August 23, 2018

Trump Lashes Out at Cohen, Sessions While Complaining That “Flipping” Should Be Illegal

He also claimed that “everybody would be very poor” if he ever got impeached.

In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News’ Ainsley Earhardt, President Donald Trump said that “flipping”—in which defendants facing jail time cooperate with prosecutors by offering damaging testimony on others—should “almost” be considered illegal. 

The interview, which aired Thursday morning, is Trump’s first since his onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of financial crimes and his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to bank, tax, and campaign finance charges—on the same day. Cohen directly implicated the president, who he said “directed” him to commit the campaign finance violations, stemming from the lawyer’s hush-money payoffs to two of Trump’s alleged mistresses. In his interview with Fox News, Trump insisted the campaign finance charges Cohen admitted to are “not a big deal.”

Following Cohen’s guilty plea Tuesday, his lawyer Lanny Davis embarked on a media blitz, saying his client would never accept a pardon from Trump and would gladly tell special counsel Robert Mueller all he knew about possible Russian collusion. This apparently caused Trump to muse to Fox News that “flipping” “almost ought to be outlawed” and that it wasn’t “fair.”

“Because if somebody is going to spend five years like Michael Cohen or 10 years or 15 years in jail because of a taxi cab industry because he defrauded some bank—the last two were the tiny ones, you know the campaign violations are considered not a big deal frankly,” he told Earhardt. 

Trump continued, “But if you can say something bad about Donald Trump and you’ll go down to two years or three years, which is the deal he made, in all fairness to him, most people are going to do that.” Trump then claimed these so-called “flippers” fabricate stories for their own benefit.

In the interview, the president again expressed his long-standing frustration with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and hinted that he may intervene in a battle between the Justice Department and Trump’s conservative allies in Congress, who have been seeking internal documents in their ongoing bid to undercut the Russia probe. Trump said, “I didn’t want to, but I think I’m going to have to. There’s such corruption.”

When asked about the possibility that Democrats would seek to impeach him if they take back the House in November, Trump said he didn’t “know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job.” He also suggested his removal from office would result in a severe economic downturn. 

“I’ll tell you what, if I ever got impeached I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor because without this thinking,” he said, pointing to his head, “you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse.”

The interview was also notable for what it did not include. Despite telling Sean Hannity on Wednesday that the president had said he was considering a pardon of Manafort, that exchange did not appear during the version of the interview that aired Thursday. 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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