Lanny Davis, the lawyer representing President Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen, has contacted Nixon White House counsel John Dean multiple times over the past couple of months, according to a report.
“I reached out to my old friend John Dean because of what he went through with Watergate, and I saw some parallels to what Michael Cohen is experiencing. I wanted to gain from John’s wisdom,” Davis said during an interview with Politico, adding that he and Dean first met in the 1990s.
“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,” he continued.
News of the outreach efforts comes as Trump mentioned Dean during a Sunday morning tweet storm against a New York Times report that said his own White House counsel, Don McGahn, has extensively cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller since November, providing about 30 hours of testimony in at least three interviews.
“The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type ‘RAT,'” Trump wrote on Twitter. “But I allowed him and all others to testify – I didn’t have to. I have nothing to hide.”
[Related: Nixon-era White House counsel John Dean lashes out at Trump after being called a ‘rat’]
Dean agreed to cooperate with Senate Watergate investigators, as well as federal prosecutors, after former President Richard Nixon refused to grant him immunity for his role in the scandal. Dean served time in prison following a guilty plea to obstructing justice.
Cohen hired Davis, himself a special counsel to former President Bill Clinton from 1996 to 1998, in July.
“Michael Cohen deserves to tell his side of the story — subject, of course, to the advice of counsel,” he said at the time of his recruitment.
New York federal prosecutors could reportedly charge Cohen with bank fraud in excess of $20 million related to his taxi businesses by the end of August, according to a separate New York Times story on Sunday.
