“The top people in the F.B.I., headed by Comey, were crooked!” Donald Trump, apparently yelling into a phone at the White House, said in a call-in interview with “Fox & Friends,” on Thursday morning. “You look at the corruption at the top of the F.B.I.—it’s a disgrace! And our Justice Department—which I try and stay away from, but, at some point, I won’t—our Justice Department should be looking into that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with Russia.” Were it not for the oral exclamation points, it would be much harder to guess, when Trump speaks, where his sentences end—and, in this case, where his threats to obstruct justice might lead.
This interview—conducted by the show’s hosts, Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade—had begun, half an hour earlier, with Trump mentioning that it was Melania Trump’s birthday, and somehow even that got complicated, when the hosts asked what gift he’d given her. The President, sounding surprised, said something about “a beautiful card” and getting “in trouble,” since “maybe I didn’t get her so much.” (Later, there was a reference to “beautiful flowers.”) But that might be nothing compared with the trouble he may have caused for his lawyers in discussing the legal situation of Michael Cohen, one of his personal attorneys, who, joined by Trump, is engaged in a legal battle over a hush agreement with Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress and director whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford. On Wednesday, Cohen filed an affidavit saying that he wanted to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in those proceedings.
“He represents me, like with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, he represented me,” Trump said. “And, you know, from what I see he did absolutely nothing wrong. There were no campaign funds going into this, which would have been a problem.” With that, Trump offered a new story about his relationship to the case—one that contradicts some of his past statements, as well as those of Cohen. At this point, it is obvious, despite the use of pseudonyms (“David Dennison”) in the hush agreement, that Cohen was in some way acting for Trump. Indeed, if this were not the case, the agreement might be found to be fraudulent, since, as written, it certainly suggests that Trump was a party. Cohen, though, had claimed that the agreement was a “private transaction”—a deal between him and Clifford, not Trump. And Trump, in a recent exchange with reporters aboard Air Force One, said that he didn’t even know that Cohen had paid Clifford a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to keep quiet. He also said that he didn’t know where that money had come from, which raises the question of how he is now sure that “no campaign funds” were involved.
It would have been very easy for Trump to decline to comment on Cohen’s troubles, which have included an F.B.I. raid on his office, his hotel room, and his home. As I’ve written before, “this crazy Stormy Daniels deal” is so crazy largely because Trump and his lawyers have done pretty much everything they could to make it more public and worse for themselves. It is in keeping with the legal madness that the case in which Cohen says he will remain silent is one that he set in motion—first by asking an arbitrator to enforce the hush agreement (which Trump, incidentally, never got around to signing) and then by filing to move the proceedings to a federal court in California. And the factual confusion that Trump’s “Fox & Friends” interview furthered will provide yet another argument for Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, in his attempts to compel Trump to sit down for a deposition. (Avenatti tweeted that the interview was “very informative.”) Cohen’s handling of the transaction is also, reportedly, one of the areas of concern for prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, who initiated the F.B.I. raid.
Not that that particular incident has to do with Trump, Trump said, on “Fox & Friends.” “Michael is in business,” he said, beginning a riff that might be set to music. “He’s really a businessman, and fairly big businesses, I understand, and I don’t know his business—but this doesn’t have to do with me. Michael is a businessman, he’s got a business. He also practices law, I would say, probably the big thing is his business. And they’re looking at something having to do with his business. I have nothing to do with his business. I could tell you, he’s a good guy.”
“In business” can mean so much in the Trump world, as my colleague Adam Davidson has pointed out. But the riff, with its emphasis on business, rather than on law, also might complicate Cohen’s claims that attorney-client privilege should keep prosecutors from reading some of the documents that were seized in the raid. (That separate fight is taking place in a federal court in New York; by midday, prosecutors had included a reference to Trump’s “Fox & Friends” interview in new filings, the Washington Post reported, as an indication of how limited Cohen’s legal work was.)
As Trump went on about the good-guy-ness of Michael Cohen, Ainsley Earhardt asked, “Then why is he pleading the Fifth?”
“Because he’s got other things,” Trump said.
Trump has other things, too, and Earhardt broke in to raise another issue: “Mr. President, we want to get to Kanye West.” Trump said that he believed that West, who recently tweeted that Trump was his “brother,” had doubtless done an analysis of the falling unemployment rates in the black and Latin-American communities. He didn’t mention, as West did, their shared “dragon energy.”
And then Trump was off talking about how much better he had done in the 2016 election than anybody had thought possible, including in minority communities. He bragged again about telling African-Americans that they had nothing to lose, considering how bad education was in their neighborhoods, and how crime had never been higher. (Crime rates have fallen in recent decades.) He also said that Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, would “pay” for his role in the failed nomination of Ronny Jackson as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. (Tester had circulated a memo with allegations against Jackson, some involving his handling of prescription drugs; Jackson said that the charges were false but withdrew, on Thursday morning.) And Trump allowed that he had educated the public about the evils of CNN. (“I taught them it’s fake news!”) It was that kind of interview, one in which a long stretch of sentence fragments about Kim Jong Un (“Could be that I walk out . . . who knows?”) would be a blur but for this concentration-focussing assertion about recent events: “Let me tell you. The nuclear war would have happened if you had weak people.”
“You know, I think he was awake. He had a lot to say!” Steve Doocy said brightly, after Trump signed off.
“He’s a morning person,” Brian Kilmeade added. “He’s already proven that to us”—as if the President’s starting the day with the rant was, somehow, a keeping of the faith. Maybe for Fox News it is.
