Is Donald Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen on the verge of giving testimony against him?

Despite his claims of victories on foreign policy front, the clouds on Trump's domestic horizon show no sign of drifting away

Michael Cohen, (C) former personal lawyer and confidante for President Donald Trump, exits the United States District Court Southern District of New York (Getty)

After flying back from his summit with Kim Jong-un, and claiming a diplomatic triumph, Donald Trump tweeted “everybody can now feel much safer that he day I took office”.

The president has already announced after the G7 summit in Toronto that the US was on its way to victory in the trade war he has declared on friends and foes alike.

There are likely to be public and vocal ultimatums to fellow Nato members at a meeting in Brussels next month.

The reality is, of course, very different to the Trump narrative. He gave away far more than he received from Mr Kim in Singapore.

The trade wars will hurt America as well as other countries. And the Nato states have now become used to the belligerent hectoring of the US president.

Mr Trump’s high profile and seemingly tough, and, according to him, successful, conduct of foreign affairs have, undoubtedly, helped in his very high favourable ratings among core Republican supporters. But the clouds in the domestic horizon show no sign of drifting away.

Rumours are swirling that Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer and fixer, the man who knows more than most where the skeletons are buried, is considering flipping and helping federal prosecutors who are investigating him.

There was also the news that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is adamant that, contrary to claims by Trump’s lawyers, he can, legally and constitutionally, indict a sitting president.

And, New York attorney general Barbara Underwood is suing Mr Trump and his children for alleged “extensive and persistent” lawbreaking in relation to their charitable foundation.

The last issue, astonishing as it is, perhaps does not matter to a US president who does not appear to suffer from embarrassment and shame.

But the quest to discover whether Mr Trump was indeed the Muscovian candidate in the presidential election continues and is now, to Trump’s fury, at the door of the White House.

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House (AP)

Among the US president’s first calls after returning from Singapore were to see his lawyers, who are gathering in Washington to work out the strategy over the latest developments, and working out whether he should agree to be questioned by Mr Mueller’s team or refuse. Risking a grand jury subpoena forcing him to be questioned under oath.

But the most immediate issue is what happens with Mr Cohen, who is said to be changing his lawyers and, possibly, seeking to cut a deal with a New York district attorney.

The tales have gained momentum with the deadline of Friday set by a federal judge for an independent legal firm to examine the hoard of material seized by the FBI from Mr Cohen to ascertain whether they are covered by attorney-client privilege between himself and Mr Trump.

According to some accounts, Mr Cohen is seeking lawyers with connections to the US attorney’s office who would help him reach an accommodation.

Another theory is that the current firm he is using, McDermott Will & Emery, was simply too expensive and he is looking at cheaper alternatives. There is a Trump factor in this version as well – Mr Cohen is said to be feeling let down by the lack of financial help he was supposedly promised by Mr Trump’s people.

According to a tweet by Vanity Fair writer Gabriel Sherman: “Person close to Cohen says he hasn’t flipped yet, he’s sending a smoke signal to Trump: I need help.”

Adding to the lawyer’s financial burden, the judge, Kimba Wood, is making Mr Cohen pay half the fees of the firm carrying out the assessment about him, the president and client privilege.

If Mr Cohen does flip, whatever information he provides to the Manhattan attorney will be shared with other federal prosecutors, including Mr Mueller – and that is where the potential problems lie for Trump in a number of areas.

One of them is the close relationship Mr Cohen has enjoyed with Felix Sater, a Russian-born criminal once jailed for stabbing a man in the face, who is also a former associate of gangsters as well as of Mr Trump.

He was also once an FBI informant who, prosecution lawyers stated in a deposition, supplied information on the mafia and al-Qaeda.

Sater is said to be, once again, helping federal authorities, this time in an alleged money laundering case involving the Trump SoHo hotel in New York.

Sater worked for a company called the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm with a suite of offices two floors beneath the Trump Organisation’s headquarters in Trump Tower for eight years.

Sater became Bayrock’s managing director and the company went into partnership with Trump in connection with the construction of the Trump SoHo hotel. The two men appeared at ribbon-cutting ceremonies for joint projects and went on business trips together, with Sater using Trump Organisation business cards.

