DID NOT have advance word of meeting at Trump Tower, president says.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump denied Friday that he knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower, where his son Donald Jr.; his son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and campaign chief Paul Manafort huddled with an attorney with Kremlin ties offering dirt on his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“NO,” Trump tweeted. “I did NOT know of the meeting with my son, Don jr.”
The president was reacting to a
CNN report, citing “sources with knowledge” it didn’t identify, that his former attorney, Michael Cohen, was planning to say that Trump was present when the scheduled meeting was discussed.
That meeting is at the center of the special counsel’s ongoing investigation into possible collusion between Russian officials and Trump’s campaign. Trump helped draft a statement last year that he didn’t know about the meeting, which falsely claimed the encounter was about Russian adoptions. The statement is believed to be part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s examination of whether Trump sought to obstruct justice.
Trump, in his tweet Friday, attacked Cohen, who is now facing a separate criminal investigation in New York.
“Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?),” Trump tweeted. “He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!”
Cohen, whose interests in New York’s taxicab industry have come under scrutiny, signaled a break with his former boss weeks ago when he retained a new attorney, Lanny Davis, a Democrat who represented the Clintons in the 1990s. While his private recordings of Trump and others have been seized by investigators, he has not yet produced evidence to support his claim that Trump knew of the Trump Tower meeting.
The FBI months ago raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel room, including in search of documents related to a $130,000 payment the attorney facilitated before the 2016 election to Stormy Daniels, the porn star who says she had sex with Trump in 2006.
Cohen has not yet decided to work with the federal prosecutors, according to two people familiar with his thinking but not authorized to discuss private conversations.
Should Cohen choose to cooperate with investigators, including Mueller, it’s not clear what information he has that they could not gather for themselves or have not already learned on their own.
The Mueller team has been at work for 14 months. Defendants looking for lenient deals through their cooperation usually have better luck if they come through the government’s door earlier in an investigation.
Additionally, Cohen has made no public mention of Trump’s knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting.
That inconsistency was seized upon by Rudy Giuliani, the president’s attorney. Giuliani, who called Cohen “an honest, honorable lawyer” as recently as May, has criticized Cohen in recent days. On Friday he called Cohen “an incredible liar who’s got a tremendous motive to lie now because he’s got nothing to give.”
Meanwhile, the Trump Organization is being put under the microscope as Allen Weisselberg, the company’s chief financial officer, was called to testify before a grand jury in the Cohen investigation, The Wall Street Journal reported.
A year ago, Trump told The New York Times that Mueller would be crossing a red line if he probed the real estate tycoon’s business dealings. “I think that’s a violation,” he said. “Look, this is about Russia.”
But the Cohen investigation is being run by the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, not by Mueller’s team in Washington.
Weisselberg and Amanda Miller, a Trump Organization spokesman, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The risk to the president that investigations will increasingly edge into his business was a subtext of a recording leaked this week of a 2016 conversation between Cohen and Trump. It appeared to show the president was aware of a payment made to prevent publication of articles about Playboy model Karen McDougal’s alleged affair with the president.
Trump has denied ever having a relationship with McDougal, and Giuliani has said the tape shows Trump was hearing about the payment for the first time when Cohen brought it up.
But a passing reference on the recording raised new questions about whether the Trump Organization was involved. Cohen told Trump that he had discussed with Weisselberg financing to buy the rights to McDougal’s story from the publisher of the National Enquirer. The purchase didn’t take place.
Alan Futerfas, an attorney for the Trump Organization disputed the idea that Cohen would consult with Weisselberg, telling The Washington Post that the chief financial officer is just “a bookkeeper who simply carries out directions from others about monetary payments and transfers.”