Cohen has not been charged with any wrongdoing, nor has he met with prosecutors, but the government has been looking into his business activities, including his dealings in the taxi industry and the hush-money settlements he negotiated with women who claim to have had affairs with Trump. As he told Stephanopoulos, “Once I understand what charges might be filed against me, if any at all, I will defer to my new counsel.” He added, “To be crystal clear, my wife, my daughter, and my son, and this country have my first loyalty.”

In politics, the most experienced lawyers are often Rasputin-like masters of press coverage, able to discern which reporters to trust with certain crucial tidbits of information that may amplify their client’s perspective in a sympathetic or at least constructive way. To some extent, the various legal entanglements surrounding Trump are all part of a vast, complex game of three-dimensional media chess involving carefully choreographed sit-downs and disclosures. Anderson Cooper scored a massive ratings coup in his interview with Stormy Daniels; Stephanopoulos similarly helped elevate James Comey’s perspective in advance of his recent book, A Higher Loyalty.

Cohen, for his part, had toyed with similar ambitions. For months, people in his circle told me about the possibility of him sitting down with a formidable anchor for a news-making one-on-one. When the time was right, these people said, Cohen would talk to Stephanopoulos, perhaps with his family on set, to demonstrate the human toll of his legal woes. All of this would be heavily promoted, of course, maybe for weeks, and truly revealing and intimate. At least that was the idea. Monday’s interview, on the other hand, was not on a broadcast. It was revealed by tweet about 12 hours ahead of the interview’s publication and Stephanopoulos’s on-air unveiling.

The last-minute rollout was triggered by an acute sense of urgency. The decision to speak up now comes as Cohen’s former counsel, Stephen Ryan, prepares to depart in the coming days as they face a deadline to complete their review of the documents seized by the government, some of which Cohen’s team is hoping to get protected by attorney-client privilege. At the same time, the joint defense agreement between Cohen and Trump, which allowed their attorneys to share information and documents with each other, will come to an end. (This correspondence among lawyers, which also occurred when Michael Flynn agreed to cooperate with law enforcement, is not a signal that Cohen will flip. The joint defense agreement, in Cohen’s instance, existed only through the document review period, according to one person familiar with the arrangement.) Ryan staunchly advocated that Cohen remain mum while he represented him—advice that Cohen mostly followed. Ryan’s exit from Cohen’s legal team opened a window for Cohen to put himself on the record.

Cohen’s decision not to wait any further before conducting an interview was also motivated by a concern, as he put it to Stephanopoulos, that he could become “a punching bag as part of anyone’s defense strategy.” The hits from Trump and those around him started coming months ago, when the president publicly distanced himself from Cohen and his business dealings in interviews, as did his new attorney, Rudy Giuliani. Cohen had reason to believe that they would ramp up in the coming weeks. As the joint defense agreement nears its conclusion, Cohen believed that those around the president might be preparing a strategy to go after him, according to a person familiar with his thinking. An on-the-record interview in which he defined his loyalties—and cast some shade on the president—helped him craft a narrative on his terms.

As I reported last week, people around Cohen have been telling him that he could change that narrative if people started to believe he would cooperate with investigators. As that notion set in, Cohen felt more comfortable going on the record and speaking plainly about where his priorities now lie. What he did not intend to do, however, was send a signal to anyone—the president, or otherwise—that he was seeking a pardon. “He was trying to get ahead of things and started feeling like he may not be thought of as the villain anymore,” one person close to Cohen told me on Monday. “This was about getting his voice heard before it’s too late.”