“It’s not fair.”
Amid all the noise this week, it was an almost rueful, pensive moment. The president, joining Fox News for a gentle game of badminton masquerading as an interview, was opining on low-level lawbreakers testifying against people further up the ladder in exchange for more lenient sentences. “I know all about flipping,” Trump said. “They get ten years in jail and they flip on whoever the next highest one is, or as high as you can go. It almost ought to be outlawed.”
It’s no surprise this subject was on his mind. Some of the biggest challenges to the president’s claim he did nothing wrong during the election could well be coming from people close to him who have already been implicated in illicit activity, and who now appear to be cooperating with investigators. In other words, potential flippers.
Trump: A man who loves attention but hates scrutiny
What they know about the inside workings of Team Trump could prove devastating if any laws were broken. And even if the flippers expose no infractions, they could yet reveal a lot of inside information about a man who seems to love attention but hate scrutiny. Details about his wealth, his private habits, his relationships, his views and perhaps even (horrors!) his tax returns. Remember, this is a man who has lived in the cloistered privacy of great wealth his whole life; a man who has carefully curated his version of “truth” for the outside world, and who has proven quick to sue, browbeat, or insult anyone who says anything to the contrary.
Still, for years prosecutors have used this technique of flipping insiders to get at mobsters, drug lords, racketeers, and white-collar criminals. Why? Precisely because people in positions of great power – legally and otherwise – so often surround themselves with layers of protection; people who are employed to carry out the boss’s dirty work and to take the fall for him if the law gets wise.
That’s why flippers count. And why people in power so often fear finding flippers in their inner circles.
CNN’s Tom Foreman is the author of the book “My Year of Running Dangerously.
