Watch: Trump family biographer says Michael Cohen flipped himself because he was 'befuddled' the special prosecutor wasn't trying

Following Paul Manafort's guilty plea and cooperation deal with special counsel Robert Mueller, Vanity Fair magazine's Emily Jane Fox reported that "it has also become common knowledge among close friends of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney, that Cohen is talking to the Mueller team."

"So you report that he is in contact with the special counsel's office, that he is talking to the Mueller team," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow noted. "Do you have any sense of the substantive nature of those communications? Is he -- are they -- getting acquainted? Is he providing them information? Do you have a sense of that?"

"It's unclear how far down the line these talks are," Fox replied. "I don't know if they're preliminary, I don't know if they are in front of a grand jury, I don't know if they are working towards a cooperation agreement."

"It is unclear how far down the line they are, but it is a step in a direction Michael Cohen had not gone down before," Fox continued. "This is not where he was even about a month or so ago when he pleaded guilty."

"He was at that time kind of befuddled that investigators were not reaching out to him, were not seeking his cooperation agreement, that they were going to indict him in the Southern District of New York without really sitting down with him to reach a cooperating agreement," she continued. "And he ended up pleading guilty, because there was no such cooperation agreement offered to him at that time."

The Vanity Fair reporter also tried to empathize with the commander-in-chief, trying to imagine his perspective on his former attorney.

"Michael Cohen was not only intimately involved with the president and the Trump Organization's dealings for a decade, but I keep thinking about -- I interviewed Michael Cohen when I was writing a book about the first children, the first family," Fox recounted. "And he knew so much about the daily goings on of Don Jr, and Ivanka and Eric."

"Not only do I think he has potentially witnessed things in his decade of working in the Trump Organization related to President Trump, but what did he witness about the children as well?" Fox asked.

"This is a man who was very involved with the entirety of the Trump family," she added.

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