Over the weekend, Michael Cohen left New York City and drove down to Washington, D.C., to commence what is expected to be an excruciating week for the Trump administration, if a cathartic one for himself. For more than a decade, Cohen served as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, business consigliere, and all-around doer of dirty deeds, as he’s put it. In early 2018, however, Cohen and his former boss found themselves at odds over an alleged hush-money scheme. Cohen quickly became the subject of a federal investigation, an infamous early-morning visit from a dozen F.B.I. agents armed with search warrants, and a constant victim of Trumpian Twitter invective. In the process, Cohen also became an unlikely, and formidable, player for the other side in the Mueller ordeal—a man with crucial knowledge about both the Stormy Daniels affair and the Trump Tower Moscow saga, who, after some time and major changes in his position within Trumpworld, was willing to spill. This impression was amplified when Cohen implicated the president under oath while pleading guilty in August to campaign-finance violations, among other financial crimes, and in November to lying to Congress. The following month, he was sentenced to three years in prison.

Now, Cohen plans to air the president’s dirty laundry during three days of congressional hearings—a final act of allocution before he reports to prison in May. According to people familiar with his preparation, Cohen’s testimony will include allegations of racism, lies, infidelity, and criminal misconduct while in office. Cohen has been preparing for this very public moment every day for the last several weeks, according to people familiar with the situation, as he tries to square his wrongdoings in the face of great skepticism. In intense, daily meetings, his new attorneys, Michael Monico and Barry Spevack, have been probing his memory of his time with Trump, according to these people, including his professional tasks, and the inner workings of his life as a loyal employee to a man for whom he once told me he would “take a bullet.” “Some things that are earth-shattering are right in front of your nose, and the reason you don’t know that they’re earth-shattering is because they’re right in front of you,” one person told me. The second of the three hearings will be public, rather than behind closed doors, and broadcast by all the major networks on Wednesday, hours before Trump is set to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Hanoi. (The White House did not comment for this story.)

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According to these people, Cohen is prepared to provide a first-person narrative of the crimes to which he has pleaded guilty, particularly surrounding his role in hush-money payments. Cohen’s lawyers have prepared him by asking detailed and process-oriented questions, so that he is able to tell the full story behind the $130,000 payment to Daniels, in particular. The sorts of things he could answer run from beginning to end: What did you tell Trump about the payment and how did he react? Did you tell Trump Organization C.F.O. Allen Weisselberg about it? How did you decide that the payment would come from your personal account instead of through the Trump Organization? Once that was decided, did you discuss how you were going to get paid back? If they were going to make it a retainer fee, did you discuss how it was going to be put on the books or if it would violate campaign-finance laws? Did the reimbursements begin after Trump was sworn in, and if checks were written, who signed them? Cohen’s answers to these questions, according to the people familiar, are chilling.

Meanwhile, there won’t be revelations about election meddling, at least in public. The House of Representatives set the scope for the hearings after consulting with both the Department of Justice and the Senate Intelligence Committee, which are both still investigating any ties between Russian election interference and the Trump campaign. Cohen will, however, be asked about the president’s debts and payments relating to efforts to influence the election, along with what he knows about Trump’s business activities and charitable organization, potential conflicts of interest and campaign-finance violations, and his compliance with other requirements and laws.

Congressional investigators will certainly be interested in the Trump Tower episode, too. “Who would have been aware of the false testimony that he was giving?” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff asked Sunday on ABC’s This Week, previewing the questions Democrats are likely to pose when they interview Cohen. “What more could he tell us about the Trump Tower New York meeting or any other issues relevant to our investigation?”

Cohen’s final stand in D.C.—the specter of a convicted felon making potentially sordid allegations against a sitting president on live television—is likely to be spectacular political theater, perfectly construed for our reality-TV, post-reality times. What makes it all the more striking is how precipitously the relationship between Cohen and Trump has devolved. Around a year ago, as news of the Daniels hush-money payment began to reverberate, Cohen kept in close touch with the president, visiting him twice at Mar-a-Lago and speaking with him near daily on the phone. It wasn’t until after Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room were searched by the F.B.I. in early April—an event Trump initially called “an attack on our country”—that the cracks in the relationship began to show. Trump soon distanced himself from Cohen and his legal troubles, saying in interviews with Fox News that Cohen did very little legal work for him, and that Cohen was being investigated for crimes unrelated to him. Squabbles over who would foot Cohen’s legal bills intensified the rift, as did what Cohen perceived to be a coordinated strategy by people in Trump’s orbit to discredit him.

But perhaps the most sensational aspect of all will be the split-screen tension. As Cohen rips into his former boss on the world’s stage, and lawmakers, in turn, rip into him, Trump will be at a crucial summit with Kim in Vietnam. For a president who cares primarily about ratings and the public spectacle of power, rather than the actual work and weight of it all, this could be one of the most heightened, hyped, and, ultimately, pivotal weeks of his presidency.

Last August, under oath, Cohen publicly implicated his former boss in committing a felony by directing him to make payments to Daniels. But Trump, potentially protected by Justice Department guidelines that suggest a sitting president cannot be indicted, has so far not been touched by the arms of justice. Nor have his approval ratings among supporters budged much. That could change on Wednesday, when Cohen is given a platform to elucidate the president’s alleged crimes. Cohen’s lawyer and public spokesperson, Lanny Davis, has said that Cohen could be a modern-day John Dean, the former White House counsel whose testimony before Congress helped take down Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. Dean himself was sentenced in August 1974 to one-to-four years in a minimum-security prison, part of which he served at a safe house near Baltimore. Decades later, he is better remembered for the lies he exposed than his own crimes. Cohen, as he prepares to speak his truth before the world, might be hoping for the same.

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