On Thursday evening, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo effectively incinerated the news cycle with his second riveting disclosure of the week—the sort of tantalizing reveal that was perfectly scheduled for cable news during prime-time hours. On Tuesday, Cuomo had been the first to play a grainy audio tape in which Michael Cohen and Donald Trump briefly discussed the exigencies surrounding a payment to the president’s alleged former paramour—a staccato, shorthand exchange that included some uncertainty about who wanted to pay by check (Cohen’s people told me it was him; Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, told me the opposite) versus cash. Nights later, the scoop was an order of magnitude larger. From a studio on the seventh floor of the Time Warner Center, Cuomo reported a triple-bylined CNN story suggesting that Cohen was ready to share one of his most valuable secrets with federal prosecutors in order to cut a deal in the ongoing criminal investigation into his business dealings.

According to the CNN report, Cohen has claimed that then-candidate Trump had advance knowledge of the infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower during which a Kremlin-tied lawyer initially offered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The meeting, which was arranged by Donald Trump Jr. and included Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, has been of interest to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. President Trump has repeatedly denied knowledge of the meeting. “He wasn't aware of it,” Don Jr. testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. He also attested to his dad’s ignorance on Hannity last July.

Murmurs about the Trump Tower meeting have, of late, loomed large within Cohenworld. As I reported on Monday, a person close to Cohen told me that Cohen was privy to information that could be valuable to Mueller. Three people familiar with the situation believe that this information pertained to the Trump Tower meeting. “When Michael says that he wants the truth out,” one person familiar with Cohen’s thinking said, “He’s talking about core issues at the heart of the Mueller probe.”

But Cohen and his lawyer Lanny Davis were surprised to learn that Cohen’s alleged knowledge of Trump’s involvement with the Russia meeting would be splashed out on CNN’s chyron, and then across the cable-news and social-media landscape. According to people familiar with their thinking, they were frustrated that one of Cohen’s most valuable potential pieces of information had now been publicized, perhaps nullifying a presumable bargaining chip with investigators. “Fury! Fury is what we felt,” one person familiar with Cohen’s thinking told me.

On Thursday evening and into Friday morning, some pundits suggested that it could have been Cohen’s side who leaked the tapes, perhaps swayed by an ulterior motive. They argued that the motivation could have been Cohen attempt to send a smoke signal to Trump that he ought to pardon him in order to prevent the release of further damaging information. But a person close to Cohen suggested that this theory was nonsense. “Is the best way to get Trump to give you a pardon to spend weeks pissing him off and sticking him in the eye?” the person said. Another person familiar with Cohen’s thinking told me that Cohen is not seeking a pardon or a pre-pardon, because he would still be called to testify, and if he were pardoned, he would be unable to plead the Fifth. People close to Cohen strenuously denied that they had played a role in the information’s release, in general. “Why would we want this out there now,” this person continued, “if we were going to use this information? They tried to hurt us with this to undercut our credibility.”