Sater boasted that he was so close to the Trump family that he was asked by Donald to squire Donald Junior and Ivanka on a trip to Moscow and that, once arrived in Russia, he arranged for Ivanka to sit in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s chair in his Kremlin office.

Ivanka says that her trip to Moscow included “a brief tour of Red Square and the Kremlin” and this may have involved sitting at Putin’s desk; although she could not quite remember whether she had done so.

Sater, born Felix Sheferovsky, arrived in America at the age of six when his family emigrated from Russia.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is adamant that the president can, legally and constitutionally, be indicted (Getty)

He was convinced that Mr Putin would help Mr Trump to get to the White House and he and Mr Cohen, whom he had known since they were teenagers, would receive the due credit.

“Can you believe two guys from Brooklyn are going to elect a president?” was the excited email sent to Cohen at one stage.

He had stated, in earlier messages, that Mr Putin would back the development of Trump Tower in Moscow and that this would be part of a grand plan.

“Our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it... I will get Putin on this programme and we will get Trump elected.”

Mr Cohen says the emails were evidence of Sater trying to persuade his friend of the valuable role he could play, highlighting that if Mr Trump could show his ability to get along with foreign leaders he would mark himself out from other presidential candidates.

Mr Cohen also appears in Christopher Steele’s dossier on Trump.

The former MI6 officer claimed that the lawyer was a conduit between the Trump camp and the Russians and that Mr Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov was tasked with carrying out a covert campaign to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid – which Mr Peskov denied.

Mr Cohen had initially denied “any dealings” whatsoever with the Russians in his work for Trump. But newly leaked emails show that Mr Cohen asked for Mr Peskov’s help with a Trump real estate project, the Trump Tower, in Moscow in 2016. This was when Trump was already campaigning to secure the Republican nomination for the presidency.

Mr Steele had also claimed that Mr Cohen visited Prague in 2016 and met with Russians about the Trump campaign.

Mr Cohen vehemently denied when the dossier came out that he had even been to Prague, but acknowledged later that he had been in Austria around that time.

It was reported two months ago that the Mueller team had uncovered evidence that Mr Cohen had entered the Czech Republic through Germany. Mr Cohen again denied this was the case.

But he also withdrew legal action over claims of the Prague visit against the US company Fusion GS, which had commissioned Mr Steele and the news website BuzzFeed, which published parts of the dossier.

There are further allegations about Mr Cohen’s Russian links. He is said to have acted as a conduit for a proposed deal with the Kremlin over Ukraine put together by Andrey Artemenko, a Ukrainian politician.

Mr Cohen supposedly passed on the plan to Michael Flynn, Mr Trump’s then national security advisor, who was subsequently charged by Mr Mueller over illicit contacts with Russians and is now said to be cooperating with the investigation.

And, of course, as well as all these issues, there is the matter of payoffs allegedly made by Mr Cohen on Mr Trump’s behalf to women who claimed to have had sex with the US president, including $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, also known as Stephanie Clifford.

Ms Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti, when asked about Mr Cohen, held: “There’s no question in my mind he’s going to be indicted, and there’s no question in my mind he’s going to try to flip on the president.”

“I think Michael Cohen is in a very, very bad spot, and I think the president is in a very, very bad spot because this is what happens when you trust your innermost secrets to a moron.”

Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, believes the indications are that Cohen is considering helping the authorities.

“It certainly could signal an attempt to make a friendly deal with the prosecutor, the key is to finding out who the new lawyers are” he said. “Once we know that we will have a sense of what is going on.”

What happens with all this, will depend, to all purposes, on the coming mid-terms.

Impeachment is a distinct possibility if the Democrats win the Congress and the Senate. A Democrat victory may not be necessary, as a senior British diplomat held, “if Mueller is really damning in his report”.

But with Trump supporters grabbing nominations for the Republicans in the coming election, a bipartisan approach may not be possible and bitter acrimony lies ahead. The extraordinary twists and turns of the saga of Trump and the Russians will, in the meantime, continue.