In a packed courtroom in August, at the end of a hearing in which Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts of tax evasion, lying to a bank, and campaign-finance violations, a prosecutor from the Southern District of New York detailed the parameters of the bond agreement. For those who have followed the travails of Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and cleaner-upper, the particulars of the arrangement raised a poignant question. Under the terms, Cohen would be allowed to leave New York, where he resides, only for travel to Florida, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. Cohen has family in Florida and business obligations in Chicago. The permission to travel to the nation’s capital, some speculated at the time, could facilitate eventual conversations with special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors.

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On Thursday, ABC News reported that Cohen had spoken to Mueller’s team for hours about topics ranging from collusion to possible pardons. It added another dimension to the news I reported last week, namely that Cohen’s legal team had been engaged for a month with representatives from the special counsel’s office. Prosecutors from the Southern District sat in on some of the talks, and, separately, Cohen has been cooperating with officials from the tax and finance department of the New York state attorney general’s office, which is investigating the Trump Foundation. One person familiar with Cohen’s conversations explained that while Mueller’s focus is on Russia, their discussions have gone beyond potential collusion. “He’s committed to working with Mueller on everything,” this person said. “Everything. It’s been him saying, ‘these are the many things I’ve lived with for 10 years.’ He is no longer behind Donald Trump with a shovel. He wants to tell the truth about why Donald Trump is unsuitable to be president, about how he is not only dangerous for the country, but disloyal to this country as well.” (A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment. Both Cohen and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, tweeted on Thursday night, in part, “Good for @michaelcohen212 in providing critical information to the #muellerinvestigation without a cooperation agreement.”)

Cohen’s engagement with Mueller caps a prolonged and often very public seduction attempt. After federal investigators executed search warrants in his home, hotel room, and office in April, people familiar with Cohen’s thinking increasingly emphasized to me that his views of the president were slowly darkening. What began as genuine frustration regarding his isolation from the president morphed into disillusionment, disgust, and divorce. As the Southern District built its case and the Trump and Cohen legal teams worked together through a joint defense agreement, the two teams squabbled over what would come to be massive legal fees (Cohen expected the Trump Organization to cover his liability), and Cohen believed that Trump and his inner circle were executing a strategy to distance themselves from his actions and discredit him in the process. Fed up and out of options, Cohen began gesturing to Mueller’s team that he was open for business. He hired former Clinton mega-lawyer Davis, offered stirring provocations to George Stephanopoulos, and toned down the cigar-wagging sidewalk antics that had once made him infamous.

But Cohen’s volte-face is nevertheless stunning in a broader context. A year ago, Cohen told me he would “take a bullet” to defend the president. The transition from Trump stalwart to antagonist—and, in the view of many observers, a potentially dangerous enemy—was unimaginable. Back then, The Wall Street Journal had yet to break the news about the Stormy Daniels payment. The government had not yet seized more than a million documents from Cohen’s office, hotel room, and home, including more than 100 telephone recordings that he had made.

Over Labor Day weekend last year, when I met him for breakfast at a bustling restaurant in Water Mill, a hamlet of Southampton, Cohen presented himself as precisely the hard-charging, unabashed Trump evangelist he had played on TV as a campaign surrogate—a sort of character out of a Martin Scorsese film. He arrived early, wearing a gold Audemars Piguet on one wrist and a brace on his other—the result of a tennis injury, he explained. Our conversation initially began on a sour, if foreshadowing, note. I told him I was going to record the conversation on my phone. “No, you’re not,” he told me in an adversarial deadpan, a sort of joking toughness that has subsequently become famous through other leaked recordings. “Yes, I am,” I responded.

We negotiated the point for a few minutes, until the waitress came over to take his order—eggs over easy, no butter, seven-grain toast, and black coffee, black. Cohen relented, telling me repeatedly that he was the guy who took care of Trump and his family’s problems. By the time he finished his eggs, and we were about 90 minutes into our interview, he showed me the two phones he carried. One phone, in a white case, was used for normal business. Another, in a black case, was for business pertaining to his famous client in Washington—even though, he admitted, the two were no longer speaking at the advice of counsel. Notably, the display on the screen of the white phone indicated that he was taping our conversation, too.

During our interview, the word “loyal” came up more than a dozen times. Cohen detailed his knowledge of the inner workings of Trumpworld, but insisted he would never divulge his insights—not even for a $100 million book advance, he protested. “There’s no money in the world that could get me to disclose anything about them,” he said. After Steve Bannon accused him of leaking information to a reporter during the campaign, Cohen told me that he confronted Bannon. “I’m the guy who stops the leaks. I’m the guy who protects the president and the family. I’m the guy who would take a bullet for the president,” he recounted. Was there a limit to that loyalty, I asked? Cohen said sarcastically that he would reconsider his position if Trump appeared in white garb at a Ku Klux Klan rally.