Anchors grew visibly uncomfortable as they listened to the president undermine his own legal defense.
The interview went off the rails, however, when the Fox hosts asked Trump about the Russia investigation dogging his presidency, and whether he would agree to interview with Mueller:
“Well, if I can. The problem is that it’s such a—if you take a look, they’re so conflicted, the people that are doing the investigation. You have 13 people that are Democrats, you have Hillary Clinton people, you have people that worked on Hillary Clinton’s foundation. They’re all—I don’t mean Democrats. I mean, like, the real deal. And then you look at the phony Lisa Page and [Peter] Strzok and the memos back and forth and the F.B.I.—and by the way, you take a poll at the F.B.I. I love the F.B.I.; the F.B.I. loves me. But the top people at the F.B.I., headed by Comey, were crooked.”
“You look at the corruption at the top of the F.B.I.—it’s a disgrace,” Trump continued, practically yelling, as the Fox hosts stared ahead nervously. “And our Justice Department—which I try and stay away from, but at some point I won’t—our Justice Department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with Russia. There is no collusion with me, and everyone knows it.”
.. The hosts exchanged furtive glances as they simultaneously began interrupting the president, insisting that they were out of time, even as Trump continued to shout over them. “Right, all right,” Kilmeade said. “All right,” Earhardt interjected. “O.K.” “We’d talk to you all day but it looks like you have a million things to do,” Kilmeade added. Earhardt smiled: “Thank you so much for being with us.”
..
As the Fox & Friends control room may have guessed, Trump’s burning anger could come at the expense of his current legal-defense strategy. With Mueller reportedly investigating the president and his associates for obstruction of justice in the Russian collusion probe, Trump’s lawyers have urged him to stay quiet about the special counsel’s work and allow his investigation to go forward. By impugning the F.B.I. and threatening to intervene at the Justice Department, Trump may have just given his adversaries more legal ammunition. He may also have undermined his case in more roundabout ways: at another point, he referred to his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen as having done a “tiny, tiny little fraction of my legal work”—an apparent attempt to distance himself from Cohen, who he admitted represented him in “this crazy Stormy Daniels deal.” Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s lawyer, immediately called the admission a “gift from the heavens” and “hugely damaging”: not only did Trump’s statement suggest he was aware that Cohen had paid hush money to Daniels, it also undercut Cohen’s argument that his communications with Trump, recently seized by the F.B.I., are protected by attorney-client privilege.
Federal prosecutors have argued that Cohen—who is being investigated by the Southern District of New York—is barely a lawyer, and therefore has little evidence to support the contention that his files should be kept out of the F.B.I.’s hands. And indeed, it took next to no time for prosecutors to use Trump’s interview as evidence. Less than two hours later, lawyers from the S.D.N.Y. told a federal judge they no longer objected to a third party determining whether certain documents from the Cohen raid were protected by attorney-client privilege—a claim that Cohen has made vociferously—arguing that if Cohen only conducted a “tiny, tiny little fraction” of legal work for the president, it would ”suggest that the seized materials are unlikely to contain voluminous privileged documents.” One wonders how Trump’s own lawyers, who joined Cohen’s argument last week, are feeling about their client pouring napalm on their defense.