Edward Steed

On a recent Thursday night in July, Lanny Davis, the lawyer and crisis-management expert, was sitting on a toilet on a southbound Acela train interrogating Michael Cohen, his newest client, who was in Manhattan, over the phone. Davis is the person you call if you’re famous, you’re wealthy, and your reputation is in tatters due to crime or scandal. Bill Clinton brought Davis into the White House to battle campaign scandals and, later, impeachment. Martha Stewart retained Davis when she was accused of insider trading. The embassy of the Ivory Coast, fighting election-fraud charges, agreed to pay him $100,000 a month in 2010 to broker talks with the State Department (though he quit after ten days).

Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, who was facing criminal charges in New York and would cut a deal six weeks later, pleading guilty to charges of tax evasion, bank fraud, and campaign-finance violations, had hired Davis to send a message to prosecutors and the media: Michael Cohen was like a son to Donald Trump, but he would no longer take a bullet for him, as he once said he would. He was ready to cut a deal with the government and reform his image as Trump’s Fredo-like fixer.

Hiring Davis sent a message in and of itself, since Davis is a good friend of Hillary Clinton’s—going back to their days together at Yale Law School—and recently wrote a book arguing that Trump should be impeached. He has called Trump “a vicious liar” and an “illegitimate president.” Cohen had reached out to him on the advice of a mutual friend, and the two lawyers spent two weeks discussing Cohen’s case and whether Davis would take him on as a client. Once Davis agreed, they plotted a kind of patricide against Trump that was the first phase of Cohen’s rehabilitation: a forty-five-minute off-camera interview with George Stephanopoulos that aired July 2 in which Cohen distanced himself from the president. “That was his declaration of independence,” Davis told me.

President Clinton with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton speaking on Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room at the White House on January 26, 1998. New York Daily News Archive Getty Images

But Cohen hadn’t told him everything, and that’s why Davis was in the Acela loo. Kyra Phillips of ABC had just phoned, and she was ready to pop a story about Cohen’s work for Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant that paid Cohen’s company, Essential Consultants—the same entity he had used to pay Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her affair with Trump—$1.2 million. Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon who obtained emails about the Novartis deal, was claiming that Cohen used his relationship with Trump to “sell access” to Novartis. Alarmed, Davis hung up with the ABC reporter and retired to the bathroom, where he could interrogate Cohen in private. This was the first he had heard of any of this.

“What did you do for Novartis?” Davis asked Cohen, according to Davis’s account of the conversation. “Who did you call? Who did you introduce them to? Don’t give me the definition of the word lobby. I’ll make definitions. Give me facts. How many calls did you make? What did you do?” Cohen insisted that he never made a call to the White House on Novartis’s behalf and never introduced company officials to anyone in Washington. Hard to believe, but that was his story.

“Mr. Cohen, who never introduced anyone from Novartis to anyone in the administration or Congress, did not ‘sell access.’ As a consultant, he provided strategic advice to his client.”

“Well, why would they pay you all that money?” Davis asked.

“I spent a lot of time advising them strategically,” Cohen said.

Cohen’s criminal-defense attorney, Guy Petrillo, didn’t want him to respond. Defense attorneys almost always advise public silence, lest their clients’ statements piss off the prosecutors. (Martha Stewart’s criminal-defense attorney refused to even talk to Davis when he worked for her.) But Davis prevailed and tapped out a statement to ABC: “Mr. Cohen, who never introduced anyone from Novartis to anyone in the administration or Congress, did not ‘sell access.’ As a consultant, he provided strategic advice to his client.” A strong on-the-record denial, but Davis had a little more ammo to help shape the story. On background, he anonymously slipped the ABC reporter some seemingly exculpatory information. The original draft of the contract with Novartis said Cohen would have to “provide access to key policymakers in the U. S. government,” but Cohen replaced that language with a vague promise “to provide consulting and advisory services.”

Davis was pleased with his handiwork. ABC’s story, which appeared early the next morning, included his full statement and, without attribution, the details about the contract’s altered language. After twenty minutes in the bathroom, Davis returned to his seat.

“Are you okay?” a woman asked.

“Yeah, I’ve had kind of an upset stomach,” Davis replied.

Davis didn’t realize then that taking on Cohen as a client would test everything he thought he knew about crisis management. He told me that Cohen is the toughest assignment he’s ever had. Could someone like Cohen, who is despised by the anti-Trump Left for his years of suspect service to the president, distrusted by reporters for his threats and bullying over the years, and now under fire from Trump supporters, even be rehabilitated?

Ever since Clinton’s impeachment, Davis has used a mantra to describe his theory of crisis management: “Tell it early, tell it all, tell it yourself.” He spends a lot of his time convincing clients that negative stories will be written anyway, so it’s better to influence them through cooperation rather than stonewall.

Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer for Donald Trump, leaves federal court on August 21, 2018, in New York. Cohen pled guilty to fraud, campaign finance violations. DON EMMERT Getty Images

Working for the Clinton White House, Davis specialized in burying bad news by strategically leaking documents already turned over to congressional investigators, which the White House knew would be released with maximum impact by Republicans, and working closely with reporters on big investigative pieces that he could aggressively shape. One notorious document, leaked to the AP before Republicans could exploit it, was a memo with Bill Clinton’s handwriting on it and a list of people to rent out the Lincoln Bedroom to for $50,000 or $100,000 a night. Davis had a phrase for this kind of leak (just like the info given to ABC about Cohen): “a deep-background private placement.” He told me, “It means no fingerprints and you help the reporter write it.” The payoff came when congressional Republicans later put forward the same memo, and Davis circulated the AP story to reporters. “Old news!” he told them, softening the blow.

Davis, L. MICHAL CIZEK Getty Images

Davis celebrated some of his big successes in a 2013 book, Crisis Tales: a puff piece about Martha Stewart successfully placed in The New Yorker; an extensive New York Times story about a client, Macy’s department store, which shot down accusations of racial bias; a long Vanity Fair article about another client, Royal Caribbean, which let the cruise line off the hook for a mysterious death at sea. Davis calls these “predicate” stories: articles heavily shaped by him that serve as the guiding narrative for the press going forward.

After helping save Bill Clinton, Davis was a hero among Democrats, but that started to change. In the 2000s, as the country became divided into brighter halves of blue and red, Davis preached bipartisanship in a political column called “Purple Nation” that has appeared on various websites. He had a better relationship with George W. Bush, who was a friend and classmate from Yale, than with Barack Obama, whom he pilloried in 2007 and 2008 when working as a Hillary Clinton surrogate. He was especially brutal about Obama’s relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor, whose fiery sermons almost derailed the Obama campaign. “I don’t care if you are black or white; if you sit silently and you listen to racism or bigotry or hate and you’re silent, then you are complicit,” Davis said in 2008. The Obama administration subsequently treated Davis as a pariah. “Some people in the White House never forgave me for how tough I was on him during the primaries,” Davis said.

He remained a faithful Hillary supporter. “I feel as if I am taking advantage of a great privilege that you allow me to send you a personal email every so often,” he wrote her in 2010, apologetically asking Clinton to talk to a reporter writing a profile of him. When her State Department emails were released publicly, the conservative Weekly Standard called that Davis missive “D. C.’s most cringe-inducing document ever.” Davis’s stubborn centrism made him a punching bag for the rising Left, and as his client list became more controversial, he started having to do more crisis work for himself. After a particularly tough 2010 New York Times profile that called him a “frontman for the dark side,” Davis made a frantic late-night call to Dean Baquet, the paper’s current executive editor, who was then the Washington bureau chief, and begged him, to no avail, to change the story, or at least its headline, Lobbyist’s Client List Puts Him on the Defensive.

Whatever his shortcomings—his penchant for publicity, his overreaction to criticism, his representation of some questionable people and companies—Davis practices the kind of flackery that may be disappearing in the Trump era, when spokespeople across the government and outside defenders of the president routinely lie to reporters, denigrate them, or simply ignore them. Davis doesn’t lie. He certainly doesn’t heap invective on reporters. (He’s one of those spokesmen who secretly wish they were journalists.) And he is religious about returning calls. He is in effect a lawyerly Clinton-era spinner operating in the modern fact-free world of Trump gaslighting. Not surprisingly, his defense of Cohen has gotten off to a shaky start.

His main media opponents are Michael Avenatti, who represents Stormy Daniels and regularly tortures Cohen in the press, and Rudolph Giuliani. Both lawyers are more Trump than Clinton when it comes to press strategy. Giuliani has invented a Trump-like nickname for Cohen: “scoundrel.” Avenatti recently called him “thug Cohen.” Davis sees Avenatti—along with the lawsuit Daniels filed in California against Cohen and Trump over the legality of money paid for her silence about her 2006 liaison with the future president—as a mere nuisance compared with the serious criminal liability he has faced in New York, where FBI agents raided his office and temporary home in April and carted off thousands of documents.

"Everything that Mr. Avenatti says I do not take personally.”

“When people are in litigation, especially lawyers, they say and do things that they regret and don’t recognize after the litigation,” Davis said of Avenatti’s shots at Cohen. “So everything that Mr. Avenatti says I do not take personally.”

He added that the lawyer had a weakness for going “beyond the facts.”

In an interview, Avenatti responded to Davis’s criticism. “I do not regret a single statement I have made about Michael Cohen or Lanny Davis,” he told me. “These two guys are playing games right now with the American public. They’re trying to paint Michael Cohen as this patriot and guy who has love of country while they’re not disclosing all of the information they have.” Then Avenatti, who has been using his new media platform to stoke interest in a run for office as a Democrat, added, “Even among staunch Democrats, Lanny’s reputation for the truth is suspect. I can’t tell you how many Democrats have said to me that Lanny will say anything.” (Davis told me that behind the scenes Avenatti has called him several times asking for help to mediate the case between Cohen and Daniels and that he was very complimentary to Davis.)

