Caroline Polisi is a federal and white collar criminal defense attorney in New York and is of counsel at Pierce Bainbridge. She frequently appears on CNN as a legal analyst and is an anchor at the Law & Crime Network, providing live legal analysis on high profile court cases. Follow her on Twitter: @CarolinePolisi. The views expressed in this commentary are her own.

(CNN) Michael Cohen, who once famously asserted he would "take a bullet" to protect the President, has apparently reversed course -- now that the gun is locked and loaded, so to speak.

The ammunition, of course, is the looming possibility of a criminal indictment any day now by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Cohen's recent off-camera interview with George Stephanopoulos is the strongest indication I've seen thus far in Cohen's ongoing legal saga that he will likely cooperate with federal prosecutors.

Cohen, Trump's longtime attorney and consigliere, is the subject of a federal criminal investigation led by the FBI and the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, which executed an April 9 raid for evidence on Cohen's home, office and hotel room. The criminal referral to the Southern District reportedly came from special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians to influence the 2016 election.

While both Mueller and the Southern District prosecutors appear leak-proof (to their credit) -- meaning the public gets information regarding their methodology or the evidence they've gathered only through court filings -- it seems fairly obvious that the inciting factor leading to the underlying Cohen investigation has to do with the alleged "hush money" payout to adult film star Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels). She claims she had a consensual affair with Donald Trump in 2006, as detailed in her original 2011 interview with In Touch (Trump has denied this affair).

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That alleged "hush money" episode, the messy details of which are currently the subject of Cohen's civil case in California, concerns the now infamously bungled nondisclosure agreement between Clifford and Essential Consultants LLC. This is the Delaware limited liability company that Cohen created and that was used in both the $130,000 payment to Clifford and also implicated in the $1.6 million payment offer to a former Playboy model who allegedly had an affair with top Republican National Committee official Elliott Broidy (he has since resigned).

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