CONMAN -IN-CHIEF
President’s former lawyer tells world: ‘Donald J Trump is a liar, a conman, a racist and a cheat’
‘I am ashamed of my misplaced loyalty’
THIS was the day that Democrats had dreamed of ever since Donald Trump entered the White House: a trusted Trump insider finally laying bare the dirty tricks, dishonesty, greed and racism that they believe lie at the heart of his presidency.
Giving evidence under oath to the congressional House Oversight Committee, ex-Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen certainly did not disappoint the President’s opponents — even if questions about his credibility remain, given that he’s already lied to Congress. He branded Mr Trump, his client for ten years, a ‘racist, conman and cheat’ who personally signed a cheque while in office to settle a hush-money deal with a porn star.
Cohen’s explosive and highly anticipated testimony at a daylong session in Washington weighed in on many of the sensitive issues that have bedevilled the Trump presidency. Each time, he contradicted the President’s account.
Cohen claimed Trump knew in advance about a leak of stolen Democratic emails that damaged Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and have been linked to Kremlin hackers.
He also said the President was completely aware of ongoing talks to build a Trump Tower skyscraper in Moscow during the 2016 election campaign, even as he was assuring voters that he had no business dealings with America’s greatest international foe.
Cohen added that Trump had known that his own son, Donald Jr, was holding a controversial meeting with Russians in Trump Tower, New York, in June 2016.
Although Cohen, a former vicepresident of the Trump Organisation, claimed the President largely operates by nods and winks, he came with evidence that included a $35,000 cheque to him that was signed by Mr Trump — crucially while he was President. Cohen said it was part reimbursement for paying porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Trump.
Devastatingly, Cohen hinted that federal prosecutors are investigating unspecified criminal allegations involving the President that have not been made public.
On top of all these bombshells, Cohen — whose testimony against Trump has always been something that Republicans particularly dreaded — painted a deeply unflattering personal portrait of Trump as a man in whom, he claimed, the bad greatly outweighs the good.
Cohen witheringly insisted that Trump ran for office ‘to make his brand great, not to make our country great’.
He claimed Trump never expected to win the election and would ‘often say this campaign was going to be the “greatest infomercial in political history”’. He added: ‘The campaign — for him — was always a marketing opportunity.’
The President, currently in Vietnam for talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, dismissed Cohen’s testimony. ‘He is lying in order to reduce his prison time,’ he tweeted.
Increasingly irate Republicans on the committee did their best to discredit Cohen, branding him a ‘pathological liar’. They pointed out that the newly disbarred lawyer is about to go to prison for three years for charges that included lying to Congress about the Moscow skyscraper project, campaign finance offences and tax fraud.
Republicans also claimed he had turned so spectacularly on his former client because he was upset at not being given a job in the White House and was looking for a lucrative book deal.
However, their inability to stop him from talking was starkly revealed in a House of Representatives now controlled by the Democrats.
Cohen, 52, once boasted that he would ‘take a bullet’ for his client.
Today, he insists he is ‘ashamed of my weakness and misplaced loyalty’ to Trump. He claimed he had been ‘mesmerised’ by his flamboyant and ‘intoxicating’ client.
‘I am ashamed because I know what Mr Trump is. He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.’
One of his biggest regrets, he said, was lying to First Lady Melania Trump about her husband’s philandering.
Porn star Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, claims she slept with Trump at a 2006 golf tournament just three months after Mrs Trump had given birth to their son, Barron.
Ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal also claimed she had an affair with Mr Trump around the same time.
Trump has denied ever sleeping with either of them, although Cohen yesterday produced a record of a bank wire transfer to pay $130,000 to Daniels.
‘“It’s $130,000 — it’s not a lot of money and we should just do it. So go ahead and do it”,’ Cohen recalled Trump telling him.
‘Mr Trump is a conman,’ said Cohen. ‘He asked me to pay off an adult film star with whom he had an affair and to lie to his wife about it, which I did. Lying to the First Lady is one of my biggest regrets. She is a kind, good person. I respect her greatly and she did not deserve that.’
He said Trump directed him to use his own money so that the payments couldn’t be traced back to Trump and damage his campaign.
In another riveting line of testimony, Cohen claimed Trump knew that Roger Stone, a shady Trump adviser and self-proclaimed political trickster, was working with the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks to expose stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee in 2016 that were highly damaging to Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign.
Cohen recalled that he was in Trump’s office in July 2016 when his secretary announced Stone was on the phone. Trump put him on the speakerphone.
Stone told him that he had just spoken to Wikileaks chief Julian Assange — currently living in the Ecuadorean embassy in London to avoid arrest and potential extradition — who had told him there would imminently be a ‘massive dump’ of hacked emails damaging to the Clinton campaign, he said. ‘Mr Trump responded by stating to the effect of “wouldn’t that be great”,’ said Cohen.
