The Rev. Al Sharpton sat at a table at the Loews Regency hotel on Park Avenue one morning last week, his shoulders hunched as he prayed with an unlikely dining companion: Michael D. Cohen.

Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, had asked Mr. Sharpton to meet him for breakfast not long after he pleaded guilty in a federal court in Manhattan to an array of charges. Those included a campaign finance violation related to payments that Mr. Cohen made to women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump.

“He seemed to be resolved that he was facing some time,” Mr. Sharpton said of his second meeting with Mr. Cohen in recent months. “He even asked me to pray with him, and we did at the table.”

And so there they were, a Jewish ex-fixer to the Republican president seeking redemption from a Baptist preacher and Democrat at a see-and-be-seen breakfast spot on the East Side of Manhattan.