President takes shot at Cohen
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump lashed out Wednesday at his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, a day after the onetime “fixer” implicated the president in a campaign cover-up to buy the silence of women who said they had sexual relationships with him.
Trump accused Cohen of making up “stories in order to get a ‘deal’” from federal prosecutors. Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations that the lawyer said he carried out in coordination with Trump.
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!” Trump tweeted Wednesday.
The president also defended the payments in an interview with “Fox & Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt set to air Thursday, insisting the payments weren’t “even a campaign violation” because they came from him and “didn’t come out of the campaign, and that’s big.”
Regardless of how Cohen was reimbursed, corporations are not permitted to contribute to campaigns, and money intended to influence an election must be reported to federal authorities.
Cohen’s admission to the crimes in federal court in New York on Tuesday came at nearly the same moment that Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted by a jury in Virginia of financial misdeeds. Manafort faces separate charges in September in the District of Columbia that include acting as a foreign agent.
The back-to-back developments resulted from the work of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russia’s attempts to sway voters in the 2016 election, including hacking Democrats’ emails, whether the Trump campaign may have cooperated, and if the president himself obstructed justice in investigating both.
Trump denounced the probe again Wednesday on Twitter as a “witch hunt.”
Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said Wednesday that Cohen has information “that would be of interest” to the special counsel. Davis said Cohen is not looking for a presidential pardon.
“My observation is that the topics relating to hacking and the crime of hacking … that there are subjects that Michael Cohen could address that would be of interest to the special counsel,” Davis said in a series of television interviews.
Trump weighed in on Twitter, taking his shot at Cohen and praising Manafort, saying he has “such respect for a brave man!”
Manafort, the president wrote, had “tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break.’”
But Cohen’s acknowledgement of a coordinated payoff scheme puts Trump’s presidency on the defensive.
“It’s going to be hard for the president to try to discredit all this. It’s circling him,” said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor who is not involved in the case.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, meanwhile, labeled accusations that Trump had lied about the Cohen payments “ridiculous,” but did not provide a counter-narrative of when the president had learned about the payments, referring questions to outside counsel.
Trump has insisted that he found out about the payments only after they were made, despite the release of a taped conversation by Davis from September 2016 in which Trump and Cohen can be heard discussing a deal to pay former Playboy model Karen McDougal for her story of a 2006 affair she says she had with Trump.
“The president has done nothing wrong. There are no charges against him,” Huckabee Sanders said.
Cohen and Manafort played prominent roles in Trump’s political rise in 2016.
Cohen said once he’d take a bullet for Trump, and was intimately familiar with Trump’s personal, business and political dealings for more than a decade.