He also claimed that Trump was aware of a controversial meeting his son, Donald Trump Jr, and other senior campaign figures had held with a Kremlin-linked lawyer in 2016. The latter had said she had damning information about Mrs Clinton.
Cohen said he had no proof that the Trumps were working with the Russians but he was ‘suspicious’.
Cohen, who had a murky legal career even before taking on his most controversial client, began working for Trump in 2007 and said his job had been to ‘protect’ him and bully his enemies.
He said his job included phoning business owners, many of them small operators, to which Trump owed money and tell them they would either get nothing or a reduced payment. Trump ‘revelled’ in hearing whenever such bullyboy tactics worked, said Cohen.
He denied Trump had ever asked him to threaten anyone physically, but that was only because there were ‘others’ who worked for him who handled that.
Cohen painted a picture of a property tycoon who didn’t need to
spell out what he wanted to be done but worked on the basis of mutual understanding with his cronies. He ‘spoke in code’ and those around him came to understand it.
‘He doesn’t tell you what he wants,’ he said. ‘Mr Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. That’s not how he operates.’
Everyone who has worked for Trump never questions the fact that they had to lie to protect him, said Cohen.
Cohen said his fate was a warning to others who ‘blindly’ follow Trump. ‘Look at what’s happened to me. I had a wonderful life. I have a beautiful wife. I have two amazing children. I achieved financial success by the age of 39. I didn’t go to work for Mr Trump because I had to. I went to work for him because I wanted to, and I’ve lost it all,’ he said. Trump opponents have long argued that, of all people, Cohen would know where the Trump skeletons were buried.
Sure enough, the damning allegations in his testimony were not so much a trickle as a deluge.
He produced copies of letters he said he wrote at Trump’s direction that threatened the high school and colleges Trump attended not to reveal the grades he received — even after he had lambasted Barack Obama for refusing to reveal his records.
Although the House committee was not allowed to ask him about the burning issue of alleged Trump campaign collusion with Russia, Cohen was quizzed on Mr Trump’s business interests in Moscow.
Even as Trump was telling voters on the election trail that he had no business interests in Russia, Cohen claimed the president asked him a ‘half dozen times’ how it was ‘going in Russia’, by which he meant his Moscow Tower project.
‘To be clear: Mr Trump knew of and directed the Trump Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it,’ he said.
‘He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars on the Moscow real estate project.’
According to Cohen, Trump is also being dishonest when he denies he is a racist. While he had publicly courted white supremacists and called poor countries ‘s***holes’, in private he was ‘even worse’, said his ex-fixer.
‘He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a “s***hole”,’ said Cohen. ‘That was when Barack Obama was president of the United States.’
While driving through a poor area of Chicago, Trump once commented that ‘only black people could live that way’, he added. ‘He told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.’
Turning to how Trump was also a ‘cheat’, he accused him of another crime — knowingly submitting a false financial statement to Deutsche Bank in order to get a loan to buy the Buffalo Bills American football team.
Seemingly confirming the claims of those who have long questioned Trump’s claims to be a billionaire, Cohen said the businessman ‘inflated his total assets when it served his purposes’ — such as when he wanted to be included in Forbes’ rich list — and deflated them when he wanted to look less wealthy — such as when he had to pay property taxes.
In a telling jibe at Trump’s famous vanity, Cohen claimed he was once ordered by Trump to find a straw bidder to buy a portrait of him that was being sold at a smart auction. He wanted it to fetch the highest price for any portrait in the sale (so clearly didn’t want to be seen buying it himself), said Cohen. The fake bidder duly bought it for $60,000 and Trump directed his charitable foundation to repay him, later hanging the portrait in one of his properties.
His ego didn’t stop him from avoiding the call-up to serve in the Vietnam War, the committee heard. Trump repeatedly avoided the draft, initially because he was a student and later because he allegedly suffered from a bone spur.
Cohen said Trump told him to be vague to the media about medical details, but added: ‘You think I’m stupid? I wasn’t going to serve in Vietnam.’
If it’s any consolation to Trump, Cohen did at least defend him when asked if he knew about a long rumoured video showing the President assaulting his wife in a lift. Cohen said he’d heard the rumours but didn’t believe it existed, insisting he didn’t think Trump had ever hit or mistreated Melania.
Will Cohen’s excoriating testimony make any difference? Democrats know by now Trump’s hardcore supporters long ago stopped believing any criticism of him, seeing it simply as a mendacious conspiracy to bring him down. But they can at least enjoy the moment.
Trump ‘never expected to win the election’ ‘Cohen would know where the skeletons are’