Giuliani, R. Anthony Devlin Getty Images

Davis was more cutting about his other antagonist. One of the frustrations in taking on Trump is that like the president, his new lawyer doesn’t feel bound by the truth. In May, Giuliani said Trump paid Cohen back for a payment he made to Daniels, but then walked back that statement. In late July, he said there was a previously unknown meeting at Trump Tower to prepare for the campaign’s notorious June 2016 meeting with Russians peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton, but then later explained the pregame meeting was a fiction. He recently tweeted that Chicago had sixty-three murders during a weekend in early August.

The actual number was twelve. “Giuliani shows the kind of malice, and venom, and hatred that is unbecoming and sometimes seems to me to be unhinged,” Davis told me. “It’s lacking any intellectual discipline, and it makes you wonder about his judgment capabilities.” In another conversation, he added, “When you debate Rudy Giuliani, at least my personal reaction is I feel dirty. I want to take a shower. I think he’s mentally not all there. How do I debate somebody who’s not mentally all there?” (Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.)

But the far bigger obstacle, throughout the summer, to Davis’s rehabilitation of Cohen was the prosecutors of the Southern District of New York, who were threatening to indict Cohen for campaign-finance violations, and bank and tax fraud. It was apparent that Davis and Petrillo, Cohen’s criminal-defense attorney, who spent nearly a decade as a Southern District prosecutor, had been at odds over press strategy since Davis came aboard. Petrillo viewed every public utterance from Cohen or his lawyers as a potential irritant to prosecutors. As Davis told me, “I’m not a therapist. I’m a lawyer. How do I know what irritates a prosecutor?”

Davis has prevailed over Petrillo only a few times. The first was with the Stephanopoulos interview, the Cohen team’s predicate story. During two weeks of late-night phone calls—this time for one week from a hotel bathroom so he wouldn’t wake up his family, who were attending his son’s baseball tournament in Myrtle Beach—Davis spoke to Cohen and devised talking points to relay to Stephanopoulos, the most important being that he would choose his family and country over protecting Donald Trump. Davis told me, “Every choice was to convey one message: I’m no longer the man that said, ‘I will take a bullet for Trump.’ ” They spent hours debating single words to use in the interview. “Simply accepting the denial of Mr. Putin is unsustainable,” Cohen told Stephanopoulos, after his team debated several other harsher adjectives to use, including “indefensible,” “insane,” and “treasonous.” When he first talked to Cohen, Davis told me, Cohen was “emotional, distraught, losing weight, and couldn’t sleep.” After he spoke publicly, his mood brightened. (Cohen himself declined to talk to me.)

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With the predicate laid, Cohen went dark again. It took a fresh outrage from Giuliani to bait Davis back into a public fight. When the existence of a taped conversation between Cohen and Trump discussing a payment related to Trump’s alleged relationship with Karen McDougal became public, Giuliani insisted the tape would show that Trump had no knowledge of the deal. The tape was “exculpatory,” Giuliani said.

Davis was dumbfounded. The tape showed the opposite. Trump’s attorney had simply lied. Davis gave the tape to CNN and appeared live to discuss how it exposed Giuliani as a fraud. But that also infuriated the prosecutors. The damage was bad enough that Cohen, Davis, and Petrillo went completely silent again after the episode.

“It was a 51–49 judgment call by me,” Davis told me afterward, seeming to regret the episode. “But it was a harmful defamation that you can prove was defamatory with the tape”—the crisis-management equivalent of drawing a straight flush. “When is that ever gonna happen to me again?”

A few days later, I called Davis to check in on the case. He sounded despondent. A no-comment gag order he enforced on himself was in full effect while Petrillo secretly negotiated a plea deal with the prosecutors. He’d been studying Cohen’s life story to prepare for a larger article he wanted eventually to place somewhere, even reaching out to Watergate turncoat witness John Dean for his “wisdom,” but for now there was nothing Davis could say. There was no cable studio to which he could decamp or leaked documents he could slip me. For now, the Michael Cohen story couldn’t be told.

“I’m in a dilemma right now, and it’s causing me a lot of heartache,” he said, “and questioning of whether the profession I chose is a viable profession when it involves a criminal case. And I’ve come to the conclusion it isn’t.” It was a little sad to listen to him. The da Vinci of spin had his paintbrushes confiscated.

But two weeks later, he was unshackled. Cohen reached an agreement with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud, and—most ominously for the White House—violating campaign-finance laws, which, Cohen said, was done “in coordination with, and at the direction of” then-candidate Trump. If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump? Petrillo’s strategy of silence had worked. Now it was time for Davis to resume polishing the Cohen turd. “I spent the last four weeks in the horror chamber of no comment, and now I’m finally free,” Davis excitedly told me on the day Cohen appeared before a Manhattan judge to enter his guilty plea, which could send him to prison for several years. “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, I’m free at last!”

This article appears in the October'18 issue of Esquire. Subscribe Now



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