Trump suggests outlawing deals with defendants
President Donald Trump, incensed over a deal his longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen cut with prosecutors, says it might be better if “flipping” were illegal because people “just make up lies.”
Trump, in a television interview broadcast Thursday, tried to play down his relationship his longtime “fixer” who claims the president directed a hushmoney scheme to buy the silence of two women who say they had affairs with Trump. The president contends Cohen only worked for him part time and is accusing the lawyer of making up stories to reduce his legal exposure.
“I know all about flipping,” Trump told “Fox & Friends,” which taped the interview at the White House on Wednesday. “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.”
That tool “almost ought to be outlawed. It’s not fair,” Trump said, adding it creates an incentive to “say bad things about somebody ... just make up lies.”
Trump made the comments as his White House struggled to manage the fallout from Cohen’s plea deal and the conviction of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on financial charges. The president suggested that Cohen’s legal trouble stemmed from his
other businesses, including involvement with the New York City taxi cab industry.
The back-to-back legal blows have raised speculation that Democrats would launch impeachment proceedings if they win the House of Representatives this fall. Trump argued the move could have dire economic consequences.
“If I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor,” Trump said. He added: “I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job.”
Trump did not say whether he would pardon Manafort, but
expressed “great respect” for him and argued that some of the charges “every consultant, every lobbyist in Washington probably does.”
Cohen, who says he won’t seek a pardon from Trump, pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight charges, including campaign finance violations that he said he carried out in co-ordination with Trump. Behind closed doors, Trump expressed worry and frustration that a man intimately familiar with his political, personal and business dealings for more than a decade had turned on him.
Yet his White House signalled no clear strategy for managing
the fallout. At a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted at least seven times that Trump had done nothing wrong and was not the subject of criminal charges.
She referred substantive questions to the president’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani, who was at a golf course in Scotland.
Outside allies of the White House said they had received little guidance on how to respond to the events in their appearances on cable news. And it was not clear the West Wing was assembling any kind of coordinated response.