Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Deadline,” network contributor Donny Deutsch said President Donald Trump’s “tone” was encouraging “vile” threats to his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s family.
Deutsch said, “I’ll give it to you in realtime because I had a front-row seat. I was speaking to Michael after the interview. He said, ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not testifying. My wife is sitting here crying. They’re calling out my poor father-in-law, 80-something, a man who’s never done anything.’ By the way, he watches his wife cry every day. He said, ‘I’m not doing it.’ I said,’ Michael, he’s insulated now because he brought it out.’ He said ‘He’s the president of the United States. He can do whatever he wants.’ So that’s where it started.”
He continued, “There are other threats happening, that happens every day, that magnified a thousand-fold. The things he gets written to about his daughter that are so heinous since he started to talk about testifying in Congress. He volunteered in the first place. I wasn’t quite sure what he was doing. He was not asked, he volunteered, and he was anxious to do it because he does have a story to tell. What the American public can take solace in, they may not get their Perry Mason moment, but he’s given 70 hours to Mueller. He’s spoken already to the Senate. There’s nothing new he’s going to say that he can say. And the other thing he pulled out in that announcement, he’s still cooperating. They’re ongoing things. So as a cooperating, ongoing person, I don’t think it’s even an intelligent legal move. I think his lawyers finally got to that point. So for all of that above, and that’s why you saw the statement Schiff and Cummings put out, they got canceled on. They got it. And we have to step back and take politics out of it. The president just did a Frank Pentangeli Godfather, when they bring your men to the thing and your brother is sitting right there. And out of all of the heinous things he’s done, this is a new level, and I saw it on a personal level.”
Deutsch said, “I’m telling you what I know he’s talked to me about, and he is despondent about his family. I think most people who were in this kind of trouble, and most people at their core who are decent, their decent, their family kills them. We’re so numbed and anesthetized, the president got on the air and tweeted publicly, ‘Watch out, father-in-law.’ I don’t know if that’s obstruction of justice. I certainly know it’s obstructing what he’s planning to do.”
He continued, “I know he’s anxious to do it. His instinct why he wanted to do it, if you watched Michael Cohen, he’s one of those guys that gets himself in trouble and blah. So he almost wants to puke it out of him.”
He clarified, “He doesn’t really want to puke it out, he wants to tell the story.”
He added, “And when it’s not your own family, I remember going ‘Come on, Michael, you’re overreacting.’ He goes ‘What if it’s your father-in-law?’ I’m not saying the president is responsible for this, but the president has set a tone in this country of the most disgusting, vile things that come at his children, particularly his daughter, that is almost unconscionable.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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