Lanny Davis, the attorney for President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, has been in conversation with the lawyer who helped collapse Richard Nixon’s presidency, Politico reported Sunday.
Davis told Politico that he’s been in touch with the former White House counsel, John Dean, because he saw some “parallels” between what Cohen is dealing with and what Dean experienced during Watergate.
“I certainly don’t want to raise expectations that Mr. Cohen has anything like the level of deep involvement and detailed knowledge that John Dean had in the Nixon White House as a witness to Nixon’s crimes, but I did see some similarities and wanted to learn from what John went through,” Davis told Politico.
Davis said he is not consulting Dean for legal advice, but rather just to jog his memory on the Watergate investigation. This isn’t the first time Dean’s name has been raised in recent days: Trump tweeted suggesting his White House counsel Don McGahn was not a “rat” like Dean after it was reported over the weekend the McGahn has cooperated extensively with special counsel Robert Mueller.
Cohen, like Dean under Nixon, is under investigation for a slew of financial crimes, has also been interviewed by investigators probing the Trump campaign and Russian meddling in the 2016 election. As Trump and his new lawyer Rudy Giuliani bad mouth Cohen via Twitter and cable news interviews, Cohen has hinted that he’d be willing to cooperate with federal prosecutors even if it put Trump in jeopardy.
