"I wanted to gain from John’s wisdom,” said Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen's attorney, said of his contact with former Nixon White House counsel John Dean. | Joseph Kaczmarek/AP Photo Michael Cohen's attorney says he's talking to lawyer who brought down Nixon

Lanny Davis, an attorney for former longtime Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, said he has been reaching out regularly over the past few months to John Dean, the former White House counsel who helped bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

Cohen has sent signals that he might cooperate in the investigations surrounding his former boss. The fact that his lawyer is talking frequently to Dean — who was name-checked by Trump on Sunday in the context of recent reports that White House counsel Don McGahn is cooperating with investigators — adds new hints that Cohen could be open to being a potential witness in any case against Trump.


“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 told POLITICO.

“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.”

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Cohen, like Dean in the Nixon era, is wrapped up in a criminal investigation that has a parallel congressional probe, and he has been attacked by the president and by lawyers working for the president, including Rudy Giuliani, who said he has no credibility.

Davis, known as a media-friendly lawyer, said he first became friends with Dean when they appeared together on MSNBC in the late 1990s to comment on President Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings.

Rather than getting Dean’s legal advice for Cohen, Davis said he has been asking about Dean’s experiences during Watergate to refresh his own memory of the investigation.

Dean confirmed his frequent recent discussions with Davis and told POLITICO that another “person I’d really like to talk to is Guy Petrillo,” Cohen’s criminal defense lawyer.

