Friends in low places

Last week, news reports surfaced that attorney Bob Costello, a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, reached out to the president’s ex-fixer Michael Cohen last year with a potentially scandalous suggestion: Trump might consider pardoning Cohen amid growing legal problems owing to his business deals and skirting of campaign finance law.

Giuliani’s camp denied the stories, suggesting that the pardon had been floated by Cohen’s campaign. From there, the entire matter degenerated into a he-said-he-said affair.

On Wednesday, however, CNN reported that Costello wrote an April 2018 email to Cohen telling him that he could “sleep well tonight” because he had “friends in high places.”

It seemed, at first blush, possibly like evidence that a pardon—or, at a minimum, a telling wink and nod—had been dangled and that it was Team Trump doing the dangling.

Not so, says Costello.

In an email to The Daily Beast, Costello said that he was not hinting at a Trump pardon when he talked about sleeping well at night. Instead, he was referencing a song by music star Garth Brooks in an attempt to comfort a “suicidal” Cohen. And, he added, there were documents that could confirm as much.

“To repeat myself, Michael Cohen and his counsel’s interpretation of events is utter nonsense,” Costello said. “This statement: ‘Sleep Well tonight, you have friends in high places’ was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a Garth Brooks song, to a client whose state of mind was highly disturbed and had suggested to us that he was suicidal. We were simply trying to be decent human beings. There is no hidden message.”