thought it would help me. I knew you wanted Trump, so I was trying to help you.”

In the good old days, back in the Middle Ages, say, they would torture a person until he gave them what they wanted to hear. Some enlightened souls would suggest that perhaps the pain of torture was eliciting information that wasn't quite ... true. Nonetheless, they carried on until enlightened times, when they'd simply tell the subject that they'd ruin him and his family unless he told them what they wanted to hear. I suppose there's a difference, but they seem similar to me.

this was all staged.
both sides of the phone call.

who doesn’t get that?

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