“Typical,” Michael Cohen said on Monday afternoon, according to a person familiar with the situation, when he found out that President Donald Trump had re-tweeted his rebuttal of Omarosa Manigault Newman. Trump had been on a Twitter spree on Monday, as the former Apprentice contender and White House aide promoted her new book, which includes salacious claims that her ex-boss used racial slurs and is in mental decline. As The Washington Post detailed on Friday, Manigault Newman also memorialized in the literature an account of Cohen’s visit to the Oval Office in early 2017. After the meeting, she writes, she saw the president chew up a piece of paper—a bizarre detail that leaves open the possibility, among many other things, that the two men discussed a document deemed sensitive enough that the president preferred to shred it in his digestive system. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and loyal foot soldier, is under criminal investigation by the Southern District of New York for his business activities and payments made to women who alleged affairs with Trump in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. When three dozen federal agents took more than 3 million documents from Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room in April, the two men began a long and public falling-out. Since the beginning of the summer, Cohen has believed that people in Trump’s orbit have been publicly discrediting him. As Trump made a series of hurtful public comments, and their lawyers quibbled over who would foot the bill for Cohen’s legal fees, it became clear that Cohen could be convinced to cooperate with the government in its investigation. (Cohen has not yet been charged with any wrongdoing, and according to people familiar with the situation, he has not yet met with prosecutors.) Last month, The New York Times published a report that Cohen had secretly taped Trump discussing a payment made to a woman who claimed she had an affair with him years earlier. CNN subsequently reported that Cohen was prepared to tell investigators that Trump had known about the infamous meeting in Trump Tower, at which a Kremlin-tied lawyer promised Donald Trump Jr. dirt on Hillary Clinton. Shortly thereafter, Rudy Giuliani, counselor to the president, conducted a string of interviews calling Cohen a pathological liar. And Trump himself tweeted several times about Cohen’s actions, calling them “perhaps illegal” and “so sad!” and questioning what kind of lawyer would tape a client.

In recent weeks, Cohen has fumed about Trump and Giuliani. When he recently moved out of the Regency hotel, where he had been living since winter, he lamented going back to living in a building with Trump scrawled across the façade. (In the past year, Cohen has sold other properties in other Trump buildings.) Cohen recognized that standing behind Omarosa’s story might offer him potential leverage in his public dispute with the president. But he demurred. The story in Omarosa’s new book, he has told people, was simply untrue. “I could easily have turned around and said it’s true, given what’s going on,” he told people. “But the story was ridiculous, and I’m not playing this game of what [Trump] does: pile on.” So Cohen tweeted to set the record straight. “To the many dozens of #journalists who called me, questioning @OMAROSA claim in her new book that @POTUS @realDonaldTrump took a note from me, put it in his mouth and ate it . . . I saw NO such thing and am shocked anyone would take this seriously,” he wrote over the weekend. On Monday afternoon, Trump re-tweeted it. Cohen, bewildered that a man who had assaulted his integrity now enjoyed his validation, could only chuckle.

Giuliani told me that the president’s re-tweet does not obscure the fact that Cohen taped his own client, which he called “a horrible thing for a lawyer to do.” But, he added, “maybe the president was impressed that [Cohen] came forward. Maybe he’s had a change of heart.” He qualified, in reference to his boss: “I don’t know. He’s a complicated guy.”