Prez Trump advocating for a whole new kind of sentencing reform: he says cooperation deals "almost ought to be outlawed. It’s not fair."

This New York Post piece, headlined "Trump says flipping should be ‘outlawed’ after Cohen plea deal," reports on some notable new comments about the operation of the criminal justice system by Prez Donald Trump this morning.  Here are the details:

President Trump said his former lawyer Michael Cohen “lied” to get a “better deal” with federal prosecutors to reduce his jail time — and suggested that “flipping” should be outlawed.

“You get 10 years in jail, but if you say bad things about somebody in other words, make up stories if you don’t know.  Make up.  They just make up lies. I’ve seen it many times,” the president told “Fox & Friends” in an interview that aired Thursday.

“For 30, 40 years I’ve been watching flippers.  Everything’s wonderful and then they get 10 years in jail and they — they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go,” he said about Cohen, who pleaded to eight felony counts in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday.

“It almost ought to be outlawed. It’s not fair,” Trump continued.

Cohen was facing 65 years behind bars on the charges, but is expected to get a reduced sentence because of the plea deal. Trump said that “in all fairness” to Cohen, “most people are going to do that.”  The president also tried to distance himself from Cohen, who worked for more than 10 years for Trump and was known as a confidant and “fixer” who once said he’d take a “bullet” for Trump.

“He was a lawyer for me, one of many,” the president said.  “You know, they always say, ‘the lawyer,’ and then they like to add ‘the fixer.’” Well, I don’t know if he was a ‘fixer.’ I don’t know where that term came from,” Trump said in the interview.  “But he’s been a lawyer for me. Didn’t do big deals, did small deals. Not somebody that was with me that much.”

He said he would see Cohen “sometimes” but on big deals Trump said “outside lawyers” and “inside lawyers” would take part. “You know, they make it sound like I didn’t live with — without him. I understood Michael Cohen very well. He — well, it turned out he wasn’t a very good lawyer, frankly.”

Two of the charges Cohen pleaded to involved hush-money payments made before the 2016 election to two women who alleged they had affairs with Trump between 2006 and 2007, a possible violation of campaign finance laws. Cohen paid $130,000 to former porn star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, and arranged for $150,000 to be paid to the parent company of the National Enquirer to keep Karen McDougal’s story under wraps.

Trump said he didn’t know about the payments until “later on” even though Cohen has a tape of him and the president discussing them. “Later on I knew. Later on. What he did — and they weren’t taken out of the campaign finance, that’s the big thing. That’s a much bigger thing,” Trump said. “Did they come out of the campaign? They didn’t come out of the campaign, they came from me.”

Prez Trump is entirely right that cooperation deals can often result in false testimony and can produce considerable unfairness.  In fact, Prez Trump's staff should have urged him to cite Alexandra Natapoff's great book, "Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice," in conjunction with his complaints.  Here is a bit of the description of that book:

Although it is nearly invisible to the public, criminal snitching has invaded the American legal system in risky and sometimes shocking ways. Snitching is the first comprehensive analysis of this powerful and problematic practice, in which informant deals generate unreliable evidence, allow criminals to escape punishment, endanger the innocent, compromise the integrity of police work, and exacerbate tension between police and poor urban residents.  Driven by dozens of real-life stories and debacles, the book exposes the social destruction that snitching can cause in high-crime African American neighborhoods, and how using criminal informants renders our entire penal process more secretive and less fair. Natapoff also uncovers the farreaching legal, political, and cultural significance of snitching: from the war on drugs to hip hop music, from the FBI’s mishandling of its murderous mafia informants to the new surge in white collar and terrorism informing.

I doubt that Prez Trump is serious about advocating for the prohibition of cooperation deals, and I am certain few in Congress or elsewhere would even consider seriously the reforms proposed in Natapoff's book.  But if Prez Trump really cares about the unfairness and other problems that can be created by cooperation deals, there is a whole lot he could and should do right away.  First and foremost, he should express opposition to all mandatory minimum sentencing provisions (or at least suppose reforms like the Justice Safety Valve Act) because the threat of a significant mandatory minimum prison term often creates the most extreme pressure to deal and cooperate.  Second and on-going, he could and should consider focusing at least part of his (supposed) interest in broad use of clemency powers to those persons seemingly most unfairly convicted and sentenced based on questionable evidence coming from cooperators.

UPDATE: Alexandra Natapoff has this new post reacting to the President's comments, and here are her insights:

The irony is that Trump is attacking snitching for its greatest strength: it enables law enforcement to investigate and prosecute the wealthy, the powerful, and the politically insulated.  Think of the Enron prosecution, or the dismantling of the mafia, neither of which could have happened without cooperation deals.  Also ironically, Trump is criticizing informant use in its least problematic incarnation. When Trump's "many friends" become defendants and informants, they will be well represented and informed about their rights and options, while their cooperation deals will be recorded, vetted, and publicly scrutinized.  Most informants, and most defendants faced with snitch testimony, will get none of these protections. It is precisely here in the white collar and high profile political context that cooperation is best regulated, most accountable and transparent, and thus least problematic.

To be sure, there are many reasons to agree that snitching "should almost be illegal."  It leads to wrongful convictions; it tolerates the crimes committed by informants; it coerces the most vulnerable and rewards the most culpable. It promotes government secrecy, rule breaking, and sometimes corruption.  But its potential to hold powerful people accountable is its best feature.