Oddly, though, Trump also assured the country that, if he wanted to, he could simply pull the plug on an investigation into his own campaign’s ties with the Russian government.

“I can go in, and I could do whatever — I could run it if I want,” Trump said. “But I decided to stay out.”

On Tuesday, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felonies, telling a federal judge that Trump had personally directed him to pay off two women to keep quiet about alleged extramarital affairs “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”

Cohen’s stunning admission contradicted all the dissembling stories Trump, Giuliani and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders had told about the payments.

But Team Trump’s bad day was far from over. A jury in Alexandria, Va., found Manafort guilty of eight felony counts that included tax fraud, bank fraud and hiding foreign bank accounts. But for a single holdout, the jury would have returned guilty verdicts on all 18 of the charges in the indictment. Mueller may yet decide to retry the remaining 10 with a new jury. Meanwhile, Manafort’s trial on separate charges of money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent is coming up next month in Washington, D.C.

The president ended the day in West Virginia, at a rally for Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s opponent, Patrick Morrisey. But when his crowd launched into the obligatory chant of “Lock her up!” at the mention of Hillary Clinton’s name, Trump seemed more distracted than usual. Often at his safe space gatherings, the president will relish the portion of his speech that he reserves for going after Sessions, Comey and Mueller by name and deed, but after the Cohen and Manafort bad news, he limited it to a passing afterthought: “Where is the collusion? You know they’re still looking for collusion,” Trump said. “Where is the collusion? Find some collusion. We want to find the collusion!”

On cable news, Cohen’s lawyer Lanny Davis was busy answering Trump’s question. “Mr. Cohen has knowledge of certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel, and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all he knows,” Davis told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “Not just about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election, which the Trump Tower meeting was all about, but also knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.”

On Wednesday, it was left to Sanders to try to explain exactly how what was being reported was not what was actually happening.

“As the president has said and we’ve stated many times, he did nothing wrong. There are no charges against him, and we’ve commented on it extensively,” she told reporters gathered in the briefing room. “Just because Michael Cohen made a plea deal, that doesn’t implicate the president on anything.”

The president went ever further on Twitter, saying that the acts Cohen admitted to weren’t actual crimes.

How one pleads guilty to noncriminal acts is something legal scholars may parse for generations to come. To make it so, however, one needs only to return to Giuliani’s “truth isn’t truth” logical framework.

But as Thursday dawned, the administration’s defense that it was Cohen’s word against Trump’s was unraveling.

David Pecker, an executive at American Media, the parent company of the National Enquirer, reached an immunity deal with federal prosecutors to provide them with the details of Trump’s hush-money payments to actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. That money was paid to the women in exchange for the rights to publish their stories, which the tabloid summarily buried.

In a “Fox & Friends” interview, Trump continued to fume over Cohen’s betrayal, with the president suggesting his former’s lawyer’s cooperation with prosecutors should be “outlawed.”

“It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal,” Trump said.

The president also castigated Sessions, who recused himself from Mueller’s Russia probe shortly after he was appointed attorney general.

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