When she heard the comments, Vanity Fair reporter Emily Jane Fox said her “jaw dropped to the floor.”

President Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen has gone public with his accounting of private conversations with his former client that contained outlandish racist comments, including one in which Trump announced in 2016 that black people were “too stupid” to vote for him.

In interviews with Fox that began earlier this week, Cohen said his urge to speak out about some of the things Trump said to him privately over recent years were spurred by the rise of politically-motivated violence—including last week’s massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh—which he associates with the national tone set by the president.

“When I asked him why he was coming forward now with such uncomfortable claims,” Fox reports, “Cohen was clear: he knew that the president’s private comments were worse than his public rhetoric, and he wanted to offer potential voters what he believed was evidence of Trump’s character in advance of the midterm elections.”

According to the Vanity Fair story, published Friday: