Trump: ‘If I ever got impeached everyone would be very poor’
● Under-pressure president aims to deflect attention to Cohen’s ‘lies’
President Donald Trump downplayed his relationship to Michael Cohen in an interview yesterday, claiming his longtime personal attorney only worked for him part-time and made up “lies” to reduce his legal exposure.
“It’s called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal,” Trump said in the Fox and Friends interview.
Trump made the comments as his White House struggled to manage the fallout after Cohen said Trump directed a hush-money scheme to buy the silence of two women who say they had affairs with him. The president suggested that Cohen’s legal trouble stemmed from his other businesses, including involvement with the new york city taxi cab industry.
Cohen’s plea deal and the conviction of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on financial charges have raised speculation that Democrats would launch impeachment proceedings if they win the House of Representatives this autumn. 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.”
“Without this thinking,” said Trump as he pointed to his head, “you would see, you would see numbers that you wouldn’t believe in reverse.”
Trump did not say if he would pardon former campaign chairman 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 on 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 signaled
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.
In the interview, Trump argued, incorrectly, that the hush-money payouts weren’t “even a campaign violation” because he subsequently reimbursed Cohen for the payments personally instead of with campaign funds. Federal law restricts how much individuals can donate to a campaign, bars corporations from making direct contributions and requires the disclosure of transactions.
The White House denied the president had lied, with Sanders calling the assertion “ridiculous.” Yet she offered no explanation for Trump’s shifting accounts.
Among Trump allies, the back-to-back blows were a harbinger of dark days to come for the president.
Democrats are eagerly anticipating gaining subpoena power over the White House and many are openly discussing the possibility of impeaching Trump